AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.
I find the nerd in me bristling at the implied spiritualism. If objects resist, it is a function of our minds – we simply notice things more when they disobey or change from one Heidegerrian mode to the other (I can't remember what those fucking things are called). If a place seems to have memory, it is encoded in the minds of the people who intereact with and maintain the space, not in some gaseous miasma in the place itself.
And yet – what if that's true and doesn't matter? "The spirit of a place" is a real(ish) thing, regardless of its physical implementation.
They do some quibbling over the varieties and exact meanings of panpsychism, and whether mental qualities can escape physics. I had plenty of my own quibbles, but perhaps they are all irrelevant. I happen to be rereading Bruno Latour/We Have Never Been Modern and it suggests that the division into the material and the mental is just a magic trick, and a broken one.
They mentioned How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand which seemed kind of out of place. There's nothing woo about Brand's theory, the "learn" is mostly metaphorical, he's talking about how buildings are adapted by their owners and occupants over time. But he does sort of freely agentify buildings when necessary, so OK.
Made me think of Chris Ware's monumental Building Stories.