I've always collected things. As a kid in Nottingham, it was football stickers, then magazines, then records. As a teenager, it was books - stacked in piles on my bedroom floor because the shelves were full. As an adult, it became links. Thousands of them. Bookmarked, saved, pinned, starred, filed away in folders I would never open again. My browser has too many tabs. My bookshelf has too many books. My saved folders are overflowing with things I found interesting enough to keep but never quite got around to revisiting.
For a long time, I thought this was a flaw. An inability to let things go. A digital hoarding problem dressed up as curiosity. Friends would see my bookshelves and ask if I had read them all. I hadn't. Not even close. But that was never really the point.
It took me years to understand that collecting isn't about possession. It's about pattern recognition.
The physical and the digital
My physical book collection and my digital bookmarking habit are the same behaviour expressed in two different mediums. When I pick up a book in a shop, I'm not just evaluating whether I want to read it. I'm evaluating whether it belongs in the collection. Does it fit? Does it connect to something else I own? Does it fill a gap I didn't know existed? The same thing happens when I save a link. I'm not bookmarking it because I'll definitely read it later. I'm bookmarking it because something about it resonated - a connection fired, a pattern emerged, a thread appeared that links it to something else I've been thinking about.
This is what collectors understand that non-collectors don't: the collection itself is an artefact. It's a map of your mind. It's a record of every connection you've ever noticed, every thread you've ever pulled, every moment where something in the world lined up with something inside you and you thought, yes, that one. That belongs.
I grew up on print magazines - The Face, i-D, Dazed, FHM, loaded. Whatever I could get my hands on. I would keep them long after they were current, not because I planned to re-read them but because they represented something. Each issue was a snapshot of a moment in culture, and keeping them felt like preserving evidence. Evidence of taste. Evidence that this particular combination of images, words, and ideas mattered at this particular time.
Collecting as sense-making
There's a difference between hoarding and collecting, and it isn't about quantity. It is about intention. A hoarder keeps everything because they can't decide what to let go of. A collector keeps specific things because they're building something - even if they can't always articulate what that something is.
When I built Trove, my personal taste engine, I was trying to solve a problem I had lived with for years: the gap between saving things and understanding why I saved them. Every bookmarking tool I had ever used treated links as files to be organised. Folders, tags, categories. But that misses the point entirely. I don't save links because they belong in a category. I save them because they're signals - tiny data points that, accumulated over time, reveal patterns about what I care about, what I notice, what I keep coming back to.
Trove was designed around this insight. It doesn't just store links. It analyses them. It finds the threads that connect them. It surfaces the taste profile that emerges from hundreds of individual saves. The question Trove asks isn't "where should I file this?" but "what does this tell me about who I'm?"
That question - what does this tell me about who I'm - is the question every collector is really asking, whether they know it or not. The record collector who has three thousand vinyl albums isn't just someone who likes music. They're someone whose identity is partially constructed through the act of finding, evaluating, and keeping specific records. Take away the collection and you take away a piece of who they're.
The Instagram generation got it backwards
Social media tried to turn everyone into creators and forgot that some of the most interesting people on the internet were always the collectors. The people who found things. The ones who ran Tumblr blogs that were nothing but perfectly curated images. The ones who maintained link blogs before link blogs had a name. The people on early Twitter who were worth following not because of what they said but because of what they shared.
The Instagram era told us that creation was the valuable act and consumption was passive. This is a profound misunderstanding of how culture actually works. Finding the thing, recognising its value, understanding its context, knowing who needs to see it - that is creative work. It requires taste, knowledge, and judgment. It requires having seen enough to know what's good and having the confidence to share it.
I miss that internet. The one where curation was a respected skill. Where the person who maintained a brilliant link blog was as valued as the person who wrote the articles being linked to. Where discovery happened through people, not algorithms. Where someone's collection of bookmarks was genuinely interesting to browse, because it revealed a mind at work.
Building tools for collectors
When I look at the products I have built, I see the collector's instinct running through all of them. CultureTerminal collects cultural signals. Trove collects personal taste data. Modern Retro collects brand identities and reimagines them. Even the London Pub Guide is, at its heart, a curated collection of places I think are worth visiting.
This isn't a coincidence. Collectors build tools for collecting because they understand the problem from the inside. They know what it feels like to find something brilliant and have nowhere good to put it. They know the frustration of a saved folder that tells you nothing about why you saved any of it. They know that the real value of a collection isn't in the individual items but in the connections between them.
I think the next wave of interesting products will be built by and for collectors. Not social media platforms that reward creation volume. Not content mills that optimise for engagement. But thoughtful, well-designed tools that help people do what collectors have always done: gather, arrange, connect, and understand.
Because collecting isn't a hobby. It's a way of thinking. It's pattern recognition in disguise. And in a world drowning in content, the people who know how to find the signal in the noise - the people who have spent their whole lives practising exactly that skill - are the ones we need most.
My bookshelves are still too full. My browser still has too many tabs. And I wouldn't have it any other way.
