Department of Minor Observations

Category 1 — The Intention Tab. Opened with purpose but never acted upon. Contains either a recipe, a Wikipedia article about a country, or a form that was 70% completed before something more interesting happened.

Category 2 — The Reference Tab. Kept open because closing it feels like forgetting. The article will be read again one day. But not tomorrow. The day of reading it again will arrive at some point.

Category 3 — The Guilt Tab. An email you opened, decided to think about because it was important, and you are still thinking about it eleven days later.

Category 4 — The Relic Tab. Pre-dates any current interests. There is not indication why it was open in the first place. Its origin is unknown. It loads a 404.

This taxonomy is under reconsideration. New categories are continuously emerging.

Consider: the notification that arrives to tell you nothing has changed. The bank app that notifies you that your statement is ready. The service that notifies you that it has sent you an email. The email that notifies you that a notification awaits.

We have built information environments in which systems endlessly inform each other of their informing, recursively, without approaching anything that could reasonably be called information.

The Department speculates whether this constitutes a new category of communication. It is not signal, it is not noise, but sits so clearly somewhere in between that we still lack a word for. Signo? Nonal? Suggestions are welcome. This paper is under reconsideration pending receipt of a better word.

"Content" is what writing became when it needed to be produced at
scale. It is also what painting became, and photography, and video,
and music, and conversation, when each of these was required to fill
a feed that urgently needed filling.

The word is accurate. Content is what remains when you remove the
question of what something is more specifically. It is the relic of a poem, a memoir, an
argument or a joke and retains only the fact of its existence as a form of
material to be distributed and consumed.

The Department does not see this is a complaint. A container that
holds everything then holds everything without differentiation - or interest.

This paper remains under
reconsideration pending a clearer sense of what was lost when we
stopped asking what was really in the container - and what was meant by it.

The QR code disappeared for approximately a decade after its invention.
It was considered a failed format. It was an answer to a question nobody was
asking. It required a dedicated app to scan a thing that your eye could not
read.

The pandemic restored purpose. Restaurant menus, check-ins, payment systems.
The QR code returned not because it had been improved but because the world
had reorganised itself around the assumption that a camera existed in every pocket or bag.

The Department is reconsidering its position on whether formats can be just be
ahead of their time, or whether timing is the format. This paper remains
under reconsideration pending a clearer view of what this distinction
would imply.

An ecosystem, properly understood, is a system of mutual dependence in
which many species coexist, with no single participant in control of
the whole. It is characterised by levels of redundancy, constant competition and the
threat of catastrophic collapse from a destablised system.

Product marketing has adopted the word to now mean a range of products by
the same manufacturer that work well together and poorly with
everything else. This is closer to a plantation than an ecosystem.

The Department is reconsidering whether to object to this usage or
whether the original meaning of "ecosystem" now requires similar scrutiny.
Both positions have merit. The paper remains open.