Micro-Libraries
Little baby booklings that you wear as a necklace.
(via)
Although I think you have to write them yourself.
You could just leave them empty… “The Collected Thoughts of Nick Taylor” etc. That’s what I would do. Or fill them with spells and potions and whatnot. You could hollow one of them out and keep treasure in it. Tiny treasure.
You can get them via Etsy… which I’ve signed up to recently on account of trying to flog Golden Mean Calipers… so now I get daily emails of stuff chosen by “curators”, and the quality of stuff for sale there gobsmacks me. Reminds me a bit of Camden Market in London that for about a decade sold nothing but goth-tat, but then… what happened? I don’t know – but suddenly large sections of it went very boutiquey and expensive. Professionals moved in. After that comes Starbucks, and the artists move elsewhere… then what? What happened to Carnaby Street? The inevitable shitification that happens when free-market-rent meets art.
Umair Haque upon who’s every word I hang, went through a phase of saying that Etsy was the New Google… or at least hazarding the suggestion. I didn’t get it. I still don’t get it.
I think maybe I might get it… enough perhaps to say, that the next big, big life-enhancing technology for (ahem) “developing nations” after the cellphone, might just be a reliable postal infrastructure. But how do you P2P that?
2 Comments, Comment or Ping
Shelley Noble
Love the tiny book necklaces. Everything handmade I predict will soon be highly prized, even things that are already quite available in mass produced forms at far less cost. Maybe the new coin will be human skill and attention. What Kevin Kelly called inimitable generatives.
Sep 20th, 2009
admin
Dunno… I come from a generation of children who’s clothes were made by their mothers. I’m not seeing this as a tendency that’s on the rise.
There are a load of websites that are quite gushy about how “mass DIYism” is going to be the thing… but I keep thinking of sewing machines.
It’s all about stories. About buying into the Nike story; the Jaguar/BMW story. The Swarovski Story. What is that? I don’t even know what that is. I can’t even spell it – but people are spending millions for bit-part-roles in the Swarovski Story. It’s like people are buying their way into the advert. That Oceans 13 is a classic – an entire world created out of the advertising you see at international airports… but without mentioning any actual products.
So maybe one day people might be able to 3D-print their own toothbrushes, but something tells me that more is going to have happen than simply having access to the technology to do so.
Sep 20th, 2009
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