A computer is not a thing: it is a metaphor for a way of relating to information which has been made concrete through an object with certain characteristics.
Re-envision the computer as a metaphor only, and look at what it really stands for and what it means, then you can look at how to change it.
Other things that are only metaphors:
- Hardware
- Software
- The internet
- Web sites
All of those things are eventually going to go away. Dead metaphors. Why haven’t we seen any real computer innovations in twenty years? Don’t tell me that graphics or tagging or some Web 2.0 shit are innovations. They are just baby steps forward from old ass technology which is already played the fuck out.
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12 Comments
Enter the Nanotechnology?
And can we create a better computer that doesn’t rely on electricity?
> Why haven’t we seen any real computer innovations in twenty years?
Damn fine question. My own opinion is that the technology blinds us.
> And can we create a better computer that doesn’t rely on electricity?
Another damn fine question. Check out the field of ‘reversible computing’: does a computer have to create heat? And why are the entropy-producing processes that computers rely upon themselves non-computable?
If quantum computers turn out to be possible, all bets are off.
I think the problem is that our philosophy hasn’t caught up with it all yet. In studying computer science, I reached the same conclusions, that its all metaphors, and the metaphors control us. Like what the hell is a web “page” or an XML “document”? There are no pages or documents here. We just rely on metaphors dating back to writing symbols on pieces of paper because the possibilities are too vast. Same with Object oriented programming. There are no “objects” in the bytecode, objects exist only in our mind, they allow us to see possibilities of what bytecode could do. They give us excuses, alibis, to do whatever we’re doing.
But that’s where the philosophy comes in, everything is like that in the end. Everything is a metaphor. All we experience is information, and how we parse it or objectify it controls us - becoming our reality for better or worse. I think when we’ve come to terms with this philosophical principle things will get a hell of a lot more interesting in the land of computers.
Svenson, that’s amazing. I’m gonna post that to the main page I think. Want to dwell on this more. Will bump this up to a new thread tomorrow.
Well, these ‘metaphors’ may indeed control us, but I don’t see why they can’t serve us instead.
How could we make them serve us better?
It’s like the current move away from heirarchical filing. This is of course a move /into/ google-land. Now, I think it has some merits and I’ve been trying to file accordingly: reduce folder use. But I’ve found that folders are really useful for separating different projects, things with distinct identities. Same as there are many people in the world, not just one big cyber-brain, and I kinda like it that way. So to abandon the folder completely I think is a false move (driven by the suck of google-space, perhaps).
What I mean is, it’s about seeing these entities we’ve created for what they are, seeing what their skills and strengths are, seeing beyond the label we (or They) have called them. It’s all about ways of seeing, and their improvement.
Don’t they serve us well enough already by resembling actual things we’re accustomed to? Do we really need to abandon “Pages,” “Objects,” and “Folders” for something more abstract? It might be interesting, but would it be any more useful? I’m finding the above mentioned metaphors more and more useful in my metaphorical usage of metaphorachines. Order, organization and comprehensibility are good things. What I’d like to see are increased forms of order; pushing the metaphors closer to their real world namesakes. I want an electronic book with screen-pages that looks and feels like a real book, but runs on interchangeable text files and needs no paper.
On this,
Do we really need constant innovation? I don’t see technology as really “going anywhere.” More like we find something, put it together with something else to make something Wicked Awesome. We find the Wicked Awesome really interesting for a while, and then we move on to something else or just abandon it. The most realistic future-feeling I’m getting right now is a world where people abandon computers and electronic gadgets; not because there’s something new and more interesting developed, but because the novelty factor’s worn off and these things keep sucking up more and more of our time/life, so it ends up not being worth the effort for most folks.
That depends on whether or not you think computers are where they are could be. I do not.
It wouldn’t be something more abstract at all. It would be something more intuitive.
Yes, by at least a hundred times. Imagine this scenario: all of the world’s information is suddenly at your fingertips. How do you organize it so that you can make the absolute best use of it? By arranging things into folders and using queries to sort it? That becomes laughable at such a huge information scale.
Certainly not for the sake of itself. But if there are better ways, then why should we stop with what we’ve got?
Then you are literally not looking.
Right, this is what I am saying: computers are a dead metaphor and they will be replaced by things which more naturally mimic ordinary objects, such as the electronic book you described. But, according to your description, things are fine how they are and we shouldn’t bother innovating; we should just abandon what we’ve already have…
So you want the web to be more like a library? I think we’re on the same page (heh!) there. If I’ve got you right, you see current stuff moving toward something more organic, which is where I’d like to see it go too. But I think where we misunderstand each other is that I don’t really see this as progress or improvement, but just change, which can focus on better ordering an existing piece of technology, or go in more open ended directions like combining existing things into a new invention, or abandoning something entirely. Which isn’t totally clear from my post.
Not really. I mean that we can, if we want to. What I meant by technology not “going anywhere,” would probably be better worded as, “not going along a straight two dimensional track.” Not on a single road leading to a single thing that’s utterly inevitable, but more like a million little roads stretching out all over the place; some of which overlap or lead back to earlier roads. There’s no end point, no final destination, but just a bunch of journeys that we don’t have to take if something else looks more interesting.
Collectively, anyway. Individually is a whole other plate of spaghetti.
Yes, but I don’t think library is the metaphor we’ll necessarily be using. I’ll have to find a way to explain this better. I will probably need to make some graphics to help visualize for others what I am referring to.
This is probably the closest description yet to what it is that I am visualizing as far as info organization goes.
If all of the world’s information is at your fingertips, what do you then choose to write? How will you choose to contribute?
Maybe everything you write then becomes just a query. Ubergoogle will then send you stuff based on it. Other queries.
Does the Chinese room think?