About Fragment.nl
Practically
"Sometimes something clicks. A realization, an understanding, be it mundane, lofty or maybe scientifically interesting. It happens only too often that if I don't write down these sudden insights they disappear. Being under the shower or in bed and having just turned out the lights don't improve the chances of these things getting put down in a more solid form than a little frothing in the synaptic bath. Often I have the impression that the "click" actually comes from connecting things previously unconnected, the insight here being the understanding of how two (or more) things/ideas/concepts are related.
"With this site I hope to capture some of these moments. The structure of a website seems particularly conducive to (cross)linking these different realizations, building in a sense an objectified structure of understanding. There is however, something organic about this process. It has to grow over time. Hardly anything springs from the mind fully grown, like Athena sprang from Zeus' head, and so I hope to grow this site, links slowly opening up other avenues of investigation and information and musings being added.
Romantically
"I would like to have a Direct Neural Interface. A jack in my head that connects me to a computer. Or maybe nothing that crude, but an elegant, invisible implant. Maybe not even anything so crude, but a bit of tweaked DNA growing a telepathic link to the systems around me. Are these cyborg dreams? Am I the kind of person that figures as a wirehead in so many stories? Would I be losing my humanity as a result of (permanently?) jacking in? And maybe more importantly... why would I want to chip in?
"There are a lot of reasons why I would want to do something like that, but only one really matters. Or so it seems to me at the moment. I dream of a system that has had lots of names in the past. Vannevar Bush called it Memex, Ted Nelson called it Xanadu and from the vision of Tim Berners-Lee sprang HTML and the rest of the Web. Other people had dreams of this sort and made up other names for it, but safe for HTML and the Web, no system ever really worked.
"Well, you maybe say, you do have the Web now, don't you? It's not enough for me. The vision is brighter, much brighter. It's fast, real-time, like thought. Intricate and brittle, huge and fractally detailed. It's me inside out, my thoughts splattered out on the canvas. No... it's not static, that's why the machine is there, that's why I want to hook up to a computer... to animate this structure. And maybe it's not really a structure, since it changes, it is not located. It gives when you push, forgets but still knows, holds but never can keep... it's frothing the synaptic bath.
"This I won't have for a long time. Yes, I do have it. It's here, in my head, but it can't get out! No escape except in part, in/out context, strangely warped and never the same, static. Where am I heading? Have a piece of my mind... or maybe not.
Ideally
Fragment.nl tries to trap the thought. It's an attempt, like Salvation Anthropology, to note and store the state of a slowly disappearing now. Annotating, linking, changing, braindumps... it will have to do for now.
Historically
A lot of information on this website, especially in the CyberResources section, started out under the name Webbah (WEB Based Apocryphal Hypertext) "Cyber" Resources, on the domain of my former ISP. Some of the design aspects of that website migrated to the current version as well. The current name, Fragment.nl, ties in with so many aspects of what I feel I am doing and have been doing, that I decided to drop the old name and simply go with the new one. There's a little story about fragments that I wrote as a welcome message when the Cyberculture mailinglist moved to a new server.
