I know this will likely be a very niche question, but I'm going to ask it anyway because in my quick searches I haven't found any answers.

We all know the dangers of soaked boiled linseed oil rags, so the advice given today is to lay it flat, let it dry, and throw it away, and/or burn it. But this seems only "appropriate" when rags are cheap, as in our disposable society. When things were not so cheap, so, during the time of woodworking shops in the 17th-19th centuries, what did people do? Did they have a different way of reusing rags? Or did they have a "cheap" source of rags as well, as maybe from nearby fabric or paper mills?

Maybe I'll have to dig into the primary literature of the time to find my answer.

In 2015 I was on a beach in Hawai'i helping build the prototype of what became Signal. I argued that the app needed pseudonyms because abusers know their victims' phone numbers. I lost the fight that day. History proved me right, and Signal would move to usernames under @Mer__edith's stewardship.

In this new essay, I trace the line from Barlow's Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace through smart-home forensics, metadata killings, and Archive Team's non-consensual Tumblr scrape to ask: when did we decide that a jpeg is a photograph, that a profile is a person, that storage is memory?

The answer involves a boat off Honolulu, the early days of Signal, Iran's missiles over Amazon's Dubai AWS facilities, and the communities already building for a world where the server goes dark. This is an essay about infrastructure, memory, archiving without consent, and what we lose when we mistake the filesystem for memory.

It is also the angriest and most personal text I've ever written. I'm furious, and you should be too. We bet an entire civilisation on a brutal and unreliable stack. Now, fate has come to collect that wager.

California has a lot to fucking answer for.

https://newdesigncongress.org/en/pub/who-will-remember-us-when-the-servers-go-dark/