You should check out Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep for more fun examples of how intra-galactic communication would be labeled, with routes & such.
From this book in particular, I love the scene with everyone sitting around talking about how horrifying the concept of cheese is. The rest of the quartet is wonderful, with the second book (A Closed and Common Orbit) being the MVP IMO.
Before replying, I waited for a moment to re-read those couple of pages once more. Cracked up again... Oh the utter incomprehension. And I can relate to the bit about eating the enzyme so that one can eat the cheese without getting sick. Cheese is horrifyingly great.
To add to your critique... The piece proposes fast fashion as a solution to the woes of essentially a bespoke, made-to-order craft. How can this not lead down the path from the alleged Prada-ification to a (inevitable) Zara-ification of the woven product... motifs clashing with motifs; culture and context loudly absent.
Quoting:
"For a heritage boutique, this offers a data-driven way to align traditional korvai patterns with modern market appetites knowing, for instance, that a specific shade of "Cyber Lime" will be trending in Paris next season and weaving it into a classic gopuram border."
Um. No please.
The buyer of a Kanjeevaram (or Paithani, or Navvari, or Balucheri, or any number of other traditions) is looking for something outside of time. The very inheritance exists because it is beauty, art, craft, taste of person-hood and---ultimately indescribable but deeply felt---quality that transcends the generations. To be worn until worn out, and then converted to another timeless piece with which the next few generations would adorn themselves.
The nice thing about the belief in the irrational is the market works as long as this brand of irrationality is believed in, suppose aspirational buyers find the cheaper but physically equivalent product finally within reach, I can bet they won't give a shit about these imaginary things.
Your information about tagging is relevant and useful---and a valid critique of the techno-solutionsim espoused by the piece. Words that could have been spent on talking about the incredible technology that handlooms actually are.
But keep the votebank politics out of this man. Every political leader in the history of the country has espoused such kinship and love for the handicraft. Their reasons are their own.
Khadi and handicrafts have been political since before the beginning of the republic of India.
Besides, cooperatives are well-known mechanisms to launder money, and their politically "clean" image is why they are a favourite laundry of politicians.
Past/present/future timeline made me go to... Conway's Law.
Thinking (not a novel thought) aloud... it's a new angle for me.
70s style data processing was place-oriented, as in, literally a place (/the/ central computer /building/) gated by mainframe mages.
The question of /sharing data multilaterally between cooperating data systems/ did not exist. There was only the central computer. People put data (punch cards, tapes, print-outs, paper receipts, phone calls) in the building and carried answers out of it (also as punch cards, tapes, print-outs, paper receipts, phone calls). But they would only ever talk to the same computer.
As organisations grew more interconnected, organisational silos developed around the same central-store information structure that was now embedded inside the organisation, having been a very successful model of information management in 70s style organisations, through then 90s (and severally, today too).
Simulacra <> Simulation.
The property ownership assumption baked into database engines therefore, would have been /non-sharing of schema/, not really non-sharing of data (data was being schlepped around using sneakernets).
And for this very reason, trying to build "local first" stuff around central-store data systems is ill-fated to break down, because that's a "shared-everything" world by default, and so aspects of attribution, ownership, control, interpreting/lensing/parsing/slicing etc. (somehow) need to flow along with the information. Turning the database inside-out alone is not enough.
I guess I'm saying... Ted Nelson will eventually have the last laugh.
In fact, that is my line of thinking, except "using whatever already exists on my computer(s)", which is: bash, sed, grep, jq, awk, pandoc, inotifywait, and xdotool.
The point being exactly to avoid whatever a third party may or may not deign to let me use, without hassle.
In my second go around I scored 11/18. Genius learn fast.
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