Through the Looking Glass – washingtonpost.com:
“Every hair is being numbered — eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.
“Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I’ve been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made ‘eek eek’ noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I’d long forgotten. I didn’t have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I’ve got Froggy in my computer.
via BoingBoing.
I wondered if that was true, about obscure little toys being out there on ebay. I thought back to my childhood, and remembered a little wind-up robot I bought at Meijer’s.
The one on the right, in silver and orange.
Wow.
I think that Wikipedia works to fill in gaps for things not bought and sold – These things are creating a digital racial memory of sorts.