Basic Tech V – Mostly Harmless
The title of the fifth book in Douglas Adams’ series, “Mostly Harmless”, comes from a fictional description of the earth as a civilisation. It’s a great pairing of words – the innocuous framed with a hint of threat.
Above: The Soul of a New Machine
Isn’t that what the world of programming is like though? It’s ninety-five percent unthreatening typing activities, with a final five percent of 1970’s punk behaviour. And I mean really punk – it could be anything from low-level annoyance to core-wars style worms that destroy all information. This makes programming mostly harmless, just like the pipe-wrench is mostly not deadly.
For me, the work on this project has been really slow going, and I’ve found it very long and arduous to work with the code in this fashion. One of the earlier references in this series of posts was the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, where the major characters are confronted with a spreading virus that destroys the ability for people to speak, transfers a religious belief system into their mind, and makes them run off to join a weird cult. This gets referred to by one of the characters as neuro-lingustic hacking.
This project’s aim has been about using computer tools to examine my pattern of lingustic use. The resulting experimentation with code has convinced me that, in no small way, I should be concentrating on actually making bodies of text rather than dividing my time between attempting to code and and attempting to write. The idea of a reflective tool for text is still a fantastic idea that needs further experimentation, but I’m not sure that I can do it justice between my skill in programming and my desire to create well-crafted sentences.
To that extent, this module has been mostly harmless to me. I’m no longer interested in programming in the way that I was prior to starting it, but I’m not going to rule out the idea of finishing off this project (see the Evaulation PDF) later on in the year. But I can’t breathe true life into the project in the way that a good programmer can. The MV/8000, pictured at the top of this post, was made famous by Tracey Kidder in his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Soul of a New Machine.
This book, so-titled because of the attention to detail that the dedicated team of engineers and programmers put into this early computer breathed life into a hard-pushed project, is a clear line of demarkation between between writing as an activity and programming. In-house documents from the producers of the MV/8000 (aka the Eagle) are nowhere near as exciting as Kidder’s prose, and would not have propelled either the Eagle, Kidder, or the cast of characters Kidder wrote about to anywhere near the level of fame and notoriety they still had twenty years later.
There will always be a need for textual framing of events, objects, and movements. In the next phase of my studies, I’ll be looking at the Star and Shadow’s volunteer workers, and framing that within a context of grass-roots arts activities, whilst working on the final project for the course. Both of these will projects will take the form of texts that can be read, so there’s good call for me to concentrate on something other than code. And, whilst one of my main aims when coming on the course was to develop my skills as a coder, finding out over the length of this module that I need to direct my energies into something else has been mostly harmless.
