Some three hundred years ago, the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico came to a humble conclusion that still startles today-that one can understand only what one makes. Perhaps it's true to say that the claim grows only more astonishing as the centuries accrue and technology evolves at such a breakneck pace that very few, if any of us, make anything for ourselves anymore. The paradox baffles the mind (or does so if we take Vico at his word): in the twenty-first century, when any one of us has in the palm of our hand all the knowledge the world possesses, we are secretly immersed in a new dark age. We know it all, but we understand none of it. The "cloud" memorizes the images we take, a strange archive of experiences we ourselves have lived, edited, and filtered, accessible when we want to remember what it is we've lived-a life, or a kind of life. Proof we were there, wherever there is, digitized and stored away and shareable. . . . But I'm haunted by the suspicion that not one image of it all is a thing we've made, truly made, ourselves.
