Saving, sharing and searching are critical to contemporary culture. They're activities that are foundational to being online. But this criticality is not reflected in the current technological stack and the market of available devices.
Consider the main desktop operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. Think about the dominant mobile OSs: Android and iOS. And ponder some niche operating systems: QubesOS, ethOS, Playbit. The end user capabilities common to all these operating systems?
User interfaces for interacting with the system
Creating, copying, moving and deleting files and folders
Installing and managing applications
Connecting to and browsing the web
Engaging with audiovisual media
Editing text and documents
Managing system settings and customising preferences
Configuring user accounts
Backing up data and enabling restoration and recovery
Searching user data or apps (locally or via cloud)
Supporting peripheral devices
Providing and upkeeping basic security mechanisms
Updating software and maintaining the system
Notice how saving, sharing and search features are either entirely absent, fundamentally constrained, or only available via third-party applications.
As a class, curators (those for whom saving, sharing and search is a default behaviour) make up approximately 10% of these OSs user base. That's significant but not enough for OS providers to optimise for. Especially when the curator class's main products are Dunbar goods, when the curators themselves eschew both the intensive production labour and the neurotic consumption behaviours that have proven so profitable, and when their alternative form of third-place-focused activity is so resistant to traditional monetisation strategies.
There are good reasons for this, but we're reaching the point where the stance is approaching stupid and reckless. "Stupid" because it is preventing the unlock of a tonne of latent value. "Reckless" because the higher order effects are ossifying cultures at scale.
To see what we mean, consider the following taxonomy of things. These are all types of things that most of us have, at one point or other, wanted to save, share or search for:
text, image, audio, video, game, news, meme, document, person, organisation, community, location, project, product, service, software, object, event, opportunity, activity, protocol
Now pick one of them and imagine what it takes to:
Save it somewhere/how on one of your devices
Share it with someone whom would appreciate or benefit from it
Search for it at some point in the future
Chances are that your imagining of those processes involved a non-trivial amount of manual effort and a chaining of multiple applications. Now consider the effect, the impact of that saving, that sharing, that searching. Chances are you can envision the upside of a store of things you've found interesting, of sharing deliberately with specific people, groups and communities, of being able to rapidly surface interesting things you and your peers have saved and shared.
That upside is what's impeded when saving, sharing and search are not "baked in" to the operating systems of our modern devices. The alternative—the thing we're pushing for—is to convert saving, sharing and search into core, foundational capabilities that are accessible to all. Saving should be simple. Sharing should be protocolised and pattern-based. Searching should be specific to the end user's context. Saving, sharing and search should, by now, be device OS primitives.
They're not because it's not in the interests of the incumbents to make it so. The bistable consume-or-create system that is the status quo is just too comfy, and elevating curators to first-class citizens and making Dunbar goods accessible is just too risky a gambit.
Better to keep saving, sharing and search full of friction. Better to impede the flow of artefacts, lest they flow undesirably and in a way which cannot be maximally siphoned. Better to make core behaviours that many would embody, given the affordance, seem like endeavours of great effort and expense when in fact they are some of the most natural, organic activities of all.
