Wake up babe , a talk by Bret Victor

I am seeing this as I'm going to sleep, and I will be a responsible adult, and won't watch it now.

I thought it did a wonderful job responding to some previous cricitisms we've leveled here even though that is not the goal. In particular, the goal is not to eliminate screens altogether. Instead, it observes that we have tons of progress on private computation but next to no progress on public computation. Screens fundamentally get in the way there. Now it all makes sense to me.

Honestly, I feel like there is a fantastic genius to the HCI parts, particularly the idea of computers that are for more than one person to use at a time, that is unnecessarily and unhelpfully conflated with issues of public/private, proprietary/open, etc. "You will never be able to buy this" might be attractive to anti-capitalists of a certain breed, but how am I supposed to get one? How is a school teacher? What is the fundamental difference in principle between buying a finished one and buying parts? If IKEA flat packs the parts for me and I assemble at home? Specialization, standardization, and trade are technologies that for all their imperfections have also led to enormous social good. The baby is somewhere in that bathwater. Not every good idea also needs to save the world from itself by imposing some sort of counter culture purity test. Savior complex bullshit. Also, what a kranky old fuck I've become. Why can't I just focus on how cool the drum machine is? 😓

I think there's signal, not noise, in the co-occurrence of mild anti-capitalism and basically every current computing movement of any interest.

Not denying that there is a causal relationship, at all. And I'm grateful that people are motivated to make things better, and that the motivation leads them to make better tools. I started my little project out of a concern for pro bono legal services, which is also a failure of capitalism. It me. But a person who hates trees and a person who likes cabins might both invent the same chainsaw, and it's true value might turn out to be in wood sculpture. I'd rather know what my invention is actually for than know people I disagreed with never used it. But I'm a consequentialist, maybe?

Yes, the future is a disagreement with the past about what is important, as one of my favorite sayings goes. Already we have folk.computer which puts its own political and technical spin on Dynamicland. There will be more of these. There's also signal in how critiques of Dynamicland get just a little more vehement than other projects. Now I hear every critique as, "Shut up and take my money! Wait, no, don't go! I meant no offense! I just meant to say, how can I obtain something like this, good sir!"