Always Already Programming An Article by Melanie Hoff gist.github.com Everyone who interacts with computers has in important ways always already been programming them. Every time you make a folder or rename a file on your computer, the actions you take through moving your mouse and clicking on buttons, translate into text-based commands or scripts which eventually translate into binary. Why are the common conceptions of what a programmer and user is so divorced from each other? The distinction between programmer and user is reinforced and maintained by a tech industry that benefits from a population rendered computationally passive. If we accept and adopt the role of less agency, we then make it harder for ourselves to come into more agency. programminginterfacestechnology
A Slow Boat to China A Short Story from The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami Can you even call it memory?Never any place I was meant to be
Can you even call it memory? My recall is a damn sight short of total. It’s so unreliable that I sometimes think I’m trying to prove something by it. But what would I be proving? Especially since inexactness is not exactly the sort of thing you can prove with any accuracy. Anyway—or rather, that being the case—my memory can be impressively iffy. I get things the wrong way around, fabrication filters into fact, sometimes my own eyewitness account interchanges with somebody else’s. At which point, can you even call it memory any more? memory
Never any place I was meant to be Supposing I found myself chasing another fly ball and ran head-on into a basketball backboard, supposing I woke up once again lying under an arbor with a baseball glove under my head, what words of wisdom could this man of thirty-odd years bring himself to utter? Maybe something like: This is no place for me. This was never any place I was meant to be. melancholywisdomage