Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
viznut.fi
viznut.fi
Further, hyper-concentration of wealth is not something “made possible” by the internet. These problems existed before it and will continue existing. Because, if they are any problem at all, they are a social one.
In fact. 2 of the 3 were literally non-existant before the internet was created, so the internet is obviously not causing their dissolution.
Let me spell it out further: no matter how much people moan about it, Google does not have a monopoly on search in the way that the word "monopoly" is being used. There are several alternative (hello Kagi) and people are free and able to switch in less 30 seconds, they just don't want to and just don't care.
It should be pretty obvious that, even if the internet did not create concentration of wealth, it has certainly enabled it to a far greater extent than was possible before, which was the point. It would be petty semantics to argue over whether this means that it enabled "hyper"-concentration.
The history of Android is a story about the exploitation of 'open-source', not the incorporation of the benefits of software freedom into society.
Do you think that those projects wouldn't have existed with proprietary software?
With proprietary OS, all this hardware would be trashed. It would go in waste dumps or poor countries to be dismantled at high health and environment expense. And I would buy new hardware requiring more nature destruction with mining of rare materials. Finally this additional investment would decrease my financial capacity to do other things.
So to make a long story short, the many (millions?) people preserving their hardware investment with open source software are saving environment, health and money to a large extend.
And last but not least, they weaken software company monopolies, which can only be good for society as well.
Let's say you're really determined to have freedom, so you buy a fancy new RISC-V single board computer. Fully open source architecture, bleeding edge stuff. You'll learn quickly the GPU relies on a closed source kernel that the OEM refuses to provide updates for after as little as a year or two, effectively acting as hardware DRM, when your device was supposed to be as free as it gets.
There are many roadblocks in the way of being a free software/open source fanboy.
No Wednesday morning headaches from Microsoft, no applications breaking with the new Python revision, etc. Just apps from the app store that work (mostly).
So, the Server Farms that comprise the cloud aren't ancient, but they might as well be remote temples just like those we had in the 1960s.
What you're describing is fairly basic stuff, and the computational resources required to perform those tasks has been outpaced by the miniaturization and price-to-performance value of a smartphone or tablet. But complex tasks have always required complex tools, and complex tasks become more and more complex over time, they take advantage of modern-day performance.
The smartphone is the modern-day personal computer. A workstation is still a workstation, and just because it comes in an ATX tower doesn't mean it's consumer-grade hardware.
Regardless many of the examples I provided do produce files. When I do finances I create spreadsheets, when I share shopping lists I'm making formatted text documents.
It's partially an eyestrain issue (I find the text too small) as well as the fact that the phone shows much less information than the computer screen. For instance on a mobile web page I have to scroll a lot, whereas on the computer I can just take in the text and images in a single glance. The keyboard and mouse also seem much more intuitive to me. So I guess I find the phone more cumbersome while many people I know think the other way :D
Web2 and Web3 websites do everything possible to waste as much screen real estate as possible with as little content density as possible.
Instead this is just "invert some part of culture" which makes no sense. Culture is the emergent externalized collective intelligence of social creatures. You can't invent a culture which would preserve this property without asserting a global belief in the community isomorphic to the alteration. You haven't altered the culture. You'd just asserted a group of unthinking zombies.
So when I read:
> Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
I can't conceive of such a world. Its incoherent. I also can't imagine a world where no one likes metals for whatever reason. You can't just assert a fact like that and press play. It's nonsensical.
> The science fiction and fantasy magazine Clarkesworld has been forced to stop accepting any new submissions from writers after it was bombarded with what it says were AI-generated stories.
> The magazine officially shut off submissions on February 20 after a surge in stories that publisher and editor-in-chief Neil Clarke says were clearly machine-written.
Alien technology encounter stories satisfy some of this for me, as the injection of a foreign, advanced technology makes sense in this framework, much like how ancient peoples would discover technologies built by neighbors or rivals they didn't communicate regularly with.
To which the answer is "Doctors believe things for reasons. You can't just flip a switch and change what doctors think without changing the entire world so that homeopathy is actually true, and that would be such a weird world that science in it would be unrecognizeable."
(And since I'm not ChatGPT, I can answer your entire question: "Such a story would have an incoherent world. I could imagine someone writing a story that takes place in an incoherent world, but you wouldn't be able to get useful insights from it.")
Step 2: 100 years pass
Step 3: computers are now an old (and dying) tradition, kept going only by a small group of people who understand how to care for the machines.
Was that so hard?
Such a society could probably make new computers, but the cost of making new, much worse specced computers, may not be cost effective for a long time as long as old computers can be found and repaired.
Edit: such a movie or novel would make for great Fallout-ish world-building. Imagine for instance a large hotel in a big city running the booking system on an old laptop in a central secure location, and new 8-bit computers used as terminals at the front desk. Public access 8-bit computer terminals at public libraries connected to copies of WikiPedia running on some old gaming rig and such things. :-)
Post global nuclear war reconstruction would really benefit from having even a simple spreadsheet program to aid with resource allocation, wouldn’t it?
During a nuclear war reconstruction scenario, computing wouldn't be seen as ancient or unchanging. We'd be in a transitory period where we try and recreate computing infrastructure with what we have and the power sources we have access to. But we wouldn't develop an ancient tradition or anything.
A. For obvious reasons, we continuously improve tooling and processes. This creates circular dependencies that make our civilization non-restartable.
As a toy example, imagine we made tool A, which let us create tool B, which let us, among other things, upgrade A to A'. A' can still produce B, but can also produce upgraded B'. B' obviously lets us make A'', but also C', and A'' + C' let us make B''. Rinse, repeat for a hundred years. The result is that the whole industry relies on tools A'''''''''' and B''''''''''. The hobbyists still play with A and B, maybe even A' and B', but there's nothing between A' and A'''''''''' in actual use or production, nor anyone who remembers their design, because they've all been made obsolete long ago. If the calamity hits, and we can no longer make new A'''''''''' and B'''''''''', we don't get to downgrade a step or two - we go back all the way to A' and B'. And all the other tools and technologies that also relied on our advanced capacity - they all stop working and go "back to beginning" in lock step.
B. Making and operating tools involves ever increasing energy use.
C. We've used up all easily-available high-density energy sources long ago. Both our renewable tech and our fossil fuel mining and combustion processes are A''''''''''-level tech.
With that in mind, it's not that big of a stretch to write a plausible backstory for a culture as described in the article.
And if things are so low tech, the long-distance communication would be far more impressive than the story suggests!
It seems almost certain that climate change is going to severely disrupt several of these cycles in decade or two, and a slightly different failure mode of what you allude to in C. is that our tech and processes become capped before we adequately scale up renewables, and overshoot kicks in and it's actually a negative feedback loop that certainly doesn't just stop with computers.
I reckon the primary means of computing for the lay person becomes interacting with prompts to make the computer do what you want, but the actual knowledge of software engineering and computer science is gone. Even the prompts, due to linguistic evolution, are in a language that regular people don't understand and people's mastery of the language is akin to moderns trying to reconstruct something like Akkadian. We sort of know what specific words mean and the general grammar, but we simply don't know 90% of the vocabulary to express most ideas. Whatever the language model was populated on training data from an archaic language and is also full of weird idioms and phrases and misspellings that we can't reconstruct in an organized way.
In this context, the computers might be able to solve some basic problems for us, but everything we do with them is basically just received incantations from other crusty old people. Innovations keep happening, but they're small scale and mostly revolve around finding out new ways to tweak the incantations to do novel things. But the most we can do is say, like, "draw a picture" or "sort this list."
Sometimes someone manages to spin up new manufacturing of retro components or things to replace the retro components (there are a few pcbs running around that can replace floppy drives that conform to certain interfaces with usb sticks or sd cards or even a network): Vacuum tubes, parts for vintage cars, parts for vintage watches, vinyl records, etc. but often before that happens the entire known supply needs to be scavenged.
So I can imagine a world where we manage to start doing the things we are doing with some new technology that is not digital silicon based computers that run on electricity. But there will be edges where the new technology is not compatible with some system, and in that edge lives this kind of speculation.
This story would be completely different if the old silicon computers were replaced with neo-computers.
Also for anything that uses a standard floppy drive there are cheap and plentiful adapters to use flash storage instead of disks.
The problem with those are that not all equipment that uses floppy drives conforms to standards. If you have a 50 year old embroidery machine from a company that no longer even exists you'd need someone pretty fucking technical to pull that shit apart and figure out if any of those drive replacements will even work in your weirdass machine. If you are lucky your machine used some off the shelf drive from a reputable company (I've seen some old weird drum machines machines that had Apple Disk ][ drives hanging off them) but otherwise...
https://www.livingcomputers.org/
https://www.livingcomputers.org/Computer-Collection/Online-S...
Hell deep in the chip shortage I talked with more than one person that were buying up electronics at thrift shops and ebay that they knew contained chips they could not source at the time.
So it's kind of frustrating - in effect, the author describes a thought experiment of how society would change if X happened, but without saying anything at all about that X other than asserting that one of the things X causes is a mysterious lack of interest in using computers to fill needs/desires which (at least according to the original article) aren't filled by some better alternative.
You assert it's incoherent. That's part of the point: it's incoherent with your current understanding of our current world. There might be other circumstances that lead to a such world without being incoherent. If the conclusions in a piece of speculative fiction are appealing, it may be worth thinking of what it takes to reach those conclusions.
The thought exercise of trying to make it coherent is part of the point.
The nitty gritty punch card programming was something stereotypically done by middle aged/older women. Many early computers were massive and housed in what could be considered temples in big universities surrounded by gothic architecture. They were expensive to replace and kept around for long periods of time because of how difficult it was to upgrade (some large mainframe systems still exist today for that reason). Mechanical computers like the Babbage difference engine would last a lifetime. The idea of an average Joe spending all day using expensive compute time was insane. Those who focused on them did so for academic reasons, and spent most of their time meditating on computation, math, and the structure of language and meaning.
Only weird old people would bother to learn how to program dumb desktop computers.
I feel their disquiet is misplaced. Any young, fast-moving field is going to be full of the same issues that software is in now. You can look back at the history of mechanical engineering during the industrial revolution to see many similar problems we had with unsafe projects, hyped-up snake oil, or iteration for the sake of iteration. The history of automobiles and aviation was also marked by similar issues. Slower paced engineering fields are more mature and have gone through decades or centuries of iteration before coming up with tried and true solutions. But fundamentally fiction speaks to the soul more than it speaks to any measurable outcome. Truly the only fix for this disquiet is to search inside rather than look out. Fiction can be a great tool for that.
One word: Terminals.
Computers are inherently old at this point, the technology harkens back at least the better part of a century.
The old guard in particular cannot and will not let go of CLIs and esoteric flags and arguments, and will berate anyone who would dare suggest anything concerning a GUI.
To them, the only human interfaces that exist are the keyboard and the monochrome monitor, computing is still grey-on-black (or green/orange-on-black) monospace text and running emacs or vim. The rest of the world disregards them as living relics of ancient history.
This struck me as true of most people's use of computers now. Almost everyone I know who isn't either an old fashioned developer or a gamer uses a mobile phone or tablet merely as a graphical terminal; the actual computer is some mysterious entity elsewhere on the Net.
The golden age of computing when 'everyone' had one of their own that was useable offline is now long past.
The "files and folders" metaphor never worked even in the heyday of computer literacy, most people never understood it and just dumped all their crap on the desktop.
Seeing as the metaphor did not, does not, and will not work it is only reasonable that personal computing is slowly moving away from it and towards something the users actually want: One singular place to store everything (and I mean everything) and a one-stop quick way to find something in there, organization be damned.
Email is perhaps one of the earliest manifestations of this user desire: Everything goes in the one singular Inbox, and you search for whatever mail you need.
Tags or folders, I don't care. But I need some kind of organization. A giant pile with a crappy search box that hardly works does not cut it.
My point exactly. The people who cry that the young today can't file-and-folder fail to understand bloody nobody, neither young nor old, cares for file-and-folder.
And folders are a very simple concept. If you can't handle them on a system that uses them, that's bad.
Simple to us. I've seen accountants, aka people who deal with files and folders as a matter of their god damn line of work, fail to understand or care for files and folders in computers. They still put everything on the desktop.
Fact of the matter is people do not care for files-and-folders. It's high time we admit most people do not want it, do not care for it, and just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want. Most people don't care about file systems, and both iOS and Android are right for abstracting away something nobody cares about.
> just want to store everything in one place with an easy one-stop way to find what they want
That's a pipe dream. If you want good search results, then you need to put in organizational effort. Whether or not you're using folders.
Yes, but whether they understand or not they still clearly don't care.
>That's a pipe dream. If you want good search results, then you need to put in organizational effort.
The thing is people will not put in effort, whether out of neglect or ignorance. "It's in the 'puter." is as far as most people will care, and operating environments that respect this attitude end up having the widest mainstream appeal and adoption.
It's like manual and automatic transmission in cars. Most people drive their cars to get from A to B, they couldn't give a flying banana how it works. The enthusiasts arguing over stick shift are martians, the people just want a bloody car to get them where they want to be and car manufacturers will and should oblige the people.
For another example of this "I refuse to file-and-folder" phenomenon, try and recount how many people go to Amazon by going to the address bar, typing www.amazon.com, and hitting enter instead of going to Google, searching Amazon, and clicking the first listing.
Fact of the matter is people don't fucking care for file-and-folder, people don't fucking care for locators. For most people, a given something is "in the computer" and that is as far as they can be bothered to care. Abstractioning of file systems and similar constructs to improve end-user usability is the correct decision, given this situation.
Yes, the small handful of us that understand and use file-and-folder and Universal Resource Locators hate the abstraction, but we are Nobody. They (most people) are Everyone.
The Photos app dumping all photos into one singular location with no hints as to where it's located in the file system is better usability for everyone. That's the brutal-to-nerds reality.
I understand the desire, and clever search indexing allegedly solves this, but it's fundamentally an impossible tradeoff. Organization is essential to finding things.
I'm tired of people pretending search and AI can solve that problem. It can help, but it can't tell you what x or y thing you want is. I find myself typing nonsense like "what's the thing that's important in speaking" if I watched a video about how to give a good talk and am wanting to watch a part of it again. I haven't given it a title relative to how I think about it, I haven't thought about how to categorize it, and I haven't let a "place" for it settle in my head, because I didn't bookmark it or add it to a playlist.
I wish.
Electrolytic capacitors seem to have a functional lifespan of about 10-20 years, transistors do wear out, electromigration is a problem in chips in the "hundreds of years" span discussed, and there are all sorts of other interesting failure modes of "solid state" electronics that mean they're not going to last hundreds of years without some pretty massive heroics - and that's when you can repair it at all.
I would wager that it's not been running powered on for 33 years without any repairs. If it has, probably long past due for a re-cap job, and you probably don't want to put a scope on the voltage rails to see what the ripple is.
For a broad handwave, "sitting powered off" isn't too bad for solid state equipment (it does bad things for hard drives, see "stiction"), but operating (and operating at temperature) is where the wear occurs from a range of effects. I've reworked [0] a Core 2 Duo board that stopped booting after a decade or so, because the capacitors filtering power for the IDE controller got so bad it wouldn't boot reliably (it would load the kernel off the drive, and then insist the drive wasn't present later).
[0]: https://www.sevarg.net/2018/04/15/on-art-of-repair-re-capaci...
[0] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-life-expectancy/
The vast majority of people never write enough for this to become a problem, though.
Did you double check if the files could be read by another system? A drive that goes read-only will also fail to boot, I think.
still have a few mis-named files deep in my personal directories, 2 PCs and 3 Mac migrations later.
To be an experiment there must be some sort of question to explore, after specifying some sort of condition.
This is a set of assertions from beginning to end.
This paragraph at the end in particular really struck a chord with me:
> In the real world, people associate computers with many different things: corporate dehumanization, overwhelming consumer capitalism, alienation from the material world, shortened attention spans, ridiculously short obsolescence cycles, etc. etc. It is often difficult to tell these cultural biases apart from the "essence" or computing, and it is even more difficult to envision alternatives due to the lack of diversity. Thought experiments like this may be helpful for widening the perspective.
Computing is a fundamental part of the world and crazy exciting to play around with. It allows us to experience whole new spectrums of reality! At its core, isn't this the essence of the hacker ethos?
This post so wonderfully blends a hypothetical with where we really are, what computing has in fact become. Computiung is in fact vanishing, hidden inside massive data centers (temples) & behind firewalls. Applications offer packaged consumer experiences, but actual computing recedes, gets further off, & few people experience it. Real connection to computing is slow & takes concentration & will to develop; it's not fast.
This project to invert common conceptions actually reveals a lot of truth.
The final summation is great.
> So, what is the "essence" of computing then? I'd say universality. The universality of computing makes it possible to bend it to reflect and amplify just about any kind of ideology or cultural construct.
In a world where computers are some ancient artifact, they would still have significant value as calculators and accounting tools. It's likely some scribe class would emerge around using them to manage the day-to-day of whatever social hierarchy is present.
Visicalc will never die!
You say that, but I find it far easier to explain how to solve computer problems over the phone to older people than younger people.
What breaks the metaphor for me however is the 'computers have no practical use in society' line. Medicine, modern precision manufacturing and transportation have radically changed the quality of life for billions. Without the development of global timekeeping, communications and computing (mainframes at least) life would be much nastier and shorter for many.
Does the inversion also come with all of that baggage?
You eliminate most of mundane uses of computers (such as Whatsapp, buying stuff and getting news) since you can almost immediately do this person to person.
To use computers, you need to learn to read (most people can't), which is esoteric by itself. Computers are used to store knowledge too fragile to be transferred via pollination, and for computations. Obviously, you need a lot of concentration to use a computer in such a world, and will be considered loony.
I think for a certain segment of the population born between 1980 and 1995, mostly male gamer/geek type personalities (and believe me, I do cringe at the person I believed I was in 2006 when I was doing all of this stuff), computers were and remain attractive because of the stereotypical associations with the Hacker/slacker archetype - the cultural milieu consistent with The Matrix, online video games, shows like the I.T. crowd, musicians like Aphex Twin and Radiohead, fantasy and sci-fi ranging from the more primitive Dwarf Fortress and Lord of The Rings to the fast-paced cyberpunk of Counter Strike and Snow Crash.
I'm not particularly "hip" but a lot of the mystique and glory of the Hacker seems to have worn off with kids these days - gaming and mobile phones are ubiquitous and easy to use, where they used to only be for the "hardcore nerds". Tech startups full of people like me when I was 18 have taken over the world (unfortunately, I was not one of them) and they seem to have done their fair share of harm.
I know that computer science remains popular as a career avenue to make money for young people, but I'm not sure that they're particularly passionate about it in the way that some people my age and older are. When I was into it as a self-styled "outcast" neckbeard teenager, I was into it because of the cultural connotations and the associations marketed to me as a young man in the "hacker" heyday. Imagine telling me or any young "geek" type guy in 2005 that when I was 35 that I would be a systems engineer working with ex-frat bro type guys on the hardest problems I have ever approached - I probably would have scoffed and told you that there's no way such a small mind could ever approach the mathematics and algorithms needed to REALLY be an engineer (again, cringe, but true). Yet here I am, and it's great.
Suffice it to say that I don't think there's anything uniquely young or male about computing or computers, and that the culture around them is completely free to morph and shift as
I know in my day I had a blast just messing with Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. Yes, really. Just messing in them was as fun, or even more fun than, playing video games. Microsoft Access was my favorite "game". The sheer potential that even my kid brain could see was just mindblowing.
Now? It's not. No more are developers writing for passion, most are writing for profit. No more are we allowed to tinker; to be clear the likes of Windows and Linux still let us, but iOS and Android refuse tinkerers. No more is computing "fashionable" to young minds, it's the stuff old people (read: us) do and that is so not young, come on man!
Times are changing, and we're simply no longer in the front row seats.
This part is already true about the study of theoretical computer science today. People view algorithm design, big-O, proofs, recursion, automata, Turing machines, etc. as a chore.
This is unfortunately a wrong assumption. Electromigration will kill everything with time. Most chips are designed for a finite lifespan, not in the 100s or 1000s of years, but single digits.. Sure, they last a lot longer, but not forever.
However, the article is still a lovely read!
A lot of it does not seem inverted at all.
> Programming is the most essential element of all computer use
The idea that it is a sacred place, where breathing slows down and thoughts become wholesome.
Indeed, it is the essence of computing.
The goal of computers, reduction or multiplication of work, is often lost because the output does not last longer that the work required to generate.
Computers are tools. They are used as toys, or at best, substitution of physical activities. Thankfully I only print paper twice a year. Yet why at all? Clearly I'm trusted enough to enter into a contract with companies yet can't be trusted to complete trivial tasks like sending a package without paperwork.
I'm curious if we reserved computers for qualified owners and operators like firearms or vehicles. I personally would love to operate one but without certification or training the ability to have negative impact upon the population or needless self harm outweighs the enjoyment of <current popular social media app>
I started driving at ten. I was also a teen with unfiltered internet over dial up but that isn't the same as personalized curated streaming video aligned to my habits or an exploitative corporate/State.
If we can not determine when we're getting manipulated, can not agree on what truth is nor speak against the authority without being labeled an enemy how we can adapt as a people to the growing power of computers in every pocket?
Heroes of Might and Magic III are somewhat older than 20 years but they are super different than that.
What is the point of this kind of "finding the essence" exercise anyway? Definitely seems to be very subjective, to say the least.
Or so I hear...
punch cards, anyone? reserve some time on the system?