OK, now stop laughing at the title. It will soon make sense.
There are several conflicting visions of what computing is and how humans use it at work in the world today. The operative parts of those visions have generated today's relevant and "hot" topics, both in industry and in academia, but in different parts for each vision. I would call these visions the Media Terminal, the Digital Homesteader, and the Thinking Machine. The former occurs mostly as a side-effect of the two latter visions, but will be explained later.
The important thing is the ongoing battle between the Digital Homesteader and the Thinking Machine.
The Digital Homesteader came first; he was the first discoverer, inventor, and user of all computing devices. He was the archetypical hacker and computing pioneer: Kernigan, Ritchie, Stallman, Guy Steele, Robin Milner, etc. He was often a "kibbutznik" of a pioneer: contributing his creations back to the overall community. He looked out upon the barren land, hoisted his few tools onto his shoulder, went down into the desert and made it bloom. Quitting metaphor, his areas of research and development were most commonly Systems (both applications-level and operating-systems level), Networking, and Programming Languages. The Digital Homesteader built systems and tools and ways to link them, because he wanted to carry his code and data on his back: his and no-one else's, to build a thriving home. Today he mostly lives in academia and in the industrial companies large enough to either do systems work or have research labs.
Of course, there can be no ignoring the laws of ecological/economic succession. Once the Digital Homesteader built the world of computing, inevitably someone had to come along and try to own it. In this case, that someone looked out upon the land and saw that it was too vast. He wept and ran to tell his superiors, the Prophet Investors of the Promised Market, that the land was filled with giants who would not allow its conquest. And so according to the desires of the Prophetic Investors, this man built the Thinking Machine. He cultivated computing to be something into which he could pour every function of a human mind to have them performed better, faster, cheaper and on a larger scale than any flesh-creature could ever perform them. His areas have been Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Databases, and the emerging field of Analytics. The Thinking Machine now grows fat on the tribute of venture capitalists, watching and tracking everyone who touches a computer, all mostly for the sake of marketing and sales (the words "FIRE DIRECT MARKETING ALGORITHM!" come to mind). It plants its terminals in the many Silicon Valley start-ups of the world, claiming the power to transform "social", "Web 2.0", and "Big Data" into actual money with minimal actual work or use-value. We can all name some disciples of the Thinking Machine: Page and Brin, Zuckerberg. Yet it would seem half the jobs in computing today involve some service to It.
Between these two, often mediating between them, stood men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They administered the Media Terminal, a small capitalist town on the borderlands between the remaining anarchist desert of the Homesteaders and the increasingly totalitarian city-states of the Thinking Machine. They built their town of computing around personal devices used for storing small sums of personal content but mostly for consuming mass-produced code and data. Actually, their town is what remains of a larger nation now long-since gobbled up by the empire of the Thinking Machine, who seduced the citizenry with "web frontends" and "applications in the browser". The Media Terminal's fields of computing had been Software Engineering, Information Theory (for data encoding, cryptography and compression), Networking, and Human-Computer Interaction.
War is coming across these lands. The first echo of the future into the past was Stallman founding the Free Software Foundation to guard against the encroachment of the Media Terminal, but over time it and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have had to increasingly militarize the remaining territories of the Digital Homsteaders to guard against the Thinking Machine. The Thinking Machine, for its part, claims to offer a better life, indeed a more democratic life, to those living under its purvue and government.
I think my allegiance here is obvious. The real question is: how much power over our future comes with the various fields of expertise wielded by each power bloc.
There are several conflicting visions of what computing is and how humans use it at work in the world today. The operative parts of those visions have generated today's relevant and "hot" topics, both in industry and in academia, but in different parts for each vision. I would call these visions the Media Terminal, the Digital Homesteader, and the Thinking Machine. The former occurs mostly as a side-effect of the two latter visions, but will be explained later.
The important thing is the ongoing battle between the Digital Homesteader and the Thinking Machine.
The Digital Homesteader came first; he was the first discoverer, inventor, and user of all computing devices. He was the archetypical hacker and computing pioneer: Kernigan, Ritchie, Stallman, Guy Steele, Robin Milner, etc. He was often a "kibbutznik" of a pioneer: contributing his creations back to the overall community. He looked out upon the barren land, hoisted his few tools onto his shoulder, went down into the desert and made it bloom. Quitting metaphor, his areas of research and development were most commonly Systems (both applications-level and operating-systems level), Networking, and Programming Languages. The Digital Homesteader built systems and tools and ways to link them, because he wanted to carry his code and data on his back: his and no-one else's, to build a thriving home. Today he mostly lives in academia and in the industrial companies large enough to either do systems work or have research labs.
Of course, there can be no ignoring the laws of ecological/economic succession. Once the Digital Homesteader built the world of computing, inevitably someone had to come along and try to own it. In this case, that someone looked out upon the land and saw that it was too vast. He wept and ran to tell his superiors, the Prophet Investors of the Promised Market, that the land was filled with giants who would not allow its conquest. And so according to the desires of the Prophetic Investors, this man built the Thinking Machine. He cultivated computing to be something into which he could pour every function of a human mind to have them performed better, faster, cheaper and on a larger scale than any flesh-creature could ever perform them. His areas have been Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Databases, and the emerging field of Analytics. The Thinking Machine now grows fat on the tribute of venture capitalists, watching and tracking everyone who touches a computer, all mostly for the sake of marketing and sales (the words "FIRE DIRECT MARKETING ALGORITHM!" come to mind). It plants its terminals in the many Silicon Valley start-ups of the world, claiming the power to transform "social", "Web 2.0", and "Big Data" into actual money with minimal actual work or use-value. We can all name some disciples of the Thinking Machine: Page and Brin, Zuckerberg. Yet it would seem half the jobs in computing today involve some service to It.
Between these two, often mediating between them, stood men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. They administered the Media Terminal, a small capitalist town on the borderlands between the remaining anarchist desert of the Homesteaders and the increasingly totalitarian city-states of the Thinking Machine. They built their town of computing around personal devices used for storing small sums of personal content but mostly for consuming mass-produced code and data. Actually, their town is what remains of a larger nation now long-since gobbled up by the empire of the Thinking Machine, who seduced the citizenry with "web frontends" and "applications in the browser". The Media Terminal's fields of computing had been Software Engineering, Information Theory (for data encoding, cryptography and compression), Networking, and Human-Computer Interaction.
War is coming across these lands. The first echo of the future into the past was Stallman founding the Free Software Foundation to guard against the encroachment of the Media Terminal, but over time it and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have had to increasingly militarize the remaining territories of the Digital Homsteaders to guard against the Thinking Machine. The Thinking Machine, for its part, claims to offer a better life, indeed a more democratic life, to those living under its purvue and government.
I think my allegiance here is obvious. The real question is: how much power over our future comes with the various fields of expertise wielded by each power bloc.
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire