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Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

manu.zone

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Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#31

Post by lallysingh »

shrubble wrote: post #23
jfarmer wrote: post #20

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

You could find some vestigial BASIC in the DOS batch language.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#32

Post by forkerenok »

I haven't read the book, but the quotes do really read as timeless.

I was in my early teens during dot-com era, but without a PC yet and still an "internet virgin".

One question that really tickles my curiosity is how much the spoils of the dot-com era shaped the direction of the free software in the next decade?

When looking at (the aged) projects under Apache umbrella, it seems a lot of them kicked off around that time. Is that because of the dot-com money or because Java graduated to a different stage around that time?

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#33

Post by manuhortet »

dusted wrote: post #6

This looks like a review or comment on something, that Ellen wrote, but I've no idea what, it does not link to anything ?

Right. I cross-posted without thinking about this, thanks for pointing it out. As you have figured out already the linked post is a short collection of notes on Ellen's book: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/486625

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#34

Post by severak_cz »

doctorhandshake wrote: post #4

Back when syntax was a challenge for me and documentation more scarce generally, and, perhaps even more than I’d like to admit to this day, I find myself mentally thinking of programming as ‘begging a computer to do things.’

as @daisyowl tweeted: a CPU is literally a rock that we tricked into thinking

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#35

Post by cmrdporcupine »

shrubble wrote: post #23
jfarmer wrote: post #20

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

Not in a technical sense, but in a historical/cultural sense, sure. At the time PC/MS-DOS was propagating out in the public, many of us were also working with machines where the "OS" was a BASIC prompt. And the model and syntax of command interaction wasn't so dissimilar.

But yeah, it's a bit of a hand waving generalization.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#36

Post by mikelevins »

agentultra wrote: post #14
ubermonkey wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The book was written before I was born Oh my god I'm so fucking old.

My friend, it happens to everyone. I typed in my first BASIC program in ‘89. I dropped out of high school in the late 90’s to program uh… high quality adult entertainment websites. I had a small e-commerce site for a while selling weird stuff. I eventually finished school and tried to move on but I got back into programming for a living to this day. Twenty some odd years of doing it professionally. For fun. For curio…

"My friend, it happens to everyone."

Indeed. When you were typing in your first BASIC program, my younger daughter was two years old.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#37

Post by Ensorceled »

agentultra wrote: post #28
jfarmer wrote: post #20

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…

I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

> I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology?

Fundamentally, if there is a collapse, future societies have a VERY tough row to hoe ... we've essentially dug up and drilled ALL of the easily available hydrocarbons and moved the bulk of our science and technology to storage that requires that level of science and technology to access. And encrypted most of it. They'll be trying to climb the technology ladder without coal, oil or natural gas and without any technology documentation from about 2000 onwards.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#39

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

shrubble wrote: post #23
jfarmer wrote: post #20

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

We all know. It doesn’t change the discussion of the topic in the slightest.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#40

Post by stevezsa8 »

agentultra wrote: post #28
jfarmer wrote: post #20

This is a great book and I quote this 1998 article she wrote for Salon all the time: https://www.salon.com/1998/05/12/feature_321/ "The dumbing-down of programming" > The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of…

I've always been curious if our society were to collapse would the artifacts left behind indicate to a future society how to reconstruct this technology? Is there any object permanence in our creations? I imagine a wanderer silently plumbing their way through the streets of Manhattan on their makeshift catamaran. They're mostly in search of useful resources but they can't help but be intrigued by these little, grey s…

That's an interesting question.

I'd be inclined to think The Wonderer has no use for a computer. Their life is mostly about survival, food, shelter...

But when society is again ready to automate calculations... it's only a hundred years before computing is back.

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