Nothing Ever Ends is a project blog loosely based on a history of the internet beginning with Homer, performed by Quinn Norton (me), at various times over the last decade. It’s called Nothing Ever Ends because it’s true, nothing ever does. Every motion is added to the ledger of the universe and shapes every motion that comes after it. Sometimes that looks like billiard balls drifting around a table. For us it looks like new medias, social upheaval, the environment turning against us after centuries of abuse, war, famine, pandemics, and memes of Death stalking the earth.
We have the great misfortune to live at one of history’s inflection points, when everything changes, no one is ready, and people will look back one day and say, “Wouldn’t it have been fascinating to be alive then!” because they won’t know better. It is fascinating to be alive right now, though often in an existential terror kind of way. Some days it’s pretty bad, but some days it’s pretty fun, and most of us now have small glass and metal bars full of almost all the human knowledge that exists. It’s a weird time. We’re understandably upset and confused a lot of the time. We should probably give each other more of a break than we do.
While Nothing Ever Ends is an evolving project, I can say it will be focused on imagining futures that are calmer, safer, and kinder than the present. It is reaching for futures where the Earth and its people, plants, animals, etc., live in more harmonious and enduring systems than we have now. Some of them will be imagined in the far future, some of them will be imagined months out. All of them will be possible enough that we, humanity, could one day choose one.
The first project I’ll be talking about is called a Year in Four Tonnes.