encyclopedia eidolica

computers, generationally

What makes programming so engaging is that, while you can make the computer do what you want, you have to figure out how […] One of the reasons people have become so enamored with computers is that they enable you to experience the new worlds you can create, and to learn what’s possible.1

Of course, by the time I started using a computer, a computer already stopped demanding I become so intimate with it that I learn processor-specific opcodes for my personal abstractions. Computers now are perfectly fine talking to you in English. They can generate a basic Python script for you. You will not be challenged to understand the underlying abstractions of what they write — nor the underlying abstractions beneath those underlying abstractions, nor the four or five or ten underlying abstractions beneath those.2

We have been trying for decades to make computers legible, intuitive, to humans. But the closer we get to that unforeseen utopia, the less legible computers become to anyone participating in the upheaval of the machine world. The kids become technomystics, left with the phantom kicks inside the box, the little hiccups as a packet hops across the globe, that hints at the underlying problem, at some idea that the world isn’t quite what it is. Eventually they lose even the mysticism and the abstraction machine is more like an inscrutably magic box that they can’t fathom being any other way at all.

A just machine to make big decisions Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision We’ll be clean when their work is done We’ll be eternally free yes and eternally young 3

I got into an argument recently about whether there was a unifying “internet culture” in the past at all. But anyone who’s interacted with the geek code knows there was a culture of the computer touchers: a shared ethos, a shared cultural basis, some sort of way the brain worked for those who wanted to meet the learning curve. Using the internet was a niche hobby, then a low-key pastime, then it sublimated into the world itself. I don’t want to relitigate how the Hacker’s Manifesto is only recited now as eulogy; only that for so many people these cultural artifacts are treated wistfully. Can we even remember that it was this way?

But I do think there’s a common link between the illiteracy we mean to imminentise through making computers universally accessible (at the cost of their customisability and malleability) and the general malaise felt by the prospect of perfecting this post-scarcity world. To not need anything, to live in perfect harmony, is to become an animal. Eden recreated.

So what does a computer mean, now? I don’t even have the credentials to point to that other world. I didn’t take any theoretical computer science; haven’t written a file system4; haven’t needed to write software to perfectly suit my needs. Generally my needs are that I need to stand up servers in various combinations to create spaces for my friends, or I want to make something pretty. I can use frameworks and pre-existing applications to create art, but I’m still not writing assembly; I’m not writing Forth toolkits for tiny applications.

Footnotes

  1. Torvalds, Linus, and David Diamond. Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. New York: Harper Business, 2001. Print. ↩

  2. Let alone the underlying abstraction of the model that serves as an orchestrator mediating, with finality, the obscuring world between the machine and man. ↩

  3. “I.G.Y.” by Donald Fagen. ↩

  4. yet ↩