So I sort of went about this backwards.

The latest single from tUnE-yArDs was released today, and I played it for my roommate (and suddenly no one is surprised that I made the Pitchfork Bot). Because neither of us could quite remember Merrill Garbus’s name, I ended up on Wikipedia, and that’s when I noticed something – re-noticed something – interesting.

Perhaps it helps that I’d just read Shannon Mattern’s piece and was consequently less concerned with the actual items being filed than the file system itself. All I can say is, I saw “American ukulele players” and knew I had to keep looking. So I looked up a few other public figures who’ve been important to me.

Albus Dumbledore, for example.

Or Alexander McQueen.

Or Gilda Radner.

There’s something fascinating about the implied binaries here. Not strict binaries, of course – the “American ukulele players” vs. “non-American non-ukulele players” spectrum is limited. But still, these figures and characters are defined by the things they are, and conversely the things they aren’t. Dumbledore is a fictional gay man, not a real straight one. Gilda Radner died from ovarian cancer, not from any other disease.

So what I’m presenting as my file, then, isn’t actually a list of objects so much as a way of thinking about them. The same document could be filed in seventeen different ways, if we use Gilda as an example, and that says cool things about Nelson’s idea of the impossibly large knowledge bank. And frankly, are any of us going to get to the bottom of the Fictional Gay Men well? Or the Male Suicides? When we categorize Wikipedia pages like this, there isn’t really anything more than a symbolic gesture towards completion. The pages are always being updated. (My personal favorite Wikipedia portal header is the one for serial killers – “Please do not add to this page by killing anyone.”)

I guess what I’m trying to say is, the problem isn’t even so much things are folders, if that makes sense.There’s a point at which the one overtakes the other, I think. And whether Merrill Garbus is a Wonky Pop musician or a lo-fi music group doesn’t really matter so much to my experience of her song this afternoon with my roommate. But neither is it inconsequential. Categories aren’t ever just structure. But you already knew that.