Here’s the thought of Matt Locke’s I was trying to find, prompted by the announcement of cheapo wifi-enabled hard drives a few days ago: Public Caches:

“[I] thought of the idea of installing ‘Public Caches’ – stand alone devices embedded into street furniture or trains that people could use to upload or download content. You could send an e-book or avantgo article that you had finished with, or browse the cache to see what people have left behind…

…In such a network, information would have to travel physically between people’s devices in order to jump from cache to cache. The cache on your train or street corner would be full of stuff that only people who physically travelled through or visited your neghbourhood could access. This would mean it would take a long time for ‘memes’ to migrate through a network, but it would also increase local specificity, and so enhance a sense of place and community.”

The Ouroborosian nature of my outboard brain becomes apparent here, as Locke’s post links from some previous thought here about deliberately engineering slowness in networks. Need to revisit this… again…