New frontiers exploration needs a group of people doing heavy knowledge work with a new technology that enables it. Doug Engelbart, https://youtu.be/LpIYdyOXqkk?t=2789

“We also see this in the million startups that have reinvented the spreadsheet except constrained it to perform a particular set of things and realize: no, really, people use spreadsheets because they are unconstrained”. https://youtu.be/07j2AXC9BH8?si=aekq9ikZ-xjlaeS-&t=1037

Our Collective IQ is boosted by concurrently developing, integrating and applying knowledge. Doug Engelbart, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpIYdyOXqkk&t=880s

Now that we have all these wonderful devices, it should be the goal of society to put them in the service of truth and learning. And this is the way I propose. Not through obscure forms of "information retrieval;" not through newly oppressive forms of "computer-assisted instruction;" and not through a purported science of "artificial intelligence“ that will create new personalisms to irk us. All these obstructive oddities, I think, have developed as separate ideals because of the grand preposterosity of Professionalism that has created a world-wide cult of mutual incomprehensibility and disconnected special goals. Now we need to get everybody together again. We want to go back to the roots of our civilization - the ability, which we once had, for everybody who could read to be able to read everything. We must once again become a community of common access to a shared heritage. This was of course what Vannevar Bush said in 1945 in an article everybody cites but nobody reads. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext

This all has a certain vagueness if you do not understand how bound you are today by paper— the problems of finding it , sorting it, looking things up. (If you write, that is, write a lot, you know all too well how intractable is paper, what a damned nuisance.) With a system like Engelbart's, now, whatever is written is instantly there. Whatever you want to look up Is instantly there, simultaneously interconnected to everything else l t should be connected to - source materials, footnotes, comments and so on. A document is completed the moment it is written: no human being has to retype i t . (It need not be typed on paper at all ,if it’s just for the workshop members: a printout is only needed if it has to go to someone outside the system). In many ways, Engelbart's system is a prototype for the world of the future, I hope. ALL HANDLING OF PAPER IS ELIMINATED. Whatever you write, you write on the screens with keyboard and pointer. (No more backs of envelopes, yellow pads, file cards, typewriters.) Whatever you transmit to fellow users of the system you simply 'release' - no physical paper changes hands. The group has also worked out some remarkable techniques for collaborative endeavor. Two people - say, one in California and one in New York - can work together through their screens, plus a phone link; it's as if they were side-by-side at a magic table. Each sees on his screen what the other sees; each controls a moving dot (or "cursor") that shows where he's pointing. The effect is somewhere between a blackboard and a desk; both may call up documents, point things out in them, change them, and anything else two people might do when working on something together. Basically the system Is a large-scale setup for the storage, bringing forth, viewing and revision of documents and connections among them. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Doug Engelbart and “The Augmentation of Intellect”

Back in the days of WYSIWYG web editors like Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage you would often end up with this problem, where you try to do any edit in the WYSIWYG side and then you look at the generated HTML and is ridiculous: There's like 16 nested, empty span tags and no one would ever be able to maintain that. And my worry is basically that when you automatically create markup for something that has a very complex graphical representation, it's really like one way: maybe it will help you produce a compiled output, but it doesn't actually help you go back in edit and tweak the representation later. I think we really need to get to some kind of good intermediate representation that allows you to flexibly go both ways. Slim Lim, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 47:35, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=c8WSrsIUTvqlq4tfmT1CRA

[Slim] And that goes back to something that Adam and I were chatting about earlier, which is that a lot of people gripe and complain, that LaTex is the best we have, and, you know, I'm one of them. But it really is the case that LaTex was this monumental effort by really a few people, and amount of effort that would be considered really impressive if I were to try to do the same thing but better today. Not a lot of people have spare time to do this all-in-one text formatting and packaging document representation project even though it would have a huge impact on the way people write and publish these kinds of documents. And so, in many ways, we're sort of just bottlenecked on the fact that it's hard to do incremental improvements to this particular area. We really depend on these software monoliths to keep us afloat. […] [Wiggins] And yeah, I agree. It's a monumental effort, but I mean mathematics is so important and foundational and so much of human endeavor that certainly seems like one worth investing in, although perhaps hard to reap a profit from and that makes it harder to put concentrated capital behind it. Slim Lim & Wiggins, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 48:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=BHebRCxjQVSETJlrxi1McQ

[McGranaghan]: Isn’t the state of the art [for rendering equations in the browser] generating PNG and sticking it in the web page? [Slim]: Not exactly but almost. So MathML, which is an XML dialect or mathematical markup language was this effort to build XML style syntax for typesetting mathematics naturally. It is only implemented in Firefox, so that's really unfortunate. So in terms of the state of the art, there are basically two libraries that you can use to typeset mathematics: there's MathJax and KaTex. MathJax supports all valid LaTex […]. The problem is that MathJax is very slow. So if you ever go on MathOverflow or another related StackExchange and you see all of these answers with weird gaps, and then as you watch before you the page starting to load all of the rendered equations bumping everything down one level at a time, that's MathJax in action. And oftentimes it is doing what you're describing where it is outputting an SVG or a PNG or something like that. And it's reflowing the page with every equation. Then you have KaTex, which was a library developed at Khan Academy where they realize that MathJax’s performance was not satisfactory for their exercises. KaTex supports a much more limited subset of all of LaTex syntax, but it does it all using CSS and it doesn't reflow the page for every equation, it’s basically instant rendering. And basically, it means that your options if you want to render math are: - Only target Firefox - Use a limited subset of math that’s supported by KaTex - Constrain yourself to extremely slow, dozens-of-reflow, full-expressive-power rendering to inline PNGs. And that's just not a great situation to be in and we haven't even gotten to the question of how people write math. So I would say that people underestimate how open this problem space is. Just take a moment of silence to like recognize the gravity of the situation. Slim Lim, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 52:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=kKrmc0JWRdey8N1s1OXC9A

I believe computer screens can make people happier, smarter, and better able to cope with the copious problems of tomorrow. But only if we do right, right now. WHY? The computer's capability for branching among events, controlling exterior devices, controlling outside events, and mediating in all other events, makes possible a new era of media. Until now, the mechanical properties of external objects determined what they were to us and how we used them. But henceforth this is arbitrary. The recognition of that arbitrariness, and re-consideration among broader and more general alternatives, awaits us. All the previous units and mechanisms of learning, scholarship, arts, transaction and confirmation, and even self-reminder, were based in various ways upon physical objects - the properties of paper, carbon paper, files, books and bookshelves. To read from paper you must move the physical object in front of you. Its contents cannot be made to slide, fold, shrink, become transparent, or get larger. But all this Is now changing, and suddenly. The computer display screen does all these things if desired, to the same markings we have previously handled on paper. The computer display screen is going to become universal very fast; this is guaranteed by the suddenly rising cost of paper. And we will use them for everything. [...] Our screen displays will be alive with animation in their separate segments of activity, and will respond to our actions as if alive physically too. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Fantics

[Wiggins]: For me, thinking about that word longevity, I tend to think about what is long, I guess. What is a span of time that counts as long and of course it depends a lot on what you're talking about. So if you're talking about all of society, culture, humanity, then perhaps you’re talking in the thousands of years, hundreds or thousands of years. So for example, the long now is a phrase that we use to the local-first paper, we tend to use it internally on our team to refer to longer-term. Thinking this comes from the Long Now Foundation, and the long now clock project, which is sort of this idea to build a clock that can keep time for 10,000 years and it's basically an art project, but it's designed to inspire us to think longer term, and that can obviously connect to things about climate change or human culture. And since humans are naturally inclined to think probably pretty short term, actually really short term: We think about the day that's ahead or the week that's ahead of us, maybe at most the year that's ahead of us, we don't tend to think in tens or hundreds or thousands of years. That's maybe a society level thing. I think for individuals and thinking about, you know, software as it impacts our lives as individuals, I think a human lifespan is actually is a pretty good chunk of time to compare something to. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 05:06, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=8Ny-UxkNStWnvjGA1EnO-A

[Wiggins]: Now, some have argued that perhaps part of the challenge here is the rapid pace of change of that underlying system of those APIs. I think it's interesting here to contrast the Apple versus Microsoft approach. So I think that Microsoft with DOS and later Windows was really focused on backwards compatibility quite in an impressive level. I'm not exactly sure when the cut-offs are, but I think you could run DOS stuff natively on windows till well into the Windows lineage, and much later versions of Windows could run much earlier versions. But that's part of, I think, what also created the relative instability and unreliability of that line of operating systems, which is when you need to support every conceivable thing that's ever existed in the past and put it all together in the same box, and things get messy pretty fast. Apple with the iOS world has gone very much the other route which is they basically are releasing new stuff, a new OS update, once a year and if app developers don't keep up-to-date you pretty quickly just fall out of the App Store. […] You have this very demanding operating system that requires developers be doing active maintenance, or else it [your app] tends to go away. [McGranaghan]: While I don't doubt that there was some contribution in the Windows situation to instability from needing to support all versions forever, I think what really gets you is when you need to do that, and things that are really end-user-facing, like visual in particular, because the strategies that you typically use for providing stability are not viable in that world. So, if you look at things like Unix-style server, operating systems, many programming languages, these are things that can have backwards compatibility for a long time, certainly decades. But the way they do that is they just never ever, ever ever break any APIs. And if you want to do something new, either too bad, or call it "thing 2” and just keep “thing 1” around forever. […] you can't really do that with a windowing system, for example, or a user interface paradigm or how things look on the screen, right? You just got to pick something and do it, and the old thing needs to go. And so I think it does become very hard to have that culture of very long-lived durability that you see in those systems-y programs. [Wiggins]: Yeah, maybe that points to the fundamental trade-off there, which is durability in many cases means stability, which means less change. But change is how we get things that are new and better and the world technology and computers in the internet is so at the very beginning, there's so much unexplored space, and it would be a shame if we just said, okay, well we've been working on making these computers here for a few decades now, this is pretty much how they are, probably it is probably good for the next several hundred years, let's just hold it there. That's not what we want to do. We want to keep changing and improving. So yeah, there just is a trade-off between those two. [McGranaghan]: Yeah, I think there's a very real tension and I agree want to keep exploring. I do think that in adopting this attitude of exploring and taking risks, we are going to find some things that in retrospect were not good choices. The intuition here is, I think we're projecting these very dynamic system benefits over lives that we have historically associated with durable goods. So we get the shiny new computer-enabled, software-enabled thing, and it works great the first year, and we think: things like this, before we had computers, they worked for 20 or 30 years, therefore, this thing is going to work for 20 or 30 years, it's gonna be awesome. And we've kind of projected that out for, and I think in many cases that's not going to be true. And so we are going to have to confront the downside of that tradeoff. [Wiggins]: And do you think the downside there is mainly economic? You buy the smart refrigerator seems great for the first year, some cloud service goes offline suddenly and your refrigerator doesn't work anymore and you got to throw it out and get a new one, or do you think there's something beyond the economic side? [McGranaghan]: Unfortunately I think there are several potential very serious downsides. Just to give you a couple, one that we're already seeing is this issue of repairability or even modifiability. Again, if you look at these durable goods categories like tractors, which is very prominent example right now, traditionally people could service and maintain and change and modify and improve their own tractors. But as tractors increasingly become like iPhones, you know, these black-box computers in many ways, or highly computerized hardware, Potentially you can’t service them yourself, you can't repair them yourself, you can't modify them yourself and that has all kinds of second order effects. There's also this whole thing about surveillance basically that I think we're sleeping on a little bit, but we do need to go down that rabbit hole today. [Wiggins]: On the economic side, I think there's all sort of the incentive which is basically Apple and other phone manufacturers have done very very well by always creating that shiny new thing that comes out every year or two. And you think: I want to upgrade. It’s even often built into cell phone contracts and things, people want to get a new phone very frequently. And I think that's paired with sometimes the operating system upgrades, or maybe the visual refreshes, it's almost more like fashion, the fashion industry found this very clever way to get around the fact their IP isn't really protectable, which is they just make new fashion trends the totally change for a couple of years. So then you like need to go out and get a new wardrobe. It's not the clothes wore out necessarily. It's that you want to be up-to-date and you look behind the times when you’re strolling around in your bell bottoms and those have been out of fashion for three years or whatever it is. And so I think there's an element of this kind of a fashion or desire to get the new thing that has driven a lot of revenue for these companies. I don't mean to imply that that some kind of a cackling in the back layer, they're using this opportunity to improve and genuinely make their products better: Each version of the iPhone has that better camera, that better battery life, the bigger brighter screen, it is genuinely better, but it's also the companies are very incentivized for a high pace of change that has you buying new products all the time, as opposed to something longer-term. Wiggins and McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 18:33 , https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=euUyYhr6SWC4C0KFtLmMHQ

[Wiggins] […] one of the things that points to that to me feels like maybe the most fundamental is to just think about longevity in the first place and just care about it in the first place. Part of the reason I thought this topic would be an interesting one.I think, again, tech industry skews (?) young, I think also had the same gap in my thinking as a younger person, which was I just didn't have the longer experience to be able to see what it is like for software that I've created that's in production for three years, five years, ten years, and longer and what happens over time. It's a part of what I like with the SQLite long-term support page, they basically lead with a statement that our goal is to support this until the year 2050 and so, will they achieve that? hard to know… But just by making that statement, calling it out as a value for themselves and thinking about it actively, maybe this comes back to the long-now clock idea, which is, they may or may not succeed but certainly one good way to not succeed is to not think about it in the first place. And so this makes it a first-class concern. Wiggins & McGranaghan, Metamuse Episode 49, Software Longevity, 30:14, https://open.spotify.com/episode/1DCNy94TBt3aoGbM8PNlRv?si=UT2qfBJAQWWjr5QsUGkunw

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last. The ancient temples of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them. 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. […] 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. These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian, but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile. Steph Ango, File over App, https://stephango.com/file-over-app

But why should things be saved? Everything is deeply intertwingled. We save for knowledge and nostalgia, but what we thought was knowledge often turns to nostalgia, and nostalgia often brings us deeper insights that cut across our lives and very selves. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, The Heritage

Computers offer an interesting daydream: that we may be able to store things digitally instead of physically. In other words, turn the libraries to digital storage (see Hypertexts); digitize paintings and photographs (see "Picture Processing);even digitize the genetic codes of animals, so that species can be restored at future dates (see "The Hitiest Computer,"). Digital storage possesses several special advantages. Digitally stored materials may be copied by automatic meanB; corrective measures are possible, to prevent errors from creeping In— i.e., "no deterioration" In principle; and they could be kept in various places, lessening man- kind's dependence on its eggs being all in one basket (like the Library at Alexandria, whose burning during the occupation of Julius Caesar was one of the greatest losses in human history). But this would of course require far more compact and reliable forms of digital storage than exist right now. Nevertheless, we better start thinking about it. Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, The Heritage

Paper moulders. Microfilm is inconvenient. In the best libraries it takes at least minutes to get a particular thing. But as to linking them together - footnoting Aeschylus with Marcus Aurelius, linking genetic data to 15th-century accounts of Indian tribes - well, you can only do it on paper by writing something new that ties them together. Isn't that ridiculous? When you could do it all electronically in seconds? Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines, Hypertext

[Mielke]: I just think that fundamentally analysis is great […] of history, especially in a field like tech, which is in some ways, pretty disconnected from its own history and there's almost kind of like a pride in that of moving, so quickly that we don't even look to the past. [Wiggins]: Yeah, all right. Almost listed as a sort of willful disregard of history because I think there's the classic Y Combinator startup founder, fresh out of school. It's actually their naivety that allows them to reinvent their not dragged down by the legacy baggage of how we do things today. They can just think about it and kind of of a greenfield way and dream up a new idea. […] But that comes at the expense of well actual naivety and reinventing everything and not using scholarship of the past to learn what's worked and what hasn't in order to kind of stand on the shoulders of giants or build the way that any other field would. Of course, you learn from the past and then you use that to inform what you should do, going forward into the future, and yeah, the young naive startup founder, other types that we hold up as our role models sometimes and technology are not into scholarship. Mielke & Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 16:50, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=KRW6ed30T1KEm4G8fa8FSA

It’s not just that the culture of the digital media industry is disconnected from it’s history, it’s uncritical and often unreflective, just going after the short/mid term profit and driven by hype.

[…] let me bring the positive side, which is I totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing. That is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in social media consumer not exactly sure what; everything is oriented around commerce, and again things are all good: commerce entertainment, these things are fine, I consume these. But the reason I got interested in computers that are very young ages seeing their potential for creativity, and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 23:25, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

[…] there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the stone age's to us the 1960s and 1970s and then in some ways we lost our way. And we ended up with, I don't know, social media and kind of lockdown appliance like smartphones. And in fact, there's this glorious world of Smalltalk, Dynabook and Mother of all Demos style stuff that we still need to build, or we haven't built or something like that. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 14:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

Situationist critique of the Spectacle and the passiveness of culture is very relevant here. It’s more problematic that Wiggins thinks here.

Ultimately, the problem with commercial offers and decentralized software applications boils down to the same thing. In order to challenge state reLavabitn and capitalist exploitation effectively, it is necessary to stand and organize collectively against the state and capital. Cypherpunk initiatives like Lavabit or decentralized software can go a long way to challenge the status quo, but they are historically limited by their understanding of social change and social conflict. Social change is not simply a matter of consumer preference like the choice of an individual’s email provider, neither social conflicts are mere mathematical problems that can be resolved through a strategic application of mathematics. Radical technology collectives build political solidarity and nurture security behaviors within and between activist groups in addition to providing things like email and putting the right cryptographic algorithms in place. Autistici/Inventati - +KAOS - 10 Years of Hacking and Media Activism, Institute of Network Cultures 2021, p.12

I think this is a prime example of the political economy issue. It's very easy to say we should have x. And even if x is relatively easy to do, which is not, in this case, there's still this huge issue of the “we should” that's quite the weasel phrase, right? If we were to accomplish this, we will need a bunch of companies or individual developers to temporarily make more work for themselves. Lower the profitability, make their products worse for their customers in the short term to get to some kind of global maximum. It’s a case where the coordination problem is really important. McGranaghan, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 32:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

I think that the lack of interoperability or standardization between digital tools today, really, it means that all work created within a tool is confined to that tool and to me that seems very clearly antithetical to creativity and specifically the collaborative aspect of creativity. I think that there's so much to be said for tools. Amplifying the power of our brains and really taking over the mechanical aspects of human thought and limiting creation to a single piece of software's capabilities is just kind of crazy if you have step back and think about it. And I just think that standardization and having tools talk to each other, which is fundamentally change the tide of how we use them and introduced in more collaborators, and really just expand the projects constraints beyond any one tool. Mielke, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 30:00, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=KRW6ed30T1KEm4G8fa8FSA

Data silos and lack of interoperability can very well be a contradiction of capitalism when we think of the political economy of social media.

The capitalist who produces surplus-value – i.e., who extracts unpaid labour directly from the labourers, and fixes it in commodities, is, indeed, the first appropriator, but by no means the ultimate owner, of this surplus-value. He has to share it with capitalists, with landowners, etc., who fulfill other functions in the complex of social production. Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, rent, &c. It is only in Book III. that we can take in hand these modified forms of surplus-value. On the one hand, then, we assume that the capitalist sells at their value the commodities he has produced, without concerning ourselves either about the new forms that capital assumes while in the sphere of circulation, or about the concrete conditions of reproduction hidden under these forms. On the other hand, we treat the capitalist producer as owner of the entire surplus-value, or, better perhaps, as the representative of all the sharers with him in the booty. We, therefore, first of all consider accumulation from an abstract point of view – i.e., as a mere phase in the actual process of production. So far as accumulation takes place, the capitalist must have succeeded in selling his commodities, and in reconverting the sale-money into capital. Moreover, the breaking-up of surplus-value into fragments neither alters its nature nor the conditions under which it becomes an element of accumulation. Whatever be the proportion of surplus-value which the industrial capitalist retains for himself, or yields up to others, he is the one who, in the first instance, appropriates it. We, therefore, assume no more than what actually takes place. On the other hand, the simple fundamental form of the process of accumulation is obscured by the incident of the circulation which brings it about, and by the splitting up of surplus-value. An exact analysis of the process, therefore, demands that we should, for a time, disregard all phenomena that hide the play of its inner mechanism. Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p.400

Those in charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It's as if we needed to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social obligation. Moreover the technological equipment of leisure increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores, levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.95

[…] there was these amazing visionaries who saw the potential for computers and creativity, sort of laid out a vision way back in what seems like just the stone age's to us the 1960s and 1970s and then in some ways we lost our way. And we ended up with, I don't know, social media and kind of lockdown appliance like smartphones. And in fact, there's this glorious world of Smalltalk, Dynabook and Mother of all Demos style stuff that we still need to build, or we haven't built or something like that. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 14:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

[…] let me bring the positive side, which is I totally agree that they did lay out a vision for computing. That is grounding in a world where we do seem stuck in social media consumer not exactly sure what; everything is oriented around commerce, and again things are all good: commerce entertainment, these things are fine, I consume these. But the reason I got interested in computers that are very young ages seeing their potential for creativity, and unlocking the noblest parts of the human spirit. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 23:25, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

And it's a good reminder, to go back and look at some of this history, maybe, especially because these folks didn't have any of that prior stuff computers were still so new. Particularly personal computing was essentially, you know, they were in the process of inventing it thinking what can people do if they had access to computers with graphics and networking and all the things that nowadays we take for granted but they dreamed something very different from the world we have today and that can be very grounding to look back at that and take a bit of a blank slate from where we are today. So yeah, I personally take a lot of inspiration from all their work as well. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 24:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=AmfN5kUhQK669_VhAK9e7w

I also think that they were operating in an environment that was largely kind of independent from the actual business environment and like, the technology sector as we see it today. Mielke, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 16:04, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=5lptp_mFReqInuu1Bjsbnw

Both Mielke and McGranaghan acknowledge that it’s the political economy and the business needs that prevented computer pioneers’ vision to be materialized. But, especially McGranaghan remains uncritical of capitalism (quite the opposite basically). I think the latter is a general sense I have, not directly expressed in this partcular excerpt.

[…] a lot of this study analysis has been at the level of the tools. So it's like what's on the screen, how do you program it, what's the user interface even. But there’s an entire complex system around how software is developed and used and, like you were saying, I think the reason that the vision for the software and the reality the software don't line up is because we haven't understood or at least accounted for how that ecosystem works. Sometimes I call this the political economy of software development, there's weird path dependence, there's economic incentives; you got to understand all of that if you are going to understand how we came to where we are now. And on the flip side, if you want to predict and guide the future in that direction, you need to become a sort of of political economist of software, and get not only the interfaces in the code, but also the funding and the incentives and legal stuff and all that. McGranaghan, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 18:57, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=hDV9jmWRQPSyXg1tvFtVeQ

I really think that the power of tools lies in their ability to amplify human action or thought, versus the power of human beings is really about our ability to think creatively. And so, if that's true, then why do computers often ask us to act as almost execution machines ourselves to create something when that's like very uniquely the computers strong suit. Mielke, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 12:31, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=k2HU7gp5TLWwojMeCIAQ2Q

In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism independent of the workman, who becomes its mere living appendage. “The miserable routine of endless drudgery and toil in which the same mechanical process is gone through over and over again, is like the labour of Sisyphus. The burden of labour, like the rock, keeps ever falling back on the worn-out labourer.” At the same time that factory work exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost, it does away with the many-sided play of the muscles, and confiscates every atom of freedom, both in bodily and intellectual activity. The lightening of the labour, even, becomes a sort of torture, since the machine does not free the labourer from work, but deprives the work of all interest. Every kind of capitalist production, in so far as it is not only a labour-process, but also a process of creating surplus-value, has this in common, that it is not the workman that employs the instruments of labour, but the instruments of labour that employ the workman. But it is only in the factory system that this inversion for the first time acquires technical and palpable reality. By means of its conversion into an automaton, the instrument of labour confronts the labourer, during the labour-process, in the shape of capital, of dead labour, that dominates, and pumps dry, living labour-power. Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Progress Publishers, 1887), p. 285-286

I do feel like more often than not in the modern world, stealing your attention is one example, you're sort of fighting against the computer. And perhaps, it's not the computer itself, it's the whole world of computing: the internet or email inboxes notifications, the way that the web works, and so on. You're often either fighting against this thing trying to make you do things you don't want to do, or take away your attention, or distract you, or it wants you to do its chores: you know, click this update, this do this fill up this box. And it should be be a tool quietly waiting for what you're asking of it and to co-create and help you. I like this, quote from the original Tron movie, which at a one point the bad guy basically says: “look, the system's overloaded because we don't have time to handle every little user request” and the guy speaking to is kind of the wizened old computer scientist arguing: “actually user requests is what computers are for”, and I feel like it's so often forgotten. They are here to serve us and sometimes it feels more often the human has to serve the computer or perhaps the business interests. I'm a capitalist, don’t get me wrong. But the business needs, the KPI of whoever designed the product is asking me to do things to serve that rather than my needs. Wiggins, Metamuse ep.30 Computers and Creativity with Molly Mielke 25:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5HoFWZzo4PAzEhF5Tn3WbD?si=nJ1xydCVRs2FqbkIw_4cbQ

Those in charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It's as if we needed to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social obligation. Moreover the technological equipment of leisure increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores, levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.95

We are required to live in the condition that Linda Stone has called “continuous partial attention”, where our attention is habitually distributed across multiple communication platforms. As Franco “Bifo” Berardi has argued, we now live in the tension between the infinity of cyberspace and the vulnerable finitude of the body and the nervous system. “The acceleration of information exchange has produced and is producing an effect of a pathological type on the individual human mind and even more on the collective mind,” Berardi writes in Precarious Rhapsody, "Individuals are not in a position to process the immense and always growing mass of information that enters their computers, their cell phones, their television screens, their electronic diaries and their heads. However, it seems indispensable to follow, recognise, evaluate, process all this information if you want to be efficient, competitive, victorious. [...] The necessary time for paying attention to the fluxes of information is lacking.” The consequence is a strange kind of existential state, in which exhaustion bleeds into insomniac overstimulation (no matter how tired we are, there is still time for one more click) and enjoyment and anxiety co-exist (the urge to check emails, for instance, is both something we must do for work and a libidinal compulsion, a psychoanalytic drive that is never satisfied no matter how many messages we receive). The fact that the smartphone makes cyberspace available practically anywhere at anytime means that boredom (or at least the old style, “Fordist” boredom) has effectively been eliminated from social life. Yet boredom, like death, posed existential challenges that are far more easily deferred in the always-on cyberspatial environment. Ultimately, communicative capitalism does not vanquish boredom so much as it “sublates” it, seeming to destroy it only to preserve it in a new synthesis. The characteristic affective tonality for the insomniac drift of cyberspace, in which there is always one more click to make, one more update to check, combines fascination with boredom. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.520-521

The consequence of the normalisation of uncertainty is a permanent state of low-level panic. Fear, which attaches to particular objects, is replaced by a more generalised anxiety, a constant twitching, an inability to settle. The uncertainty of work is intensified by digital communication technology. As soon as there is email, there are no longer working hours nor a workplace. What characterises the present moment more than our anxious checking — of our messages, which may bring opportunities or demands (often both at the same time), or, more abstractly, of our status, which, like the stock market is constantly under review, never finally resolved? Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Time-Wars: Towards an Alternative for the Neo-Capitalist Era, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.519

Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring. Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.558

The lack of creative ecology means that today’s great idea for a better society turns into tomorrow’s unemployed taxi drivers and homeless city dwellers. Welcome to platform monopoly capitalism. Groupon, AirBNB, Uber, MyWheels and countless others. Here, we do not witness so much a gross violation of the rules of appropriation as an attempt to reshape existing economic activities and drive labour to its bones: a disruption without a cause. Let’s not delude ourselves: we are not sharing anything when we rate the last wretched soul who gave us a cheap lift with his Uber cab. We do not share anything when we drive a Hertz or Avis rental car (except our likes). Sharing only happens in the absence of market transactions. And it doesn’t have to ‘scale’. This begs the question: can we still speak of creative industries, which in Europe’s policy world (and beyond) rests on the economization of culture? Everyone is keenly aware of the fact that Creative Industries as a policy meme has passed its use-by date. This is why we need to warn ourselves: changing labels will not help us much. https://networkcultures.org/geert/2014/11/20/the-creative-question-nine-theses/

the incursion of capitalist cyberspace into every area of life and the psyche has intensified the processes of de-socialisation. This is not to say that there are no progressive potentials in the web, but these have almost certainly been overrated, while the impact of cyberspace in de-socialising culture and subjectivity has been massively underestimated. Here I merely rehearse Bifo’s account of semio-capitalism and Jodi Dean’s critique of communicative capitalism, but it is important to operationalise this critique. Blogs and social media have allowed us to talk to ourselves (but not to reach out beyond the left bubbles); they have also generated pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger — they waste time and energy, our most crucial resources. Email and handhelds, meanwhile, have produced new forms of isolation and loneliness: the fact that we can receive communications from work anywhere and anytime means we are exposed to work’s order-words when we are alone, without the possibility of support from fellow workers. In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it — as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution — but not live inside it. The problem is that this goes against the tendencies of handhelds. We all recognise the by now clichéd image of a train carriage full of people pecking at their tiny screens, but have we really registered how miserable this really is, and how much it suits capital for these pockets of socialisation to be closed down? Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - Socialization Beyond Social Media, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.592

[McGranaghan]: Isn’t the state of the art [for rendering equations in the browser] generating PNG and sticking it in the web page? [Slim]: Not exactly but almost. So MathML, which is an XML dialect or mathematical markup language was this effort to build XML style syntax for typesetting mathematics naturally. It is only implemented in Firefox, so that's really unfortunate. So in terms of the state of the art, there are basically two libraries that you can use to typeset mathematics: there's MathJax and KaTex. MathJax supports all valid LaTex […]. The problem is that MathJax is very slow. So if you ever go on MathOverflow or another related StackExchange and you see all of these answers with weird gaps, and then as you watch before you the page starting to load all of the rendered equations bumping everything down one level at a time, that's MathJax in action. And oftentimes it is doing what you're describing where it is outputting an SVG or a PNG or something like that. And it's reflowing the page with every equation. Then you have KaTex, which was a library developed at Khan Academy where they realize that MathJax’s performance was not satisfactory for their exercises. KaTex supports a much more limited subset of all of LaTex syntax, but it does it all using CSS and it doesn't reflow the page for every equation, it’s basically instant rendering. And basically, it means that your options if you want to render math are: - Only target Firefox - Use a limited subset of math that’s supported by KaTex - Constrain yourself to extremely slow, dozens-of-reflow, full-expressive-power rendering to inline PNGs. And that's just not a great situation to be in and we haven't even gotten to the question of how people write math. So I would say that people underestimate how open this problem space is. Just take a moment of silence to like recognize the gravity of the situation. Slim Lim, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 52:05, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=kKrmc0JWRdey8N1s1OXC9A

[Slim] And that goes back to something that Adam and I were chatting about earlier, which is that a lot of people gripe and complain, that LaTex is the best we have, and, you know, I'm one of them. But it really is the case that LaTex was this monumental effort by really a few people, and amount of effort that would be considered really impressive if I were to try to do the same thing but better today. Not a lot of people have spare time to do this all-in-one text formatting and packaging document representation project even though it would have a huge impact on the way people write and publish these kinds of documents. And so, in many ways, we're sort of just bottlenecked on the fact that it's hard to do incremental improvements to this particular area. We really depend on these software monoliths to keep us afloat. […] [Wiggins] And yeah, I agree. It's a monumental effort, but I mean mathematics is so important and foundational and so much of human endeavor that certainly seems like one worth investing in, although perhaps hard to reap a profit from and that makes it harder to put concentrated capital behind it. Slim Lim & Wiggins, Metamuse Episode 48 Rich Text with Slim Lim, 48:30, https://open.spotify.com/episode/51u2e3Ak6E4yMfqmA0NOdm?si=BHebRCxjQVSETJlrxi1McQ

Tomorrow’s digital collective ownership could manifest itself as a composite of free software, cracked software, bootleg devices, samizdat source code, modded appliances, sneakernets, invite-only bespoke networks, squatted game servers, and all sorts of computational apparatus strategically and knowingly used in relation to their limits and potentials to build infrastructures with a specific purpose at the service of a clearly articulated political ambition. The earlier the grieving process starts, the earlier new forms of organisation and mobilisationthere might not be a clear alternative to the digital commons. It is crucial to move forward with new strategies. The earlier the grieving process starts, the earlier new forms of organisation and mobilisation can start. https://collectiefeigendom.nl/en/ownership/digital-collective-ownership

It’s challenging to design a social collaboration layer for distributed/decentralized productivity apps. - Users are very familiar with opening a web app and performing mutations (often with an account that is specific to this app). An example is adding a comment to a PR on GitHub. - In a decentralized setting, you often have cryptographic identity, which means that you have to sign mutations (or really anything that needs to be identifiable). This is currently tricky to do in a web browser (unless there are solutions I am not familiar with). - So the pattern often is, mutate in the desktop app which has easy access to the private key. Web views become view-only (mostly for public data). - Web apps are typically very useful for accessing information edited by many people easily. - Is web very tied to the client-server model? Do we need a post-web social layer when we do things with cryptographic identity?

Ultimately, the problem with commercial offers and decentralized software applications boils down to the same thing. In order to challenge state reLavabitn and capitalist exploitation effectively, it is necessary to stand and organize collectively against the state and capital. Cypherpunk initiatives like Lavabit or decentralized software can go a long way to challenge the status quo, but they are historically limited by their understanding of social change and social conflict. Social change is not simply a matter of consumer preference like the choice of an individual’s email provider, neither social conflicts are mere mathematical problems that can be resolved through a strategic application of mathematics. Radical technology collectives build political solidarity and nurture security behaviors within and between activist groups in addition to providing things like email and putting the right cryptographic algorithms in place. Autistici/Inventati - +KAOS - 10 Years of Hacking and Media Activism, Institute of Network Cultures 2021, p.12

At the top of the chute, people tell themselves they're going to use these tools as a kind of fancy autocomplete. As they descend, they say they'll spin up some agents to explore ideas, but they'll write the code themselves. Next their agents are generating the code for them, but don't worry, but they'll review all the output. Soon they're plummeting downward and well, they don't actually review the code being spat out much anymore, but they trust the agents, heck maybe the agents are actually better coders than they are they say. And where does it go from there? From "I don't even code anymore" to "I don't even prompt anymore"? https://dustycloud.org/blog/faulty-towers-vibe-sickness-and-the-vibe-bobsled/

Yes, AI is a buzzword, and we ourselves are hesitant to use it. But we should be humble enough to acknowledge that we don’t understand life and intelligence well enough to exclude the possibility of LLMs capturing an aspect of it. Maybe an aspect of intelligence (at least human-like intelligence) is emergent from language, and LLM researchers got it right.

Computation as a central ontological concept is becoming popular (e.g. Wolfram, Benjamin Bratton / Blaise Agüera y Arcas / Antikythera, Hassabis). It is an interesting idea and it’s connected with progress related to LLMs.

How do LLMs relate to theories in philosophy of language? I think they encode much of what Wittgenstein describes in Philosophical Investigations, where he calls for deciding meaning via how language is used in language games. This feels really close to how meaning is produced in the case of LLMs, but also in how they manage to resolve ambiguity.