This past Sunday, after much reflection on the state of the world and my own affairs, I elected to close all but six of my 134 open browser tabs. I shall never be an expert on cheetah genetic diversity or the evolution of speech. Room temperature superconductivity too will be laid to rest. The second coming of an engineer who studied — in an expansive sense of the term — materials science, now stands delayed.
One doesn’t take such decisions lightly. Each tab was a wormhole to a better, a delightfully unknown way of life. Every tab closing squashed the unfolding of possibilities. About a dozen were a quarter old, many older than a month; a few I remember whizzing by at the start of 2023.
Some will live on as bookmarks, the ignominy of mass graves. I’m sorry, the Aeon essay unifying AI and art. Some have mausoleums, resting in emails to self. They were precious. Hence the honour of the epitaph — the descriptor in the subject line.
The tragic finitude of the human condition: one must continually cull the lives not lived. Each tab was closed with a sigh, every approach of the cursor towards the cross left regret in its wake. One must choose. One must choose, be always choosing.
Looking up from your desk this very minute will tell you things don’t always have a reason to exist. But things always have a reason to come into existence. Boxes on the org chart. Chrome tabs.
In this still new century a journey of a thousand miles begins with a browser tab. Articles flanked by Kindle books, bracketed by summaries of academic research, bookended by arXiv papers. Several tiny Eustaces, the dandy with a monocle from the New Yorker, lit up the otherwise dull carousel of favicons.
There was an imagined path to a second career as a writer of literary nonfiction. The first book would have been one on deciphering animal speak with machine learning. Only humans have infinite recursion. But the cetaceans and corvids too might have proto-sentences, according to the artists among scientists. Whales have songs, hits, dialects. What really is language? What is intelligence? The crow and the dolphin, as much as Aristotle or Turing, could tell us.
The two parts of my story would come together. The 16-year-old with an equal love for S.L. Loney and Emily Bronte. But it wasn’t meant to be.
Then there was the second coming of a metallurgist and materials engineer. Unlike those who work for ISRO, my path has been about a purely platonic idea of success. Not skills.
Room temperature superconductivity would have served as the redemption arc. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.
…
Life is not outside. The Internet saved us from the roll of dice that was the 90s. One can curate it all: the neighbourhood, friends, teachers — the entire architecture of the ambient. It’s all about tabs.
Goodbye my beloved 134. You will live on in the vast expanse of astral space that is the Web, waiting for an ageing space cadet to swing by someday.
