Map of my personal data infrastructure

The way I see it, if you need a map then it's too complicated.

...Great (bait)! It seems it's not for you.

The green labels show the simplicity of the structure:

- export from services (a serious and shifting challenge for some or many of the services individually)

- cached raw export values

- imported internal/processed values

- query, use, and visualization tools

I mean, you can also just let the data go. "nothing, chaos" is pretty simple. I don't believe being able to search my chatlogs from 2005 would make my life simpler, or better.

Some people are natural archivists and love that second-brain stuff though, and this is a pretty sweet example :). One area I strongly relate to Karlicoss is how bad it is getting data out of my bank; as a regular non-institutional customer I don't get API access, so I have to download a PDF manually every month and run it through some script to parse out the line items.

Oh sure, you can opt to be an animal. You can opt to not gather your intellect, intelligence, to avoid trying to understand who you are, what you do, what you are, as you go about your time online. You can easily- we all easily- avoid reflection, understanding, coherence. Like animals. It's uncivil, the very definition of unbecoming: eternally forgetful.

I don't even mind this low path! Sure! Be nothing! Remember nothing! Scatter your essence everywhere, collect & distill nothing! Fine. I don't oppose your choice to eternally disperse yourselves, to harvest & focus & observe nothing. Exist only in the now, for eternity. It's your right, as much as I think it is below you, less than what you probably ought merit yourself.

What is just repulsive as heck, just dejected & pathetic, is that there are no alternatives. Except this work. Except what karlicoss is doing. The entire world lets itself be nothing, be zero, like you advocate, just sands of time. Karlicoss is focused on being a human, one with conscientiousness. Seemingly, to me, the entire rest of humanity lets all their data be trapped, contained in hostile corporate networks, under phones that don't give us access to our own data, existing on networks where we have no rights. Let it go is the only option available to nine nines, 99.9999999%. There are probably 7 people in this 7.5 billion person world doing anything at all like this, not letting it go. I'm sorry humanity, it's not your fault: you keep getting dealt a shit, ultra-consumerist crap un-personal computing hand, just getting shorter & shorter ends. But at some point, revolt, working, taking the effort, becoming a Karlicoss, opting to care, is the only sane, sensible option.

I keep thinking of Google's mission statement, how much radical potential it embodied, how radically far & further from the tree we fall, every single year:

"to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Even our own information is a mess, a chaos. Our own information leaks, worse & worse, every year. We retain less & less human potential of ourselves, each year, as mainframes & cloud dominate more & more of the public space, steal up the oxygen of computing & information technology that we could be using to invigorate ourselves, orient ourselves & each other, in the newly public, ever more shared world we cohabitate upon. We have made no progress. Karlicoss has.