"I’m afraid of becoming an idiot. In this age, you don’t need to think. You don’t even have to look for things; they’ll be found for you. You don’t have to remember things; it’ll be remembered for you. The diggers before us bought illegal CDs and brought them into the country. The digger generation before that could go and look for things on cassette and vinyl. We did our digging on YouTube. Even then, we didn’t have artificial intelligence systems to analyse our tastes and recommend new songs for us. I had to go all around finding things one by one and listening to them. I would make lists of songs I was hearing for the first time, and then later I would go looking for similar ones, creating my own personal playlists. I ended up listening to a lot of music. These days, I can go on Spotify alone and they’ll recommend 10 songs that are similar to the one I just listened to. Their recommendations aren’t actually bad. If you look at our generation, there’s a lot of knowledge but no thinking – lots of information, no contemplation. You’re constantly acquiring information, so the information acquired before gets crowded out by the new information, and your own ideas go away. It feels like everyone’s floating around knowing where to fit on."

h1 GRADUATION IMP

Measurement is an intimate practice, one that requires proximity and patience. When you are measuring, you are checking where a subject sits in relation to a standard. Measuring implies care. You don’t measure something if you don’t have an interest in how it’s doing or how it relates to its surroundings. We measure our ingredients to make sure our meals turn out the way we want them to; we measure our shore lines to see how the climate is changing in response to our actions; we measure our friends by asking, “How are you? No really, how are you?” Measurement is a form of tending, a gesture towards understanding, and a commitment to being as specific as possible about the measured subject’s relationship to space, time, and its intersecting systems.

When I think of measuring the Internet though…it feels like trying to quantify the space between the wind and the trees. How can you measure something you cannot see?