My dream is for consumers to move away from using many different subscription-based, web-hosted services, each with their own cloud storage feature, and shift to a model in which each person uses just one or two services like Dropbox to sync local files across multiple devices, editing them with software installed locally and purchased through one-time or update-based payments.

One wrinkle in this that I see is that online collaboration depends on a centralized server host, typically the company providing the service. So my further dream is that we find a way to decentralize server hosting and empower ordinary users to host their own servers.

It abandons the desire to find connections among links, turning instead toward what art historian David Joselit has described as “aggregation”: the selection and configuration of relatively autonomous elements that may signify disparate values or epistemologies. Joselit argues that aggregation captures the asynchrony of globalization while also reflecting an “epistemology of search”: In his words, “What matters more in our contemporary digital world is not making content, but configuring it, searching for it, finding what you need and making meaning from it.” Artists no longer undertake their own research but download, assemble, and recontextualize existing materials in a desultory updating of appropriation and the readymade.