Molly White is right as usual: "We’ve already tried out having a tech industry led by a bunch of techno-utopianists and those who think they can reduce everything to markets and equations. Let’s try something new, and not just give new names to the old."
trying to articulate new ideologies for computing is where my mind has been at the last few years too. i joke about the 'anti-perf manifesto,' but forging imaginaries that can run on computers that are actively antagonistic to the techno-utopians is all about killing myths of heroism where we are the someone else who goes out and "brings home the spoils." how do we reach a computing that isn't foundationally based on asymmetric power, we serfs at the mercy of the lord of the platform and vice versa, we altrustic platform providers building things the commoners couldn't possibly understand. The language of "scale" where one or a few services need to expand to provide for millions hides futures where we can provide for each other horizontally in overlapping quilts of dozens, hundreds. You could shorthand the "#AI" boom as the continuation of the information conglomerates trying to provide the everything platform, and if our dreams are to meaningfully challenge theirs we can't also aspire to simply "do what they're doing, except it's us doing it."
I tried to articulate this as the cloud orthodoxy vs. a still-nebulous idea i've landed on as vulgarity in computing, but i'll probably be orbiting this idea for as long as i am on line.
@jonny interesting thoughts.. the approach of soft computing could be a way to shift computing more to the left, i.e. to humans, with methods like “computing with words”, on the basis of computing with partial truths inherent in language. infra does not seem to be at the stage yet I think, nor platforms exist
I think vulgarity is useful as a frame because I think we can draw a lot more inspiration for computing from language than we usually think. I usually approach this topic from controlled ontologies and database schema and etc. as the technologies of defining what is allowed to exist and we are capable of expressing. We want computational consistency and guarantees of seamless meaning when we describe things on computers, we want optimization and control. But language doesn't work like that at all, and is a far more robust system of expression and means of using meaning than what we do on computers because it absolutely defies most of the design constraints we usually prioritize. I am sort of purposefully provocative with 'anti-perf' to try and express how deeply we need to reorient what we want out of technology - perf as the archetype of "always good to have more of" quality in software is useful to show what kind of stuff it crowds out.
Language as an art flourishes exactly when the conditions of "perfect communication" break down, when there are gaps and inconsistencies to make us of in metaphor and jokes, when we can negotiate over meaning and drench ourselves (to borrow lacan) in the surplus value -> plus-de-jouir of language.
"The popular vernaculars are vast speech-jungles, in which old forms are decaying and new ones continually springing into life; and this fermentation results in the creation of numberless new terms, which come to birth and live and die in tropical profusion. They are formed in living response to the needs of the moment; the greater number of them hardly survive the occasion that brought them forth; but others, on account of their expressive power and their usefulness, establish themselves, spread from district to district. [...]
For human speech is after all a democratic product, the creation, not of scholars and grammarians, but of unschooled and unlettered people. Scholars and men of education may cultivate and enrich it, and make it flower into all the beauty of a literary language; but its rarest blooms are grafted on a wild stock, and its roots are deep-buries in the common soil. From that soil it must still draw its sap and nourishment, if it is not to perish, as the other standard languages of the past have perished, when, in the course of their history, they have been separated and cut off from the popular vernacular — from that vulgar speech which has ultimately replaced their outworn and archaic forms.”
what does security look like for language? something more like belief. it has its own vulns, but it's an active, considered, slow process. one that takes place in each of our bodies, not a gigantic centralized data center. what if we saw massive leaks and ransomware attacks at cloud datacenters as indications that there shouldn't be massive cloud datacenters. if we don't take the existence of the platformatized web as a given, then perf, consistency, idealness are also optional, and we can open the space for different sets of metaphors for how computers could work
soft security ( see http://meatballwiki.org/wiki/SoftSecurity ) is one of the most interesting ideas in the history of computing to me because of how effectively it demonstrates flipping an idea on its head, making a problem into a strength.
rather than controlling who can say something and what they can say, why not represent the plurality of speech and keep a record of who said what? wikis work because they think of security in a different way. Incorrect or bad information can exist, but its impact is minimized by lowering perception of immutable fact and making it very easy to undo. The modality of expression is confined (eg. you can't execute code on the host computer) allowing the power of expression to be unconfined. vs. an ACL-like minimal permissions model where power needs to be carefully controlled because there is no universal undo (s/o whoever indexes the fedi for that term, i know you're out there). A wiki becomes a social space because people can take visible actions and then their impacts can be discussed and used to inform norms.
edit: ward (and others) fedwiki project takes this an idea in an interesting new direction, and i have still not had time to try it in any meaningful detail.
You can apply a similar kind of agency flip in a lot of contexts. it's not a universal acid, but it's an example of how untethering some basic constraints helps you find different ideas, different ways things can be done, different tools to write.
@jonny It'd be cool if we could make wikis as hip and as useful to use as discord. Unclear how "typical" individuals feel about that mode of interaction
@mauve i have seen enough 'typical' individuals see wikis and be like wtf where has this been all my life even with the stodgy old interfaces. the idea of "pages are names and you can say a name at any time to link to that page" catches like wildfire even through interface barriers
@mauve i have been playing with wiki/discord bridges in an extremely light way but it is an area that i would absolutely LOVE to make more bidirectional and fluid. it's on my longterm todos. https://git.jon-e.net/jonny/wiki-postbot
@jonny Mind libking me tk the guts of how it structures data (what does discord see, what does the wiki see)? Having a bit of trouble navigating the code.
it was designed to have a little microsyntax for selecting n-back post ranges and handling semantic wikilinks contextually but i haven't been able to implement that on the client side yet.
so ideally that would, yno, have a data model that it juices things into, so i'm going to work those scraps into an n-to-m bridger that i was experimenting with a lil service version of here: https://git.jon-e.net/jonny/chatbridge
@jonny very cool! Would be neat to have ab easy way for the different platforms to qurry abou yhe state of the wiki too. Or even use something like embeddibgs to search through it
@jonny Honestly wild how apps like facebook abd discord become replacenebts for the web. I thibk habing a "familiar inyetface" for data helps a lot. The variety of web clntent and apls makes it harder to switch cobtects and sources
@mauve yeah agreed. I think most wiki engines went the route of "lets be the everything app platform" (xwiki is explicitly this) rather than "lets distill something core about the wiki model and make it wildly interoperable" - most of what I have reused from that package is the interface to mediawiki whose API is mysteriously godawful. I think if they looked more like ways to link a bunch of subpage chunks from different mediums together they would be a lot more interesting, and a way of bridging interfaces like discord and fb by writing adapters that represent their slots and verbs.
@mauve its a shame the matrix bridges are so promising and yet so limiting, like the double puppeting stuff is cool but extremely underused just to do 1:1 mirrors of channels across mediums, like it was easier to abandon matrix bridges altogether than it was to do an all-to-all bridge between multiple channels across slack and discord
@jonny language is so multipurpose there are invariably tradeoffs and choices to make in conformity vs freedom dial.
Imagine a scientific or legal context where the speaker or author takes liberties with the naming of things in order to express creatively. Unlikely to be appreciated by their audience. The extreme limit of this: mathematical notation/text.
This struggle plays out here in our very #fediverse in how people use and abuse hashtags. Are they supposed to be a controlled vocabulary?
Add comment