Meaning
The quality without a name
The meaning of objects
The meaning of music
A creature of bones, not words
The shape of the sentence
To build a folly
- ââDesigned to be ruinsââ
- ââFolliesââ
- ââThermal aediculaeââ
Let the meaning choose the word
Taboo your words
The arbitrariness of the sign
- ââGods of the Wordââ
The eye does not see
The utter nothingness of being
Whereof one cannot speak
Not knowing quite what they mean
Things cannot be other than as they are
50 reds
No words to describe
That is not it at all
A soft and fitful luster
Reference and Is-ness
The demand of a new word
Apparency
Fish and water
The word invents itself
AI-art isnât art
The Future Is Not Only Useless, Itâs Expensive
The Gifted Listener: Composer Aaron Copland on Honing Your Talent for Listening to Music
On 'The Master and His Emissary'
A brief foray into vectorial semantics
The way an oyster does
The primacy of interpretation over sensation
The body image
Meaningness
Sermon for WIAD Bristol 2021
The language itself has been weaponized
Itâs quite difficult, to fight back against the seeming wisdom of axiomatic âtruths,â when the language itself has been weaponized through the power of pattern. Through rhythm, rhyme, alliteration, and consonance.
The last time I was in England was at the invitation of Nomensa, to give a talk at a conference wherein I encouraged the audience to discard an axiom that I feel has done users of the English language more harm than good through endless and glib repetitions.
Like âCuriosity Killed The Cat,â âYou Are Not Your Userâ sounds so good that we keep on saying it, without appreciating what weâre reifying through repetition. The pleasure of repetition, the pleasure of pattern matching, the pleasingness of Kuh Kuh Kuh consonants on the one hand, and of the round vowelly Yuh Yuh Yuh on the other make these things we say seem true because they sound and feel so good to say.
One Of Us
Thatâs the primary difference between an axiom like âCuriosity Killed The Catâ and an axiom like âYou Are Not Your User. â The former rings true in common experience. Itâs test-able, like striking a tuning fork or dangling a bit of yarn in front of a kitten. The latter is just some stuff that somebody said.
Sometimes, axiomatic sayings like âYou Are Not Your Userâ no longer have a who thatâs saying them. They cease being an actual instruction, and instead serve as a kind of identity, to identify the person whoâs repeating the axiom as One Of Us.
The technical term for when an axiom devolves into an ID card is shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
You and your user are one
In the case of the seeming egalitarianism and beneficence of the voice from the cloud that says âYou Are Not Your User,â what I hear in that voice is the ringing of a cash register, and the creaking of the crank on the side of a box that software development efforts disappear into, and that money comes out of.
A mechanism that would seize up instantly if some still small voice were to propose the opposite of what the thunder says: that you and your user are one.