We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.
A good creative tool should let people make ugly but unexpected things, I think. Any new capability that yields only beautiful things is a subtle kind of tyranny.
Cosine lets you embed any piece of text and see its nearest neighbors. Each text is embedded only once. If you add a text someone has already added your action and any note you add are recorded along with anyone else who added that text.
Is it a quote book? Is it a weird contest to see if you can get the top neighbor spots? Maybe.
It is an attempt to strip things back and make embeddings the focal point of the system, rather than just a piece.