among other things, code is by its nature an imposition of your way of thinking about some part of the world onto another person. why would you want to do that?
what it should be like: reading a novel, listening to a piece of music, debatably playing a game
what it's like in most cases: brainwashing, social control, manufactured consent, gaslighting rhetorics
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle This. Programming reproduces a worldview, and the problem is that the worldview reproduced in most cases is too much of a monoculture, with barriers to representation in the form of implicit and explicit hurdles & gatekeeping. (This is part of the reason I think "small computing" is so important: users should have enough control to make the code they interact with representative of THEIR umwelt.)
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle The absolute best case for coding, on an ethical level, is that you have reproduced your worldview and you're the only one who uses the software you wrote -- while someone else can still take it and adapt it. Making it so everybody feels comfortable replacing the system's perspective with their own is a UX concern (maximizing expressivity at every part of the learning curve, and smoothing the learning curve out)
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle Like, it's YOUR computer. Just like in YOUR house, you can knock down walls, paint graffiti on everything, and replace the lawn with a tangle of roses if you want, you should be able to make YOUR computer's interface behave however you want. Nobody else has to like it, because it's yours. If they use it, they are a guest in your house & they have to put up with the decor.
@enkiv2 @walruslifestyle true. i think the problem with that (somewhat) is that coding is both a craft and a skill, just like making art is.
so..(half thinking out loud here) there's two things at play:
- writing software that's well-crafted, "professional"/skilled in execution. skill is unique to the person coding, as well as possibly being a shared set of values
- writing software that's personal, intimate, "homey". this is like "i play the uke", in a good way.
group A might be snobbish toward group B, but fk those jerks tbh lol
@enkiv2 @walruslifestyle or in artistic terms, it's craft
i don't think that all software needs to be universalist in style/rhetoric, but there's cases where it's really helpful. it depends on what someone is "writing"
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle The way I see it, UI standardization is a matter of supporting corporate capitalism, and doesn't make sense outside that structure. This might mean that, so long as people have jobs, we can still have this distinction between a standardized "work machine" that multiple people use and an idiosyncratic and personal "home machine".
@enkiv2 @walruslifestyle that's still within the scope of software being functional/tool-like rather than creative, but sure, i agree
what you're saying (from what i gather) is more like craft <-> tools. which is also valid ofc.
making a painting doesn't negate making or using a hammer, or doing things that involve paint, hammers, nails, etc. of whichever functionality and purpose
@enkiv2 @walruslifestyle for a lot of devs, things like demoscenes are the furthest reaches of coding.
for me, that's where things begin, heh. regardless of skill, more like in terms of vision and intent
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle I'm thinking more along the lines of: a computer is both an expression of our worldview (i.e., an art-work) and an extension of our mental space (like a journal, mood-board, scrapbook, sketchpad, or face). When it works, it's an auxiliary brain lobe with a slow connection. The degree to which it functions as an extension of our mental space is dependent on the degree to which it's representative of our umwelt.
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle Because, when our computer isn't good as art (i.e., doesn't actually map to how we think about things in a natural sub-cognitive way), we have to struggle with translating things so the computer understands this. Essentially every piece of standardized or commercial software is awkward to use until the user changes their mental space to match it, because it's not an expression of the user's worldview but of some designer or programmer's.
@shoutcacophony @walruslifestyle But, if the system was made malleable, you could express yourself & get whatever you needed done just by co-evolving with your computer. Programmers, sysadmins, and power users do this to some extent, and users of dedicated smalltalk machines to a greater extent, but I feel like our UIs should look as alien as our deepest ideas are to each other, for maximum symbiosis.
"we" tends to get gendered here, though, and dependent on other factors, like ability and neurology. i follow what you're saying, though
and yes, that's one useful modality, at least. fair enough
@walruslifestyle @enkiv2 take me off this thread, thanks
@enkiv2 @walruslifestyle right!
when i think back to CD-ROMs and all that, at least there was more than one worldview. it was still within a set of very homogenous cultures: white, frequently male, almost entirely straight -- but at least it wasn't a "pure" monoculture
as things stand now, it's very close to being that, which is...pretty horrible. it reeks of fascistic-like social structures, and of technocratic dystopia. how is this even remotely good? sighs
@walruslifestyle also, a lot of male devs take this as metaphor, as in "the codebase as art", then continue on with the same exact thing they always do, lol. i don't mean this metaphorically, i mean that it should be literally equivalent or even equal.
if the intent of the piece crashes the codebase, i simply don't care. :p
@walruslifestyle this has been true at least since interactive multimedia, which was a strange mix of half-ok and standard horribleness, just in an earlier, somewhat less stratified way than it is now
@walruslifestyle imo it's not an imposition, it's a recording, like a diary or mind-map but formal enough to be independently executable. deploying code as services is where the imposition begins imo
@martensitingale
ah yes that makes sense!
@walruslifestyle
*ding*
this is part of why i view coding as a form of artistic expression -- as in, i want there to be a direct arts-like social contract for anything i put out there
it sabotages a lot of presumed functionality and usability to the point of it being "non-functional", but i'm not convinced that is bad.
if anything, it's the opposite, as long as the arts-like social contract is clear