22:06, Tuesday 10 Jun., 2003 Link

We should be able to sink storage piles in the ground. When you move house, you should go down into the basement and stick a giant spike into the earth, hook it up to your network, and the planet acts as a giant hard drive. With a finger, press the soil next to the spike and touch it to your mouth, and it would feel like damp and acidy, like licking a battery. And why do hard drives spin? It's cosmetic, surely, no other reason but that and that alone. Imagine, then, kilometer long stacks driven into the crust, spinning to store petabytes and petabytes, stabilisers for civilisation. There's a chemistry word for this, um: a buffer. They'd be gigantic buffers of knowledge, gyroscopes tying humanity to geology, guarding against collapse, steadying us but actively maintained (human ants scurrying to look after these things that bridge physical scales); part of the planet itself, and on that scale really like only a gentle fine mesh, hanging on by the finger tips, but each tip, to stand up, spinning.