From Flow to Pieces - and Back Again
The Hidden Pattern Behind Books, Bits, Brains, and the Future of Computing
From the essay
If you walk into a synagogue, a museum, or an archive and see an ancient scroll, something feels immediately different. You don’t flip to page 173. You unroll time itself. Knowledge is not indexed—it is traversed. I began to suspect a recurring transformation I now think of as the Chunking Principle: the conversion of a flowing continuum into discrete, manipulable units. Once chunked, the world stops behaving like water and starts behaving like Lego. We learned to command nature by replacing it with symbols. Now the cost of those symbols is bringing us back to nature.