Obsolescence
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- Rust Never Sleeps — Neil Young
The great falsification of the reductionist millenarians who foresee a world without work, a singularity, a future where chatbots will deliver legal services.
Two types: use-case obsolescence: classic case the Dewey decimal system; and competition obsolescence — classic case Sony Betamax.
Use-case obsolescence: the Dewey decimal system
The Dewey system is — but for most intents and purposes was — a taxonomy for physical libraries. You have to arrange a library somehow, and Dewey was the fellow that devised the system which most intuitively organised did that. For years, schoolboys like me knew to head immediately to 001.9 for MYTSERIES AND THE UNKNOWN.
But Dewey’s was an arbitrary intellectual commitment to order for the sake of it, a little bit like the layout of a QWERTY keyboard. It didn’t mean to do anything other than help users find books they were looking for, and librarians put them back.
Now, to those who jump at the shadows of power structures lurking in our language, to taxonomise is to narratise, is to commit to a power structure. So, bad. But in a world of physical books, still, a necessary evil — you have to organise somehow. But in a networked world of digital books, not just unnecessary but meaningless. We can categorise ditigal information however we like.
So, we don’t hear much about the Dewey decimal system these days: it is obsolete. Its demise was driven by the lack of a viable use-case. Outside of physical libraries (are there still such things?) We no longer need it. Those who had it now found they could do perfectly well without it.