Troy Kitch

A sobering read: The First Digital Nation by Lilian Bernhardt.

The island country of Tuvalu moves towards the virtual world as climate change threatens its physical territory.

According to Kausea Natano, the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Pacific Island nations contribute less than 0.03% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions.

This is from The Long Now Foundation: “a nonprofit established in 01996 to foster long-term thinking.” It’s a small detail, but note how they reference the year.

I’ve been following this foundation since I learned about it in 2011. It’s interesting to look back at my old blog post, in which I cite IBM’s Watson, in light of where we are today with AI. Also timely to read this article about Tuvalu in light of the recent adjustment of the Doomsday Clock.

I also recommend The Long Now’s excellent podcast.

The Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking debuted at the end of 2021, but I just learned of it today. I’ll post the entire thing here, as the manifesto requires: “This declaration may be freely copied in any form, but only in its entirety, including this notice.”

We recognize that an immense amount of useful information is available digitally, and that tremendous value can be gained by connecting this information. Connected knowledge enables people to create great products, solve important problems and improve themselves.

We also recognize that humans work best in psychological flow. Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time. Activating an aptly-placed link to information is easier and faster than searching for the information — and more protective of flow.

We affirm that the ability to copy a link to a resource is as important for cognitive productivity as the ability to copy other types of information. This applies to all persistent digital information.

We invite software developers to do their part, by

1. ensuring their users can conveniently obtain a link to the currently open or selected resource via a user interface; and

2. providing an application programming interface (API) to obtain or construct a link to that resource (i.e., to get its address and name). To help people benefit from the information they process with software, we advocate ubiquitous support for linking of information resources. This would help realize the potential of hypermedia that was envisioned by information technology pioneers such as Ted Nelson and Douglas Englebart.

A good goal and, fortunately for me, most of the apps I use are link-friendly.

From Adam Engst of Tidbits:

Keep in mind, this is a manifesto, not a technology, standard, spec, or product. The Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking is meant to encourage developers to add linking capabilities to their apps such that every distinct information resource within the app can be accessed via a link. And it encourages users who want to reap the cognitive benefits to request such support from the developers of the apps they use.