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An Essay Concerning the Inbox
A Lockean poem in twenty cantos and one thousand lines
An Essay Concerning the Inbox is a long poem that takes Locke’s language of sensation, reflection, memory, and identity and routes it through the lived material of Unix mail culture: phosphor screens, /var/spool, polling daemons, and the improbable dignity of names like fetchpop, PopTart, get-mail, gwpop, pimp, pop-perl, popc, popmail, and upop.
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An Essay Concerning the Inbox is a long poem that takes Locke’s language of sensation, reflection, memory, and identity and routes it through the lived material of Unix mail culture: phosphor screens, /var/spool, polling daemons, and the improbable dignity of names like fetchpop, PopTart, get-mail, gwpop, pimp, pop-perl, popc, popmail, and upop.
Table of Contents
- 1. Tabula Rasa at Login
- 2. Port 110 at Dawn
- 3. Labor in /var/spool
- 4. Substance, Header, Body
- 5. Midnight and Personal Identity
- 6. Consent of Daemons
- 7. GNU Weather, BSD Light
- 8. UUCP Roads and Bang Paths
- 9. The Nine Candidates
- 10. Fetchmail after Empiricism
- 11. The Archive of Impressions
- 12. Errors, Retries, and Human Understanding
- 13. Pine Needles, Elm Shade, Mutt Footsteps
- 14. On Property in the Mailbox
- 15. Commonwealth under Cron
- 16. Sleep of the Operator
- 17. Green Screen Republic
- 18. Deletion, Mercy, and Retention
- 19. Dawn over the Post Office
- 20. Essay Concerning the Inbox