Intentionality in an Age of Slop

Hey Joseph — I can appreciate the work that went into this, and the spirit behind it, but I think you're getting in your own way in a couple of areas.

First, the page really offers no clues as to who you are. This may be intentional, and you might be wanting to let the ideas live or die on their own merit, but the academic style and the personal framing (such as the "author's note" about "my project") suggest that you intend to convey there's a person and personality behind this, but you don't say who. (And contradictorily, there are some plural pronouns later on, as in "our answer" and "we believe.") To give another perspective on this, you have dozens of citations, but it's unclear how one would cite this work itself.

Second, it doesn't seem like you've entirely decided who your audience is. For example, in footnote [I] for "README", you state: “The ‘landing page’ for a software project (repository) hosted on Github [sic]. Github [sic] renders the markdown [sic] put into a file called README.md in the project’s root directory.”

But who is the person who doesn't know what a README is, but does know what Markdown and root directories are? Similarly, section IV is pretty dense with technical terms and concepts that don't seem, to me, like they would be at all accessible to someone who needs to have READMEs explained to them.

Third, the essay is sort of collapsing under the weight of all of its tooling. Footnotes and references use separate enumeration schemes, and each are rendered in three independent ways. Translations (er... original language texts?) are also provided in a different manner entirely. It's just a bit overwhelming and confusing.

Finally, I think your philosophical preamble could probably benefit from somewhat more brutal editing, and your actual proposals some additional, practical elaboration.