January 3 (Dia 1)
(Note: backfilling in some posts to sync up with primary body of writing, sorry for the splurge)
1
Several years ago, before joining Tlon full-time to work on next-generation actually-personal computers, I was obsessed with the idea of starting a company involved with promoting new ideas around death culture through the design of new civic infrastructure.
Specifically, I was interested in the conceptual reversal of “death sites” (such as cemeteries) as environments of decay and stagnation to environments of new life, knowledge, and cultural transfer. I felt it was a shame that the richness of past lives and ideas were lost on a people constantly looking forward to the next thing, and thought death environments were an interesting material to shape.
This overall idea was heavily informed by my experience with Dia de los Muertos, the Mexican conception of a “day of the dead”, a period of time where the barrier between life and death becomes a little more porous.
I seriously believed places of remembrance could be transformed into cultural engines or avenues for novel meaning-making, turning sites of contemplation into sites of compounding enlightenment. A successor to the idea of a library oriented towards highly local know-how and history.
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