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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

#81

Post by pramsey »

Random_BSD_Geek wrote: post #57
manuhortet wrote: post #2

I recently read Ellen Ullman's memoir about her life as a software developer in the dot-com bubble era: "Close to the machine: Technophilia and its discontents". The book was written before I was born, but I can still closely relate to most of the cultural points made. She does a great job defining the anxieties and frictions you experience working in the duality of the very formal computer systems and the subjective…

> What other similar books would you recommend? "Close to the Machine" by Ellen Ullman and "Microserfs" by Douglas Coupland occupy roughly the same space in my memory.

Both genius. Other readable computers books from an earlier time, that still resonate.

- Soul of a new Machine, Tracy Kidder - Dawn of the New Everything, Jaron Lanier

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#82

Post by glitchc »

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…

The answer to this lies in our history. Given that we know so little about past civilizations, especially older than 6000 years ago, and new discoveries sometimes startlingly reveal how advanced they were, the answer would be no.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#83

Post by cmiles74 »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #27

> How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless…

I did a two year technical program, it was called "Information Systems and Data Processing"; this was maybe two or three years before this book was published ('94-'96 maybe?). It wasn't an apprentice program but all of the people teaching the programming classes had worked with the language professionally. It made a big impression on me at the time, I think it prepared me (somewhat) for the big empty spaces that you don't really notice until you start working on a project.

It's clearly no replacement for a computer science degree, but I think there's a real benefit to spending time with people who have done the work professionally.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#84

Post by [deleted] »

hotnfresh wrote: post #41
shrubble wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that BASIC is not underneath MSDOS...

Some early PCs would boot to a basic environment if it couldn’t boot to any other OS. Not sure if that extended to machines that could run Win3.1, but IBM 8088 PC-XTs (and similar, but that’s what I had) definitely did that, though normally one would boot them to DOS.

[deleted]

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#85

Post by 3-cheese-sundae »

bentcorner wrote: post #66
agentultra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There is that tell-tale green circuit board inside. But how does one turn it on and use it? What does it do? They'll probably think it's some sort of coming-of-age fertility totem, and our datacenters will be structures built to pay homage to the gods.

And how exactly are they not?

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#86

Post by benji-york »

rml wrote: post #62
agentultra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the science fiction book 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' by Walter M. Miller (perhaps you already have :-}) It's set at a monastery in the desert post nuclear apocalypse, where scribes copy wiring diagrams and store artifacts like partially destroyed circuit boards without understanding what they are / how they work. And it builds from there.

Your comment makes me think you may enjoy the 1632 series[0], which is sort of 'A Canticle for Leibowitz' in reverse.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#87

Post by fennecbutt »

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…

To be fair, I've thought about this sometimes too. Like, I contribute to technology myself, but in a very minimal way. And most people don't at all, they consume. But there are a golden few in the world who are doing _everything_.

For example how many people in the world actually know how to build an EUV machine like ASML's one? How many people understand the absolute forefront of integrated circuit design? Maybe like, 1-2 dozen people at most?

It's a pretty crazy thought. And I bet none of those guys are making as much bank as the suited executives above them.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#88

Post by daemonologist »

me_me_me wrote: post #78
Ensorceled wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

What a coincidence, I had that discussion with my friends yesterday. We came to conclusions that the scenarios of rebuilding society back up are based on the type of collapse. The greater drop (destruction events) and greater time gap before rebuilding can start anew the harder it would get. A dark age collapse - worst case scenario - where people slowly loose knowledge over generations - due to lack of institutions…

A Canticle for Leibowitz comes to mind, though while the preservation of knowledge after collapse is a central premise it is not what the novel is about, exactly. Worth reading in any case.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#89

Post by delusional »

marcosdumay wrote: post #80
Ensorceled wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

On the other hand, they get some high-concentrated storages of refined materials, and we will leave lots of those rune-engraved panels that emit an unnatural power when exposed to light. Anyway, unless we are talking about some really unprecedentedly disaster, we'll leave plenty of paper books to help them understand those things and bootstrap their society.

Unless we inexplicably decide to burn all of our accurate books because of some culture war.

Re: Close to the Machine: Technophilia and its discontents

#90

Post by msla »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #27

> How much of this is impostor syndrome and how much reality? How different are other fields really? I also feel any new programming task as something foreign, for which I am not ready, basically undoable from my position. But at the same time consider myself able to get into anything and everything, and of fixing and building whatever that can be done. I cannot figure out any straight explanation for such senseless…

It isn't just the lack of a piece of paper, it's the fact every project is new to some extent (to exactly the extent we can't just reuse existing code) and present somewhat new challenges. Also, some difficulties scale very nonlinearly, with single changes turning the challenge from needing a few extra weeks to solve to being effectively insoluble in any reasonable timeframe, if ever. ("Check this program to see if our code standards are being followed" to "Check to see if this program will halt" can sound equivalent to a manager, but woe betide the person who tries on the second one.)
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