#WeblogPoMo2024 - The Fatalistic Turn

According to this survey there is little hope, that individual actions can do anything apart from maybe raising awareness. The Guardian asked “every contactable lead author and review editor of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018, with 380 of 843 responding”. Here is what you can do according to the opinions of the world’s climate scientists:

  • “Most experts (76%) backed voting for politicians who pledge strong climate measures”
  • “The second choice for most effective individual action, according to the experts, was reducing flying and fossil-fuel powered transport in favour of electric and public transport. This was backed by 56%[…].”
  • “Almost 30% of the experts said eating less meat was the most effective climate action”
  • “a similar proportion [30%] backed cutting emissions from heating or cooling homes, by installing heat pumps, for example”
  • “Having fewer children was backed by 12% of the experts”

Ugh. And there are these statements:

It can only go so far. Deep, rapid cuts in carbon emissions from oil and gas, as well as other sectors such as transport, are needed, which are outside the control of the average individual […] Individual action can only amount to a drop in the bucket – only systemic changes will be sufficient

Many foresee catastrophic levels of global heating and are shifting their focus away from the physics of the climate system towards action that slows global heating and work that protects people against the climate impacts they now see as unstoppable.

Another post I read recently was A Tour of the Jevons Paradox How Energy Efficiency Backfires:

In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1

Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.

Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.

It gets harder and harder to not talk about the planetary trajectory as set in stone. I guess it’s good to have posts like this in your timeline?

The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of “woke” things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.

Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.

The ozone could have a huge hole.

We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.

I feel like we forget this, you know?

Is it? What will it do? Hope is cheap. Change is impossible to envision. Especially if imagined as collective change on a planetary scale. Things will have to become much worse before we can meaningfully engage with what happens. Maybe this is not you, but it is us. You can warn and write all the manifestos you want, have a negative footprint or whatever: Just as with AI we’ll have to come to terms with the fact that climate change is just us. We’re the planet. And as the planet is the result and the cause of what’s going on, the individual will have to recognize and come to terms with not being able to do a lot.

There is hope in disruption. But strategically “weaponized” disruption (like calculated, non-violent protest) can only do so much and it seems that big economic players like Big Tech™ to name an example are not even playing within the margins of democracy any more. Take this quote from a recent Cory Doctrow article on the EU’s attempt to regulate tech giants via the DMA:

Apple appears to be playing a high-stakes game of chicken with EU regulators, effectively saying, “Yes, you have 500 million citizens, but we have three trillion dollars, so why should we listen to you?” […] Just like Apple, Meta is behaving as though the DMA permits it to carry on its worst behavior, with minor cosmetic tweaks around the margins. Just like Apple, Meta is daring the EU to enforce its democratically enacted laws, implicitly promising to pit its billions against Europe’s institutions to preserve its right to spy on us. […] Tech has found new ways to compromise our privacy rights, our labor rights, and our consumer rights - at scale. […] After decades of regulatory indifference to tech monopolization, competition authorities all over the world are taking on Big Tech. The DMA is by far the most muscular and ambitious salvo we’ve seen. […] Seen in that light, it’s no surprise that Big Tech is refusing to comply with the rules. If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech’s ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.

Even if the DMA will be enforced completely and the EU won’t let big companies weasel out of actually complying, I have very little hope that this game of resisting compliance and enacting policies is not continuing for the foreseeable future. Non compliance is surely not a phenomenon exclusive to Big Tech. Far from it. Which means that even if we get the right people to put policies into place to reign in companies this cat and mouse game is just going to make sure that climate change is even more of a sure thing.

And what about all of the non-democratic societies? And what about all those non-environmental governments who do nothing? Can you solve a planetary problem while parts of the world are at war with each other? Or at least are ideologically opposed? What about China?

I read an article by Noah Smith about the wider implications of the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles the US have enacted. A couple of things form this:

Joe Biden is about to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. A 100% tariff is an absolutely huge tariff. It means that Chinese EV makers would have to sell their EVs in the U.S. at half the price of EVs manufactured elsewhere in order to be competitive. That just isn’t going to happen. A 100% tariff will probably be enough to keep essentially all made-in-China EVs out of the U.S.

And further, himself quoting David Fickling:

A lot of people are worried that tariffs like these will slow down the transition to a low-carbon future powered by solar power and batteries. For example, David Fickling writes:

China’s widening lead in clean technology, coupled with its vast trade surplus…are combining with faltering efforts on decarbonization in developed countries to produce a toxic mix…If green technology such as electric vehicles…gets badged as foreign and threatening and finds itself excluded via…tariff policies, then drastically falling costs aren’t going to be enough to get it into the hands of consumers…An acceleration in trade wars will only slow our path to zero [carbon].

He’s right to worry. Transportation is responsible for almost 30% of U.S. carbon emissions, or about 4% of the global total. If the U.S. failed to switch to EVs, it could hamper decarbonization efforts by a small but noticeable amount.

And a last one from this:

The most important thing about these tariffs is probably the message they send. Protectionism is now the consensus economic policy of both major political parties in the United States. Biden has extended the Trump tariffs on China and levied the new EV tariffs; Trump is trying to one-up Biden by promising to raise the 100% tariffs to 200%, extend them to Mexico, and slap an additional 60% tariff on all Chinese-made goods. There is currently no major party or presidential candidate that you can vote for in America that is even remotely interested in free trade.

What I take from this is that the biggest economies are at a trade war with each other and it’s about to get very ideological on planet earth again(?) - but not in an environmentally friendly ideological way we might hope for. Meaning that systematic improvements of the climate situation are completely unlikely. Because a climate neutral Europe won’t be enough and itself utterly unlikely. I do not have hope for the rest of the planet.

All this is to say that: We will have to live with it. We will have to accept climate change. We won’t be able to stop the catastrophe. All the displaced people. All the pain and suffering. All the biodiversity loss.

What is interesting though, is that fossil fuels won’t last forever and the world’s overindulgence in a surplus of energy that is not bound to the solar energy system (as opposed to the fossil energy system that spurred much of industrialization) is inevitable. We will not live to see this, but we also won’t stop the shit show until then. The planet will go through this. I don’t see how it wouldn’t.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - A Rational Case For Protest

Having agreed to write more this month has produced a handful of posts that make me uncomfortable.

These are all posts that make me uncomfortable because these are fluent thoughts that get more concrete the more I write. Today I wanted to add another point about (non-violent) protest.

If you’ve spent enough time in the social humanities, you will end up with a viewpoint that could be condensed down to “humans are gonna human”, meaning that intentional action very seldomly can be used as a starting point for analysis because either it is not visible to the observer, or intentions are getting displaced as soon as other actors are entangled. If that is true and it still seems possible to give good descriptions, maybe even explanations of change over time, of “why the things are the way they are” by completely excluding intentionality from the analysis, then it seems right to be very skeptical towards explanations that rely on private intentions being present to make sense of the world. You don’t need to know the why of individuals to understand the why (or at least give a convincing description of the state of things at a given time) in a larger sense.

Armed with this viewpoint it seems heartbreakingly obvious that protest can’t work, because bigger more distributed powers shape society, if you like it or not.

But. There is a case to be made for protest, if we don’t assume protesting is meant to inform and convince the wider public to change their ways and join the protesters until the social pressure becomes so high that other people would be elected to the parliament that in turn would enact new policies.

If we take as read that any protest would need enough active participants and sympathizers, why would you want to protest if not for convincing people? I found this great encapsulation in a Hacker News thread about the 3,5% rule:

Protests aren’t intended to gain allies. It’s to put pressure on those in charge. Pissing people off and interrupting commerce is literally the point.

Disruption is the point! It means that people will complain about the protestors. It means that the politicians in charge will be asked - sooner or later - to deal with the protestors and in its absolute form this can really only go three ways: 1.) The wish of the protestors is granted in some way or 2.) the state uses violence to end the protests. Either way the non-violent protestors keep the moral high ground. 3.) The third option is that the protest peters out, in which case the protest was not strong enough to begin with and not worth a potential conflict with the law. You really have to believe in what you believe (or at least make other people believe that you believe in what they believe) to spearhead a protest.

So there you have it: A rational case for protest is about disruption not about convincing fellow citizens. You need allies to make enough of a fuss, but changing society has a lot less to do with convincing people and a lot more to do with strategically annoy them.

What has this to do with not taking intentionalities into account? We can see that the mechanism of protest works even if people do not act strategically on purpose. All you need is the right strong convictions and the wish to disrupt people for disrespecting your values. If you as an individual realize that protest works like this or not is not important for it to work this way.

So what about the other posts? I wonder if some problems in wanting to change the web through protest and activism can be attributed to there not being a need to understand the mechanism. You can disrupt parts of the web, but the web is not a society which means that platforms won’t react in the same way - or at least they don’t need to - because shutting down protests is so much easier: like what recently happened on stack overflow:

Stack Overflow announced that they are partnering with OpenAI, so I tried to delete my highest-rated answers.

Stack Overflow does not let you delete questions that have accepted answers and many upvotes because it would remove knowledge from the community.

So instead I changed my highest-rated answers to a protest message.

Within an hour mods had changed the questions back and suspended my account for 7 days.

The web is not a democratic society so disrupting a platform will have a different result than disrupting society: Either nothing happens, the platform dies or you get banned. Note that these things seem similar to what I wrote above, but they are different. One way in which these are different is that a platform is not owned by its users. Another way they are different is that people in charge are not elected by its users. So the dynamic of pissing of fellow citizens, them complaining to politicians to end the disruption and the politicians having to decide to either answer with ethically questionable violence or by granting the wish to the protesters is not working in the same way. Users engage on platforms. Platforms have owners. And these owners may have share holders to answer to but share holders are not congruent with the users of said platforms. To make protest work you would need a meaningful amount of users be part owners of a platform. Or you need to protest in the context of your society, which would be my point to make here.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Is There A 3,5% Rule For The Web?

Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.

So claims an article from the BBC from 2019. It refers to the research of Erica Chenoweth which in turn inspired the Extinction Rebellion group.

I think there is hope in such research that seems to show that nonviolent activism that reached a relatively low threshold actually led to change. I say this, because I at least have a hard time believing protests do anything positive at all. Which is a sad and cynical take, I know. So reading this kind of stuff makes me skeptical, yes, but also hopeful, that there is something to it.

In light of what I recently wrote about AI: That I don’t think that LLMs are going anywhere, even if they are not going to fulfill their promise. And that we won’t prevent their development by individual consumer choice. Which therefore means we should instead explore them carefully and with an eye for making them a part of our shared experience (by hopefully making them more sustainable (et. al.) and enacting policies towards this) instead of trying to look away and excluding them from intelligent and more complex discourse that tries to think a whole world - that, like it or not, includes AI and VCs and Techbros - no matter what our individual values might be.

So in light of that I wonder what a “3,5% rule” for web discourse could look like. The truth is: I can’t think of one. The Web and its visitors are not really a society or a nation state (or a union of such things) and therefore do not govern themselves. We are citizens of the web only in a very metaphorical way. The policies are enacted by governmental bodies like the EU. This makes me think that in order to change the web you need to change the society you’re living in. Which means that a “3,5% rule” - if it exists - for the web would just be the “3,5% rule” for non digital societies.

So activism of the web would necessarily need to interface with the physical world and non-violently protest its rampant development to become not much more than a collection of hellish and exploitative platforms owned by rich people that actively threaten any and all live on this planet by exploiting resources, exploiting people and undoing democratic progress everywhere.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Vulnerable Thoughts Around LLMS and generative AI

It makes me extremely uncomfortable to think in terms of ethics when it comes to generative AI. I would like to say that I am agreeing with Baldur Bjarnason on the matter and that there is actually nothing to discuss, but only to state that AI is unethical, unsustainable, un-researched and actively harmful to the planet and its inhabitants. It’s also a bubble and can’t deliver on its promise:

Found via a Reddit post about a WSJ article quoting a Sequioa presentation

In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue. This 17x number is just for chips – Nvidia chips alone, I think – so the actual cost-to-revenue multiplier is much higher in reality. So the hardware it’s installed in and the actual CPUs are extra. Research is extra. The army of freelancers used for RLHF training are extra. Electricity cost is extra. And chips depreciate in value pretty rapidly. Especially since every chip vendor on the planet has more specialised ML chips in the pipeline that are more effective at the task. This investment will be worthless pretty quickly.

But then … I am using it at work - where my employers pay for a pro version for us to use - and even in my free time I use it as my access to a more advanced version makes it more interesting to use and I’m - as I am so often - caught up in a kind of fatalist argument, it seems: I do not see LLMs going away. Do I feel better for not using them? Only theoretically. I feel like I am learning things while I use them because there are actually wast swaths of what I am theoretically supposed to to be able to do at work that I can’t do without a nudge here and there. Same is true in recreational programming.

In theory I feel that keeping myself morally untouchable and staying “pure” is interesting, but just as I tried to express when I was talking about manifestos and their harsh delineation between good and bad according to a standard they define without outlining the practical steps to make this a reality, I find myself reaching for the same here: Purity is theoretically interesting, but practically life happens elsewhere and so it is more a question of degree, if anything.

I can’t and won’t deny the fact that I find these AI tools helpful and interesting, sometimes. I won’t not agree either that they are also not unproblematic. However, I will say that excluding these things from your life - by individual consumer choice - doesn’t do anything to make them do less harm, make them more sustainable or actually changing the practicalities of life. We have become very good at defining things in such an “either/or” way that it has become useless to apply these standards to any real life situation, where you may be forced, coerced or seduced into - for example - using these things. What now? Time to stop living? Time to apologize for the rest of your life? I think that we may have to relearn how to examine the world. Not in terms of purity of our actions, but in terms of the realization of the world we inhabit.

This means manny big and small things. One small thing it means is to understand the relative limit any one’s actions have on the whole. We are an expression of the whole, so not being able to change the whole is not THAT surprising, I’d say. This also means that better understanding the whole - for example by examining the insane amounts of money and resources that are put into training, developing and serving these models to customers (like in the quote above) and how insanely powerless we as individuals are to change this - helps understanding us and our place int this world. Look, even in Europe - which I would only call a beacon of democracy by comparison to the alternatives out there - I do not foresee a sufficiently strict policy that would make LLMs impossible to deploy even though they are, in their current state, unethical in so many ways.

But if this is the case … I think you ought to be able to examine what you’re dealing with. I think people found always interesting what is problematic in one way or another. As far as I can tell LLMs and the whole field of commercial AI are no different. Does this give you card blanche to not care about any and all concerns around this? No. Does this mean you can’t use those tools? I don’t know, I tend to think the answer is no here, too.

There are things that are tabus in society that you definitely, positively cannot find good and explore in the way I try to argue for here. You can’t try on “slavery” or “naziism” for size, for example. But LLMs are not a tabu. They are problematic, sure, but they are not the same thing as those societal tabus. They may become one, we’ll see. It follows that you may be interested in them as long as you stay mindful and open to what they may become. I would even say that it is important to stay engaged, because this also makes it possible to recognize what may be worth developing further.

I guess what I’m trying to argue for is: 1. LLMs are going to stick around. They may not fulfill their promise of becoming super intelligent conscious agents - which is pretty unlikely and in any case prohibitively expensive and ruinous to our planet - but they are here to stay in some form or fashion. 2. Being interested in and using LLMs - even in your day to day life - won’t change this, however it well give you a better idea of what LLMs are and what they can and can’t do in an experiential sort of way that will absolutely change your perception of them. It’s not wrong to be curious as long as you’re cautious and recognize that you can’t generalize your experience: You’re not doing publishable research, you’re finding out for yourself. 3. I find it MUCH more valuable to live in the uncomfortable truth that you as an “unpure” individual can only do so much, apart from being interested in what is going on and actually recognize and examine what makes existence so uncomfortable if you can’t change what’s happening, which is kind of contradictoriy. I want people to express this ambivalence and live in it, because most of us are simply unable to live purely for purity’s sake.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Thoughts on "Manifesto for a Humane Web"

The developer Michelle Barker has published a very cool Manifesto for A Humane Web and I wanted to comment on it a little. I mostly wanted to point to some lines from Bruno Latour and his 2010 paper An Attempt at a “Compositionist” Manifesto and comment on their implication for the Humane Web Manifesto, as far as I am interested in it here:

I know full well that, just like the time of avant-gardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people trails behind[…]. During this recently defunct time of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speed up the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries. This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow of time had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. The war waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how many defeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was the inevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could be used like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” and who was more “reactionary.”

And even though I love this text for it is a pretty good one, I will stop quoting after one more passage:

And yet a manifesto might not be so useless at this point, making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future.

I think that this understanding of what a manifesto could be in our modern world fits nicely to the way the web is going and how to proceed: Carefully and facing the future. With taking precautions and slowly. With an eye for a more “ecologist” web, that is with an eye for dependencies and conditions that make up diversity. I think this is a great framing for the humane web, because the categories used to frame this manifesto make clear what is needed for society of the web to make it in the wilderness that is the internet: “accessible”, “inclusive”, “safe”, “secure”, “sustainable”, “reliable”, “resilient”, “transparent”, “independent”, “human-centred”.

I have some quibbles with some of the categories and especially coming from a Latourian actor-network perspective I find that using the term “society” (as in “Like a functioning society, we take what we need, and we contribute what we can. We are citizens of the web…") would need to be qualified a little to make sure that we understand ourselves as makers being made by the web - which just means that tools have agency, too and that we have to lengthen our gaze a little past what we would traditionally call society. There is more involved.

About those categories I will only note one more thing before trying to express what I would’ve like to see more of. This point is that instead of “independent” I would have chosen the word interdependent. And instead of “human-centred” I would have chosen “un-centered” or “distributed”. But let’s not get lost in the weeds.

I know that this manifesto is very much of its time and reacts to platformism, late capitalism and the threat of “Big AI”. But I think it is important to realize that the society of the web needs to be assembled slowly, carefully, facing the complexities ahead by remaking - I would say - what here & now means, by taking more time examining what lies before us.

Sounds nebolous? But questions like the following arise from this stance:

  • “How exactly are we going to think of a web society?”
  • “How can an individual take meaningful steps?”
  • “What does it mean to not filter out by categories, those who are “un-progressive” or “progressive with an asterisk” but to describe a prospective future?”
  • “What series of steps can be taken as an assembly of actors (a team, a company, a neighborhood)?”
  • “What is implied by the difference of being un/humane? Are those who are humane able to sustain themselves in any way? How? Can we separate them from the un-humane ones? How? Is this a stable difference? Who differentiates?”

I think the most understandable way I can put this - because I get annoyed by the way I have to express this as well, a little: If this manifesto and others like it that it links to point at something, is this something served by the playbook of exclusion/inclusion, sorting and filtering out? I imagine that whatever the humane web could be, it would express itself less in terms of framing out what it is not by underlining what it is, but by exploring what would make it possible to exist at all. What are the technologies, processes, organizational forms, ways of observing, tending to, maintaining, caring for and negotiating that could make a different web? This also implies what can stay - I assume the underwater cables, the http protocol can stay, CSS can stay, but what else? Do we know the web that is?

I’m all for binding those “How?“s I would have liked to hear more about to a higher order thinking, but I am not so interested to be sorted into good or bad by adhering to either all of the categories or none, without being told what is needed to even make one of these categories a real thing on a planetary scale (is that the goal?) and what is done to make it worth it to try for that.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - 100 Days To Offload Next?

I need more reasons to blog regularly. Can we have a WeblogPoMo every month? I have not been as engaged with my own blog in at least three months. It may not look like much, but I think that having an excuse to publish and work on the blog is awesome because the slight social pressure helps me build some momentum and get back to posting regularly. And then I noticed this sentence under “Inspiration” of the WeblogPoMo page:

I am also (selfishly) prepping myself to get back into a daily blogging habit so I can complete Kev Quirk’s 100 Days To Offload within the next year.

So what is 100 Day To Offload?

The whole point of #100DaysToOffload is to challenge you to publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year.

I guess I know what I’m doing next.

#WeblogPoMo2024 Apple Music's Create Station Is Actually Pretty Good

I do not have great needs when it comes to my music streaming service:

  • I want (most) of the music that I know and love available to me
  • I want to be able to manage owned music and want it to integrate with the streaming offering
  • I want to be able to find new music that I actually like

I struggled especially with the last part until a few days ago, but I can now say, that picking a song I like at the moment and use the create station command is pretty good! It might be just my imagination, but I think that this generates better, more relevant song lists than using Autoplay when running out of music in a playlist, listening to the radio, or listening to their curated playlists (personalized or not). All of the other stuff doesn’t really work for me. But this does. So it may be worth a try.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Overview

  • Last updated: 2024-05-14 - 21:32

More for me than anyone else: Here are my posts for the WeblogPoMo2024.

Total: 16 Posts

#WeblogPoMo2024 Feeling At Home In The Abstract (From Theory To Programming)

Why am I such bad photographer? Why do I not care about such things? Why am I so bad ad drawing? Why do I not have the patience for that? Why do I not try to create things that are trying to be optically pleasing? Why do I not create sculpture? Or handcrafts? Why am I not?

There are obvious answers. Talent would be one. Laziness an other. From the obvious ones, I like to think that I employ my creativity more and better in the abstract. Earlier in my life, I would have said that historical epistemology, sociological systems theory and actor-network theory would have been my playing fields. Nowadays it’s software architecture and software development. And I guess essayistic journaling. Ruminating on things, how they could fit. Thinking about thinking and writing about writing. It’s thinking and writing. But it’s not beautiful writing. If it’s that, it’s kind of accidental on purpose, maybe. But not in English. It’s mostly functional, because my voice won’t come out as easily in English as it does in German. Which is not even always a bad thing.

I sometimes long for being able to write about mundane things like how does it feel to live in a different country (notice, that I didn’t say Finland; I immediately went abstract abain…), for example? Or being in an international relationship, or whatever? I force myself to write about this stuff sometimes, because I want to preserve a kind of public record of the years I went through, but I ordinarily would write about more abstract things.

I do notice that a lot of my abstract thinking has either become private and found a place in my notes app, instead of my blog, or has become purely thinking because my life is so full of stuff and non-abstract life that I can’t indulge in this kind of stuff too much. But what am I even saying. Even if I don’t get to spend all of my time thinking about the act of writing-thinking in the abstract, my life is still full of the abstract: Because I’m a programmer and the act of programming is at its root a work of abstracting. This way of abstracting just feels much more concrete to me nowadays. It also doesn’t feel as explorative, because in the end I am supposed to abstract for money, meaning I am supposed to create, to produce really, business value with my work.

I recently learned an interesting thing about my inclination for abstraction: It wants to be explorative. I think I’m doing my best creative work, when I can look at a legacy body of work - this could be an abstract published text, or a legacy code base - and am allowed to take my time with said body of work. The notion of refactoring comes to mind: In programming this is defined as a behavior preserving code change. This enables the restructuring and renewing of legacy code bases. Something similar could maybe be claimed for often times unwieldy abstract texts, too. I am able to dissect them and reassemble them. So that I can explain them, use parts of them, recombine them, take parts of them and combine them with other parts from other texts and be innovative with them. At least for me I can do that pretty well. The opportunity to do anything with that “in the open” has kind of passed though. I do not envision myself publishing many papers about new aspects of actor-network theory, for example. I do envision myself using this muscle to become pretty good at thinking about the craft of programming, though. I am happy to say that I get payed for spending about 8 hours a day writing and thinking about code. Most of this is relatively mundane web development in a more or less proprietary legacy framework, but even then it lets me imagine and sometimes even actually do some applied creative abstract thinking.

And that’s awesome and interesting to me. And I want to become better at it, I want to do more of it and I want to be able to take on more responsibility so that I may contribute wider reaching solutions to this code base of ours, so that others can use and appreciate them. I feel in this way I am not, nor was I ever, that different from creatives that work within a less abstract medium.

For a second I had hopes that the iPad event would be interesting. I was hoping for mac apps on the iPad - or even a full fledged macOs. But nope…