Move and Copy

In the analogue, tactile world, the primary mode of translation is moving. When i want to give you a book i liked, i mail it to you. you get the very same book that i had and i no longer have the object. Copies are always inexact, if very close. We have lots of name for this: duplication, replicas, forgery, fascimile.

In the digital realm, precisely the converse holds. When i send you a file, you receive a duplicate. I retain the original, but the copy is exact. To move a file on a computer, a copy is first made at the destination, then the original is deleted. There is fundamentally no way to move the original, except to do this. In fact, a deletion usually only de-references the data. The information remains, until that space is over-written; it is as though you take the label off the file-cabinet drawer, but leave the papers inside until you need to put something else in that drawer.

This is the sort of thing that at times seems mundane, merely the state of things. Yet at other times, it fascinates me that the two realms in which we function daily are so inherently dissimilar.