Humans Were Around For A Long Time Before Index Cards, But That Time Wasn’t Very Organized

Though, of course, humans use organization for good and for evil: “The index card was a product of the Enlightenment, conceived by one of its towering figures: Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist, physician, and the father of modern taxonomy. But like all information systems, the index card had unexpected political implications, too: It helped set the stage for categorizing people, and for the prejudice and violence that comes along with such classification.”