It seems clear that we are in a nascent cute-and-stupid-baby-stage of user experience that will be forced to revisit some of the foundation of our understanding about how the web works. Unfortunately it seems we have been babies for hundreds of years. Chronological illiteracy seems to be an evolutionary feature, not a bug. Our social delusion of a permanent 3D existence is great fun, evolutionarily speaking. The hive mind wants to know everything but learn nothing.

So I wonder how we will adjust? And if the web is an extension of our brain, who is the architect? How will we actually change the way we build the web? Will the web help us understand some things about the world? You suggest that it will be “80%” of an understanding. Who decides which 20% gets cut from my memex?

Most of the decisions are being made by some blundering corporate fiat. Startup culture is a horrible cradle for these baby ideas. We have huge opportunities to craft these experiences almost as an extension of the humanities. Probably the process will be a protracted and painful point of experience for many years to come.

The urbanization experience has likewise begun to unravel over time and technological pressure. Killing 400 geese at Prospect Park, for example. Riots, famine, drought, food islands, poverty belts, are painful architectural groans, all the things we forgot to design for. But at least urbanization has that crazy discipline called “urban planning” — and on the web, we barely have a concept of time at all.

Time is a missing piece in so much work on the web. Our hive-mind mental-model has yet appreciate the importance of time because we have barely experienced it on the web. Web design is incredibly temporary, to the point of being vapid. It's difficult to imagine how this kind of slow-grind UX problem could have been avoided — IxD and UX design barely have 10 years of history. Urban planners actually have schools they can go to.

It astonishes me how much more work there is to do in this regard, and how few people there are to think about it. There are entirely missing fields of design. The lack of regard for “Drift” could eventually result in experiences, like so many killed geese, but on a deeper level of systemic failure, a truly horrible place to live. Tiny design assumptions have huge impact culturally.

But the reluctance to “see time” is, I think very deeply rooted in a fear of mortality — we actually don't want to see the processes of drift that you are talking about. I mean, is it any surprise that Silicon Valley doesn't want to look back a few hundred years? The transformation of this coastine has been a very violent process. Looking forward 300 years also scares people for some reason (hint: they're dead). So, yes I'll skip the 4D retrofit please, I'll take a delusional sense of permanence any day!

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You know I agree that place is a story we tell ourselves. The borders of the place both in space and time depend on how you want to tell the story. What's the point of view? Who's the narrator? What's the driving conflict?

I diverge from you (maybe) in that I don't think it is that interesting to try to tell every story in every way about every place.

Then again, maybe that is not what you are really getting at. In the end, it is a data visualization problem. What kinds of data do you want to use, what sources do you trust, and how do you combine it all to make it readable? Is it possible to build a framework that turns everyone's combined stories into one cogent story? Is it desirable? In some cases yes, in some cases probably not.

On a practical level, I disagree that people who work in the geo space build their tools as if place is permanent. I think the shifting nature of place is well understood, but the balance between keeping up with the change and making sure that if you do make a change to your data it is absolutely sure, is probably a little bit too far on the side of surety.