Quote of the day: (or archiving of a historical cluster of words)

"there is no singular epiphany"...

"it’s more than a dream, actually. It’s been realized. It will be a new standard that, I hope, will apply to every intellectual work, a consistent way of naming every piece of intellectual creation"

JA: That’s right, and the idea is to create an intellectual robustness. So if you think about citations when using URLs, if we make an intellectual work, we stand on the shoulders of giants, which we all do, and we cite our influences in some way—not necessarily in a formal academic sense, but we simply refer to them by linking to the original thing you were looking at. URLs are an example of how we become intellectually dependent on this citation mechanism. But if that citation mechanism is actually like plasticine, and it is decaying all around us—if oligarchs and billionaires are in there ripping out bits of history, or connections between one part of history and another, because it interferes with their agenda—then the intellectual constructs that we are building up about our civilization are being built on something that is unstable. We are building an intellectual scaffold for civilization out of plasticine.

"HUO: So in that sense it’s actually regressive compared to the book. No dictator can remove parts of a published book in the same way.

JA: Exactly. So this new idea that I want to introduce to protect the work of WikiLeaks can also be extended to protect all intellectual products. All creative works that can be put into digital form can be linked in a way that depends on nothing but the intellectual content of the material itself—no reliance on remote servers or any organization. It is simply a mathematical function on the actual intellectual content, and people would need nothing other than this function."

From, "In Conversation with Julian Assange Part I"