James Bridle on the Value of Ruins - A Plea for the Past

An important and thought-provoking talk from the innovative publisher James Bridle:

Between The Alexandrian War of 48 BCE and the Muslim conquest of 642 CE, the Library of Alexandria, containing a million scrolls and tens of thousands of individual works was completely destroyed, its contents scattered and lost. An appreciable percentage of all human knowledge to that point in history was erased. Yet in his novella “The Congress”, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “every few centuries, it’s necessary to burn the Library of Alexandria.” ...as we build ourselves new structures of knowledge and certainty, as we design our future, should we be concerned with the value of our ruins?

Listen to James' talk at dConstruct here.