Here’s some Friday afternoon reading for you all — the classic 1999 treatise on eBay and the collectors impulse. In it Gibson describes is obsession with watches on eBay and talks about the curatorial imperative.

The idea of the Collectible is everywhere today, and sometimes strikes me as some desperate instinctive reconfiguring of the postindustrial flow, some basic mammalian response to the bewildering flood of sheer stuff we produce.

Be it watches or iPhones, we’re all under the same spell. Heck, even blogging is about this impulse. A classic read.

My Obsession [Wired]