There is another approach than linking: what about silence?
If everything was kept, and everything was linked to everything else, there would be no cognitive value in the links. Exclusion creates meaning. So linkage has to be selective. But if any meaningful set of links excludes some connections, then do we multiply the sets? The same dilemma recurs. At some point we have to be where we are, accept the links we have, and work to extend and change them. So linkage may free us, but it also affirms our limitations. Not everything will be visible.Pandora: So the libraries would all get to be enormous, if you didn't throw most of the books and things out. But how do you decide what to keep and what to destroy?
Archivist: It's difficult. It's arbitrary, unjust, exciting. We clear out the [local] libraries every few years. Here . . . the lodge has destruction ceremonies yearly . . . . A fit of housecleaning--the nesting instinct, the collecting drive, turned inside out, reversed. Unhoarding.
Pandora: You destroy valuable books?
Archivist: Oh, yes. Who would want to buried under them? . . . . Books no one reads go; books people read go after a while. But they all go. Books are mortal. They die. A book is an act; it takes place in time, not just in space. It is not information, but relation.
Pandora: This is the kind of conversation they always have in utopia. I set you up and then you give interesting, eloquent, and almost entirely convincing replies. Surely we can do better than that!
From Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home ((New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 314-315.