I went out for a walk a little while ago armed with


  • a debit card
  • a CharlieCard
  • a cell phone
  • an MP3 player
  • a 4GB flash drive
  • the Kindle


It weighs a few ounces, all told. My money, my transit pass, my books, my SMS conversations, my music, my podcasts, my blog, and whatever it is I have on that jumpdrive that I have undoubtedly forgotten about all exist inside a neverwhere shadowspace composed of electromagnetic waves and the traces of their existence. I don't carry them with me; I only carry a variety of scrying mirrors, each carefully  tuned to pull something out of the aether.

Of course, being as it is springtime in Boston, I have also elected to bring with me a sturdy umbrella. And I'm sitting in the roof garden atop Tisch, which is a great crenellated concrete bunker full of obscure dead-tree editions of a variety of things that no one has thought about in fifty years, but which someone will undoubtedly have to write a term paper on soon. So not everything is in the cloud. Yet.

Still. I wonder if this is how people felt when the telephone first appeared? Suddenly, a lot of things were happening in no physical location. It must have been novel.

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