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"Any community that uses computers would have the ability to create its own software. A local software would address local needs better than the generic "one size fits all" solutions would."
Vernacular Computation is term you might be looking for (inspired by https://twitter.com/rsnous/status/1170467742287200256 )
The other question to ask here is why do we tend to only use and develop Personal Computers rather than Community Computers (thinking along the lines of https://dynamicland.org/ )
> > A local software would address local needs better than the generic "one size fits all" solutions would.
At what cost in terms of development effort? "Not Invented Here" is a well recognized anti-pattern for good reason. Don't forget the ongoing investment required for maintenance and (in many cases) ever changing interoperability requirements.
> why do we tend to only use and develop Personal Computers rather than Community Computers
Dynamicland is an amazing project but I think it's a pretty loose use of the term computer. It seems to me to be a physical space which incorporates interesting human-computer interaction paradigms. Someone still owns and operates the collection of computers and devices powering the entire thing behind the scenes so it's more like a mainframe or other public access system (ex sdf.org) in my view.
So I'd split your question into two - why do people seem to prefer personal computers to public access systems, and why isn't there more investment in developing novel human-computer interaction paradigms?
To the first question: All things being equal would you really prefer to do your personal coding, writing, reading, online shopping, or other private activities on a system someone else controlled? Note that many people already do much of their day to day work on such devices (ie centrally administrated systems).
To the second question: That shit is incredibly expensive in both time and materials and a return on investment seems unlikely in most cases. Just look at how difficult it has proven to develop usable VR headsets that fall into a reasonable price range! (And then you have to rework or reinvent all the existing software to add support for them.) It does happen though - VR headsets, the Wiimote, and the Xbox Kinect are all examples. There are certainly hobbyists who custom fabricate their own keyboards or implement interesting interactions using computer vision, but the hurdle between that sort of thing and mass adoption of novel hardware that integrates with a variety of software is absolutely huge.
> At what cost in terms of development effort? "Not Invented Here" is a well recognized anti-pattern for good reason.
Building a system from smaller pre-built components helps address that; you would be able to take those already-built pieces and arrange and configure them to your specific needs.
That is: not all customized solutions are a symptom of NIH syndrome. Sometimes one size doesn't fit all.
Take a step back, I'm thinking in broad strokes before thinking about all the 'whatabouts' of security concerns/etc.
Of course we want some degree of commonality for the sake of minimizing resource use, but there's a huge question of what types of software would look like if it was developed by other cultures for different goals.
Regarding dynamicland, I think there's space for both a mix of personal and communal computing - we already have personal computers while working on wikis, google docs, etc. It's too early to tell what dynamicland or similar efforts will grow into, remember it's current state is "One step in a 50-year project".
> "So I'd split your question into two - why do people seem to prefer personal computers to public access systems, and why isn't there more investment in developing novel human-computer interaction paradigms?"
Perhaps it's partly because personal computers already lay better within the context we already live in - we live in homes generally with at most a nuclear family. Households do have shared television computers / home assistants but they're generally oriented around content consumption.
> "All things being equal would you really prefer to do your personal coding, writing, reading, online shopping, or other private activities on a system someone else controlled?"
Today we're already doing plenty of things on systems someone else controls - I think the idea is to do more activity on platforms with shared stakeholdership. This means having a commons for doing those activities, per Elinor Ostrom's 8 principles ( http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-princi... ).
Exactly, this also feel wrong to me, because a framework that allows local business to cater to locals much more easily and effectively is also a "one size fits all" approach but on a lower level. I really don't like the negative tone of this blogpost.
> At the same time, computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users' intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity.
They amplify thinking like any power tools. Those tools allow you to make both intended actions(whatever they are) and mistakes on much bigger scale. Like the old saying goes "This machine has no brain, please use your own".
To be honest, I see a bit of a contradiction here... what we now call ‘computers’ are far more than initially intended (and I’m not referring to the “‘computer’ used to be a job description”): the whole original theory and assumptions of computer usage was that they would be used to calculate and generally enhance already existing rational methods of consideration. Lambda calculus and Turing Machines and so forth were single devices that executed tasks — not nodes in a network whose only purpose is to enable communication between the users that posses them. Those who pondered them and their implications did not see them as many-to-many communication tools. Largely, this is the source of the disconnect referred to (and the disagreements going on between responders): the utopian premises of computing were based on expectations of rationality because that’s what stand-alone computers are best used for; when they became communication devices we (culturally) manufactured the genre of cyberpunk to accomodate for the implications of this (and other things).
It's pretty hard to get a computer to do what you want. You're at the mercy of whatever software is installed, and most of this software is "stupidity-amplifying" rather than "intelligence-amplifying" -- especially the software that an untrained person is able to pick up and use for their own purposes.
Yes. The same can be said about chisels. When I was small, I tried to use chisel to carve something. I was untrained, so I only hurt myself. The same is with computers. But should we limit access to computers for untrained people? It would make my life much easier, but I still think we shouldn't.
I don't think there is a problem with the former statement at all:
Amplifying stupidity must mean it can solve problems without external intelligence. If it required more intelligence, you'd have a less useful machine.
I love that permaculture is getting so much interest here. (I shared a link to Bill Mollison’s book early during shelter-and-place and it seemed to really resonate.) Cool to see people wanting to apply its principles to areas like technology.
One thing I’m reminded of here specifically is Steve Job’s idea that computers should be a “Bicycle for the Mind”. (Look up his talk from the early 80s on it if you haven’t seen it.)
There’s so much overlap in the early days of personal computing with ideas like Permaculture. Kind of a blend of hippie-utopian ideas.
I wonder if the Apple II was the closest thing to embodying what the author here is imagining. A bicycle for the mind, and a computer that enabled local communities. Something extensible, which you could hack. Would not be out of place to find an Apple II powering a little solar farm and water pump. Some would probably say the Amiga as well.
I love this aesthetic — a kind of retro futurism. Apple’s early advertisements of a computer in the kitchen, in the classroom, etc, really captured that ethos.
"Instead of amplifying the users' intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity."
Lost me right there. I love computers, as a bioinformatician they allow me to understand reality better by giving me the power to create abstractions from massive amounts of data that my puny brain can comprehend. The structured way in which I communicate with my computers allows met to think differently about problems. I strongly feel that they amplify my intelligence.
Then you didn't reach the part where it says
'Observation is among the most important human skills computers can augment. Things that are difficult or impossible for humans to observe can be brought within human cognitive capacity by various computational processes. Gathered information can be visualized, slight changes and pattern deviances emphasized, slow processes sped up, forecasts calculated. In Bill Mollison's words, "Information is the critical potential resource. It becomes a resource only when obtained and acted upon."'
Oh that sounds good. I guess I always find it difficult to read a piece that starts with things that go strongly against my convictions, I realize that this is problem for humanity and does not help in getting wiser. I should have read the rest of it.
I think the author is giving lots of value to computation itself, which is not how humans generally allocate it. It's results are seen just as another generic resource.
What do people do when clean water becomes nearly free? They do ridiculously inefficient things. It's easy, efficient use of truly limited resources, like _time_.
There is a reason we don't optimize things beyond their economic value; because it was designed to optimize total resource use.
or perhaps indicative of what "economic value" means in the context of a finite planet with finite resources.
I think you DID nail the needed change point right on the head. Our economic system prioritizes "anyone should be able to do anything at any time for a price, but the price externalities and waste are irrelevant."
I'll draw a parallel with PC's "This thing should be able to do anything at anytime and be everything to everyone" vs "this device runs circuitry and control loops that optimally manage a given pre-described domain"
As an aside, one of the simplest, cleanest and easy to read web page I've recently come across on the web. Much easier on the eyes than text files (like RFC docs), but without all the bloat and pretty ribbons of most sites these days. Appears to be hand-written HTML and doesn't even load a stylesheet.
This fits in with low technology and degrowth. For example, this site [1] only works with energy collected from a solar panel, challenging the idea that things always need to be available.
When he talks about technologies that make us more stupid I remembered 5G, not because of the wave frequencies it uses, but because it will increase the amount of information in our mobile phones, information that most of us already cannot manage well today. It is also a tremendous waste of resources, because we will need to change all of our mobile phones and their will consume more energy.
Waste is very subjective. When you have 100x the supply of something, it becomes cheaper to do stuff, which means other more valuable resources can be saved instead.
We don't manage "information" as much as we do abstract objects. You can have a 5 mebibyte, gibibyte or tebibyte objects, and they will still consume the same amount of mental capacity.
The switch to a new wireless standard is not a cliff, it will happen gradually, there is no need to throw away everything at once. Energy per bit transferred is lower for 5G devices, which makes them more efficient in the future to compensate the need to transfer more bits.
The experience I have is that we've never had such a high attention deficit.
Attention is a finite resource, there are biological limits to what we can analyze in depth.By increasing the speed of comunications, we run the risk of becoming more superficial.
My point is that developed countries already have infrastructure and in my view it is not justified to change it completely in consideration of the environmental challenges that lie ahead and that many of us already suffer from hyperconnectivity.
In this respect my way of thinking is very much in line with this article.
Were systems built that embody this kind of design, or is this purely speculative?
Great manifesto, or at least the beginnings of one.
Favorite Quote: "Instead of planned obsolescence, there should be planned longevity."
Which, of course, is yet another artifact of capitalism.
I'll contend that our global economic "system" (or lack thereof, in terms of intended consequences) is a far larger determinant of our living conditions than any local/national government, intertwined as it is with "the economy" (in thrall to?)
Let's not forget where planned obsolescence came from, nor the stream of constant revenue it generates for it's practioners (if also, perhaps, casting it's proponents as antagonists to human potential's realization)...
... but onto more practical matters: I've often found cool chips in the trash and wished to be able to onboard their unique capabilities without having to circumvent:
1) an informational vacuum (their maker went bankrupt, or their technical data is locked in some cellar.)
2) "protection" mechanisms designed to create opacity, because "capitalism" and competition, etc.
I am imagining some sort of Forth-Borg performing some kind of JTAG perimeter-scan-like activity that basically can "learn" any hardware at the raw gate level and then impose primitive functional blocks on top, regardless of the original intention of such logical structures. Am I crazy? probably...
"you will be assimilated" and it guesses the voltages, the high/lows/pullups, bypass caps, etc. perhaps based around a Field Programmable Analog Array..
ok, i'm seriously digressing.
I agree with the author. Bloat and deliberate obfuscation and wasteful fake-"abstractions" that merely obfuscate, bloat, and treat users to less info etc, this all has reached absurd depths of silliness.
I see this sort of movement as (ironically) inspiring new platforms and devices, while perhaps also enabling us to re-examine existing systems in light of such ideas.