Response to David Weinberger

While we were watching Weinberger's talk today in class, a specific clip from Friends kept replaying through my head. In "The One With Monica's Secret Closet," Chandler manages to open a secret closet, that was locked by his super organized, slightly anal, wife, Monica.

http://youtu.be/apvf4UihPd8

In this clip, the closet is Monica's space for everything that can't be organized into her declared system. Weinberger talks about how physical things must be classified by their similarities, and the advantage of the internet is that it provides an infinite number of possible classifications.

Weinberger disagrees with Aristotle's notion that everything must be classified into definite categories. To put it in Bacon's terms, Aristotle embodies the "Idol of the Marketplace" by limiting truth with words. Definitions are concrete and static categories that have no room for miscellaneous objects like those in Monica's closet.