File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs. Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems and other tools. Paraphrasing something I wrote recently If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

Complex systems can evolve from simple systems only if there are stable intermediate forms. (Donella Meadows, 2008. Thinking in Systems)

So, to survive, you might say a design has to discover an evolutionary path from the familiar to the new, from the present to the future, through a series of steps into the adjacent possible.

The principle holds for infrastructure too. The internet started with the adjacent possible: coopting telephones.The internet didn’t have to deploy expensive new hardware, or lay down new cables to get off the ground. It was conformable to existing infrastructure. It worked with the way the world was already, exapting whatever was available, like dinosaurs exapting feathers for flight. (Exapt Existing Infrastructure)