2023-03-04
hello fellow internet conspirators, number schemers, makeshfit tinkerers
it’s 12:34am on a friday night, and i’m responding to the reminder in the top right of my computer that is telling me to kick off this email chain, to open the door, plant a seed, ignite the campfire and start the tale so that I can pass the pen around and see what song emerges from its travels.
this was created using Siri and as you can see, there’s some miscommunication at the end of this
I’ve been simmering around the idea of cultivating a personal weekly practice / meditation of articulating / braindumping the king of computing and technology I care about and want to make. Partially as a way of measuring some sort of progress of sharpening my vision of the kind of world and alternative future that yields the sort of computing forms that I care about. Partially as a medium for ejecting these thoughts from my head regularly and have a recurring log of them.
Then, I thought, what a nice seed for our thread. This is something I’m sure takes up a surprising (and also unwieldy at times) amount of mental space for all of us, and I want to hear more internet dreams because this sort of imagination is contagious.
I’ve been reading Mary Oliver’s Upstream, so the current questions that come to mind all revolve around methods of applying poetics to computing. The book is effectively a love story between the natural world and poetry, how the latter emerges from paying attention to the former, is, in itself, an act of preservation and noticing the world around us.
When Oliver talks about the ways that we don’t pay attention, or more precisely, the fine-grained detail that she perceives and bears witness to in nature, I think about how much of computing is invisible, unfelt, formless, ungraspable. When she talks about her search for an elemental poetry for the world, something that concerns the spiritual condition of the body, wakefulness, an awareness, an attitude towards the world, I think about what that kind of wakefulness looks like when we talk about computers.
I think it is right to categorize agentic attitudes towards computing under this, but there’s something else beyond agency, where you look at computing and the internet as a medium for beautiful things. Is it that you look at the people and the emergent, natural phenomenon that come from it? This is a bit different (and maybe dangerous?) compared to the way you would look at the natural world because it is, after all, not natural. It is a product of man, and the underlying infrastructures laid by power-hungry corporations and militant nations.
What I do know is that this view of agency towards these invisible electronic threads that govern so much of our lives resonates a lot and can inspire a surprising “wake” when described to people. For example, I met someone tonight who is quite deep in computing as a hardware operator/researcher and artist, and I saw his eyes light up with a fire as I described the cultural change I hope for, in the form of a wave of demanding agency towards the technologies and interfaces we use every day, one in which the interface is at fault rather than the end-user, if they can’t do what they want to do.
ok this is getting too long already. i want these to be less than 600 words ideally to be easy to read, to not look heavy. I am excited to simmer on these questions with y’all and am grateful to have such imaginative co-conspirators to dream with :)