Future of Coding - The Computer is a Feeling by Tim Hwang & Omar Rizwan

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

We've renamed the podcast and community — we are now the Feeling of Computing! Here are some thoughts about the motivation to rename and the choice of new name. It's a small change, but it feels meaningful and clarifying. The new name better fits what we've been doing all along, and sets us up for the next decade of this community. The new name reminded us of The Computer is a Feeling, a document (of some definition) by Tim Hwang and Omar Rizwan. Unlike our usual selections, which are crouton-dry and tiring, this one is basically a 1-pager, quick and fun — you should totally give it a glance and see what you make of it, before Jimmy and I tease it apart and lawyer over the many nuances. This piece makes us question what the computer means in our lives, and how that may have changed over time. Light on specifics and arguably steeped in nostalgic yearning, its series of declarative statements come out more like broadly probing questions. Is the computer feeling possessed only by those who remember the time before the internet? Are computers even required? What does feeling this feeling elicit one to do? We answer at least one of these questions. "But you can't trust them, they're podcasters," said everyone ever, "you've got to feel it for yourself." Links $ While these main Feeling of Computing episodes are, in a word, infrequent, the bonus episodes over on our Patreon — Feeling Off — arrive at a dependable regularity! Why, in the time since we recorded this here episode, we've released two (2) bonus episodes. The first was a unruly deep tangent Jimmy and I fell upon right smack in the middle of this very episode, and then excised out — That's Shakespeare — about code.org, whether the "everyone should learn to code" movement is actually about literacy, the backlash to this movement, and our personal feelings on it all. Then in December we shared our annual end-of-the-year spectacular with games, awards, music, spelling, men who are spiders, and our predictions about the near and distant future — All of the False Ones — free free free for download, no patronage required. The old name is cursed. The old name might have been inspired by Bret Victor's talk The Future of Programming, but the vibe of the community is probably closer to Inventing on Principle. The new name invites us to reflect on the way our tools make us feel. For instance, Kid Pix was a quirky, playful drawing program designed for younger users which had its heyday in the 1990s when Ivan was a younger user, and it gave him some pretty specific feelings at the time. (Also, in the time since recording this episode, Ivan dug up a Snow Leopard iMac from the sedimentary rock and installed KidPix Studio 4, and his 6 year-old daughter has been having a blast with it.) One Piece is a manga and anime that's pretty popular, but perhaps off-topic for our community. Did you know about our virtual meetups? Every month we have people showing off their work, and it's been fantastic to see the wild variety of creative programming projects built by members of our community. We share the details of upcoming meetups in the #announcements channel on our Slack, and publish them in this Luma calendar. You should come! The feeling is still present, in your time, as it was in ours You can build computers out of water, if you want Sim City 3000 was released in 1999, and gave Jimmy the computer feeling. (Ivan played Sim City 2000 back in 1997-ish, and got pretty good at typing the word "FUND", before learning that this didn't actually give you free money and instead gave you a bond.) When Ivan says "go to six or seven bookmarks", that's a reference to this appfrom 2024, not the mid 2025 meme. The two folks in our sphere — Folk Computer by Omar (et al), and FolkJS by Chris Shank and Orion Reed. Folk Computer is similar to Dynamicland, which Omar did some interesting work on. Back in 1997, Ivan taught himself to edit videos using Avid Cinema, a Mac-only video editing tool that predates iMovie but served similar goals. (It came bundled with the infamous Power Macintosh G3 All-In-One, aka the "Molar Mac", which was Ivan's second home computer.) The Programmable Ink gang at Ink & Switch have spent the past few years on this one project, and it sometimes gives Ivan the computer feeling. The Bazaar and the… The Whatever… Yeah, Yeah. MetaCreations was the company behind Bryce 3D and Poser 3, which Ivan used quite extensively when he was a young'un. Here's a photo of Ivan, midlife crisis rapidly approaching, holding his original Bryce 3D box. Wormholes used in this episode: One wormhole to/from the Feeling Off bonus episode That's Shakespeare No secret wormholes. ! Send us gushing, uncomfortably familiar fan mail, join the Feeling Of community, and find us on-line: A: B: C: D: e: F: G: H: I: 🐘 🦋 🌐 J: 🐘 🦋 🌐 K: L: 🐘 🦋 🌐 M: N: O: P: Q: R: S: T: U: V: W: X: Y: Z: https://feelingof.com/episodes/079Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/feelingofcomputingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The feeling of computing. We have to talk about that. The podcast, as you may have noticed, is now called The Feeling of Computing. You, Jimmy, you may have noticed. Yes, we, if you are not terminally online and on our Slack, we've had constant conversations about renaming the podcast. I know we've mentioned them here. And we did it. We renamed things. We were never super happy with the future of coding as the name, especially now. I know Ivan linked and I saw it as well. to Cursor, who now has this big, like, advertising that they're the future of coding. And it didn't really quite fit what we were doing here, not because, just to be clear, not because, oh, we're reading papers about the past so they couldn't possibly be talking

about the future. I think, honestly, I'll just say it. That kind of criticism just frustrates me so much. Yeah, it's so weak. Because that's just not how anything works. Yeah. Like, you can read papers about the past of people talking about the future. and talk about the future that way.

You can talk about the future by doing a lot of different things. And I still think we do talk about the future. Yeah. But the future of coding had this kind of, I don't know, the singular, like, as if we know what it's going to be, as if there is only one inevitable thing, and also just had this very tech bro-y co-option of it that was not my favorite.

I also don't like coding as a framing for what we're talking about. Like, I think coding as a kind of a colloquial shorthand for programming often. I know other people have different interpretations of it, but that's the kind of most common one that I see. I'm not especially interested in programming as an end in and of itself and as a thing to focus on. I think the computer is much bigger than that. I think that there's so much more we could look at. And see, I am. Yeah, and it's good we have you.

but, but, well, that's one of the things I like about this paper is, well, it will give us an opportunity to talk about that distinction here of programming, not programming. Because this paper is decidedly on Ivan side of this debate, that programming is not the be all end all of computing. So we will see, we will see, we'll have that conversation. But yeah, I think having this being the feeling of computing is really kind of more in line with what, trying to be more encompassing of the kinds of things. things that we talk about on this podcast. I mean, yes, it's a playoff Brett Victor's future of programming talk, right? That's like what this is a reference to. And there, Brett Victor is talking about all these things from the past that were supposed to be the future and didn't end up being the future, right, in his mind. But also we get Brett Victor's inventing on principle,

right? Like, I think, like, yes, it's like cliche to talk about Brett Victor, but to ignore the influence, I think, is just to do it a disservice. Like, Brett Victor, you. It's, you know, inventing on principle was not a call to make the most hyper-efficient technology, to make industrial scale perfection. It was to give creators this immediate connection. And I think that that was the most important. Like obviously he's talking about how to live your life, but his principle, giving people the connection is about this feeling. It is about like what is it like to use a computer to create something? And I think we wanted something that's more encompassing and involves all of those various things that we like to talk about here.

So if you're worried that all of a sudden this podcast is changing, you've liked what we've been doing recently, and you're like, oh, it changed, and now you're going to change content. Now we're like changing the name to fit the topics we're already doing, the kinds of stuff we're already talking about, not the other way around. One little thing I'll throw on top of that, that means a lot to me personally, thinking about inventing on principle and what makes it so compelling.

I like the idea of framing things in terms of, terms of feeling because I think that different creative tools that you use give you certain feelings as you use them. And we'll get into that more as we talk about today's reading. There's like a different feeling that I get when I am cooking or a different feeling that I get when I am programming something or a different feeling that I get when I am making some artwork, whether on the computer or physically or wherever, playing an instrument, that kind of thing. All these things give me different feelings. And a lot of the feeling comes from the nature of the tool that I'm using. How does it feel to hold a really nice knife and to cut, you know, some

food with that really nice knife? Like there's a certain feeling that that confers versus like a really dull knife. Or what does it feel like to use Kid Picks Studio, for example, or or some other weird, you know, kind of playful art making program? Or what does it feel like to play a game like Factorio as opposed to a game like Tetris, right? All of these things give you a different sort of bouquet of feelings. And I really like the motivation to try and create tools on the computer, starting from a place of what feelings I want them to confer upon the people who use them. Like I find that personally to be a really motivating way to approach my work as somebody

who makes tools on the computer. And I don't feel like that is well captured by Future of Coding. Like nothing about the name Future of Coding. feels like it is inviting to people who want to focus on things for expression or things for creation or things for empowerment. Whereas feeling of computing gets closer to that for me. It gets closer to like trying to make something that is really nice and trying to like dedicate yourself to this, to this craft of meta creation. And so I like the new name a lot better as making space for the kind of work that I want to do. And I'm, you know, at the end of the day, I still want to make things for programming.

I still, like, you too, Jimmy, you want to make programming languages and compilers and all that kind of stuff. I want to make visual programming environments. Like, we're still going to be doing nerd shit. But I think we're going to do it with a, with a, you know, a better range of things we can talk about without feeling like they're ill fit by the name. Absolutely. And I think, you know, it still has this, like, how can we make the feeling of computing better, right? Like, how can we, and how can we explore different feelings? Like, it's all still wrapped up in the same mission.

And I think it's, it's made it exciting for me because I think there's just a lot more papers where I can say, all right, this, this fits the mission. Like, this is something we can do. Like, we're definitely going to be doing some Christopher Alexander. I need to go, I need to go buy the physical books and go peruse them and make an excerpt because we're not going to read all thousands something pages of a pattern language or whatever, which I know is more of a reference. But, like, you know, there's stuff that, like, I think, like,

That maybe always fit in there, but like thinking of it in terms of these feelings and how we, how we approach computing, I think is just exciting to me. So I'm stoked for it. And I'm stoked for this paper. Well, I'm not letting you do that segue because there's one other point that I want to make before we move on. Okay, okay. Make the point. Make the point.

There are going to be a lot of people listening to this show and participating in this community who liked the old name and who liked thinking about actually making futuristic programming tools and making, you know, stuff that is that is very technical and that they don't really care about this touchy-feely kind of how does it inspire you kind of angle as much as they care about like wanting a robustly engineered solution to a well-defined technical problem or wanting to do a bunch of type theoretic proving work or whatever. And I think that just because I personally and Jimmy to whatever extent you are as well feel that this feeling of computing frame is a better fit than the future of coding frame. We want this to be a big tent still. We want like anybody who is making stuff on the computer for people who are making stuff on

the computer are welcome here because I think that's what this community is ultimately about. It's people making stuff on the computer for people making stuff on the computer. That's interesting. I don't know. I don't know if I would go. So you, you, feel like it's got to be like this this is definitively tool makers well no no i what i'm trying to say is big tent i'm trying to say if you're one of those people so i mean just to be clear like i am still one of these people who like i think this is good because like to me like feelings are something i completely ignored for a lot of my life i'll admit that right i know that sounds crazy but like i was i just didn't think about my feelings as a first class entity so that i didn't feel

them, right? But I never thought, I never reflected on them. I was definitely this like, let's just logic everything. And I still have this bent and I still want to make like well-engineered solutions. I still want to make highly technical things. I'm much less into, you know, like I'm much more into the deep technical stuff and want to make cool tools and futuristic stuff and all of that, right? And yet I feel this name that works. But I still have to be pedantic and push back on this people who make things for people who make stuff on the computer. So I'm just am curious about it. So like, I guess you're trying to guard against something like, well, if you just make art on the computer, this is definitely, like, that's non-interactive.

Like, you're just like, you know, deviant art. You're posting stuff on deviant art. This is probably not the right community for you. Not that you're not welcome here, but like you won't find anything. We're not talking about that. Is that? Exactly. Okay, okay.

You're not going to find a community of like. minded similarly skilled people who are going to be able to give you deep feedback on, you know, your one-piece fan art. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That is not a, like, we're not waving a flag saying, hey, people who identify in this way come congregate here. The flag we're waving. But if you wanted to make a really novel interface for letting people make their own

one-piece fan art in a programmatic manner, then you might. I find the right people here. Yeah, I bet there are some One Piece fans who also are in the community making, you know, programming languages and compilers and stuff who would go, oh my God, that's super cool. Let's talk about One Piece and compilers. Gotcha. Gotcha. Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's interesting because we could have gone the route of saying like the Toolmakers podcast or something like that.

And you seem to like really, you know, identify that we're people making tools. Yeah. I think, right? So why not go that direction? Because, okay, so a little bit of the motivation behind this particular name, I wanted to keep the acronym when sort of setting out the rules for the renaming back in April or whenever this got started.

Keeping the acronym's important, just for continuity sake, and because that's a little bit of the iconography of the communities, we all call it FOC anyways. So that sort of put some guardrails around what names were viable. And then another one is just that I didn't want it to feel like it was a shift to a completely different frame. I wanted it to feel like we are growing the frame a little bit. We're taking the frame established by the current name and expanding around that same center point.

I think for me, like one of the reasons I wouldn't want to go for something more tool-focused, right, even though I do think that that's probably where, you know, most people are is building something to build for people who build something. Yeah. It is like, like, I think of like, uh,

like the handmade, uh, group or whatever, right? Like they, they are very much focused on distinctly, we are building something. And I am show and tell my,

the thing I'm building. Yes. And like, I'm not saying that doesn't have, uh, there isn't an aspect of that in our community. I think that's an important aspect. But that's not the sum total of what we focus on.

I think this is also a place to reflect on. what computing is like, what computing ought to be like, have big, big, you know, galaxy-brained ideas, right? And I think if we had turned this into like the Toolmakers podcast or something, it feels much more like, hey, everyone, come and make your things and show them, rather than, hey, let's contemplate what computing could and should be and, you know, societal issues and all sorts of things that we cover on here. And that's why I think this, this name captures it in some ways more. But I want to at the same time continue encouraging and in fact find ways to encourage even more of show and tell. Absolutely. That is something we do a little bit of in the Slack that we could do even more of. Yes.

And in fact, let me take a minute to say for people who listen to this podcast but aren't active in the Slack, that we're now doing a thing where on usually the last Wednesday of every month, we have a little virtual meetup. And there's usually maybe about 20 people who come out to that. and there's a couple of demos that's been running for about a year and a half now and the hit rate on it has been way higher than I expected. I was expecting to see a lot of sort of toy weekend projects little like, oh hey, I wrote a parser for S expressions

or whatever. No, it has been like banger after banger of wild, imaginative, creative tools and things that people have made that sort of fit roughly in the frame of the feeling of computing. And I am continually inspired by what people are showing there. And I'm surprised that a year and a half in, this little tiny corner of the internet continues to turn out just new thing after new thing that I find mind-blowing. So yeah, if you're not in the Slack or you haven't ducked in lately, maybe come by on a Tuesday near the end of the month so you can find

out when exactly the next virtual meetup is going to be, because those are a lot of fun. Those are really, really interesting. So more of that kind of stuff, more people sharing what they're working on and other things like that. You know, there's some new energy flowing around in the community that I'm really excited by. Yeah, absolutely. Well, on that note, I think this, okay, this paper, the computer is a feeling. Is not a paper? It was published in a journal.

Is that a journal? The New York Review of Computation, number one, May 23. Yeah. With the only ever thing that it's the sum total of the journal. We're reading the whole journal right now. What is it other than a paper? All right. I think...

Name the media. What is it? I think it's a listical. Okay. They call it an article. It's an article. No, I'm going to call it a listical. It's not a listical.

It's a listical. It's a list. An ongoing set of articles about computer feelings two years ago. and this is the only one. So it is a listicle by Tim Huang and Omar Riswan. It is this relatively short list

of points generally on the theme of the computer is a feeling. So I think there's two ways we could tackle this. We could go through the whole thing or we could read the whole thing. I think we're going to read

the whole thing point by point and talk about it as we go. Okay, so not just read the whole thing up front. think we read the whole thing up front. It's short enough we could. I'm not suggesting we should. I just, I did think about it because you could like read the whole thing and talk about it, but I do think going point by points probably going to be better because I think I was thinking about as a listener, if a podcast just decided to read me the whole text, I would just tune out,

not listen to any of it and then come back to when they were talking about it. I would have to put some music under it or do something, do some. Yes, I did think you could like, you know, do a... No. No, okay, okay. I think what we do is we read each point, point by point. Uh-huh. And that way, as the thing unspools itself before us,

we get to react to each new twist and turn as we go. Yes. I will say from the outset, like, we did not name the podcast after this paper, but after we named the podcast, I thought about this paper and thought, this would be a really fitting one to talk about for the renaming. episode. I know we renamed before we put out this episode, but you know, it's the first episode

since the renaming. Yeah. May I have the honors of doing the reading of each point as we go, or do you want to alternate, or what would you like? I would love for you to do the reading. I hate trying to read out loud. Do it. Me, me, me, me, me, me. The computer is a feeling by Tim Huang and Omar Riswan. Number one. The computer is a feeling. a device. Strong open. So, I mean, obviously, it's a little hard to comment on just the first one without the second one.

Number two, by this we mean that what makes a computer a computer has nothing to do with commands, compilers, or even machines. For us, computer is the specific feeling of artifacts that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning. All right. When I first read these two points, I thought I was going to absolutely hate this. This sounds like the nonsense that I don't like. I'll be completely honest.

Like, the idea that the computer is not a machine, the computer is not command, it has nothing to do with commands and compilers. Okay, maybe it has nothing to do commands and compilers. But it's definitely a device that does computation. And so the only thing here that kind of gives a hint that they're not going to be that obnoxious is that it's for us. They're not actually just, I'm going to spoil. They're not actually trying to redefine, say that a computer is not a computer.

They're trying to say, let's focus on this different use of the same word computer. Yeah. And I wonder if that's because they're trying to tease out like, hey, here's a thing that people often mean when they talk about computers, but that aren't captured by the like definition of a computer as a device, that there's like more to computer culture than just the the device that like something about it is bigger than what that physicality of it suggests. Perhaps we'll see. But the wording here saying that computer is the specific feeling of artifacts that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning.

Unpacking that slightly. Specific feeling of artifacts. I don't know what they mean by artifacts. And having read the whole thing, I still don't know what they mean by artifacts. Yeah, I think that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning. So, like, it seems a little weird because we haven't really, like, restrained anything at this point. And I don't, again, I don't think even with the whole thing that we've restrained it much. Because, like, okay, I could have a notebook, just a plain old notebook.

It's an artifact that it can allow for intimate systems of personal meaning, right? I think without a doubt, a sketchbook, right? Something like that. Right. And I don't think that they're trying to say like this is a, that is what, well, sorry, a computer is not at this point. A computer is not a thing. It's the feeling of artifacts. I assume by the feeling of artifacts.

I mean the feeling produced by artifacts. Yeah. Yeah. I think so too. Right. So there's a certain feeling that's produced by artifacts. Now, I think implicit in this has to be artifacts of a certain kind. Yeah, right.

Like, you know, text documents or like a, you know, a digital drawing that you make or something like that. Those kind of artifacts? I think artifacts here are the physical things, right? Like the mouse and the keyboard, that kind of thing? Yeah, like the computer, right? Like, it's the thing that, like, yes, I'm not saying it can't be some aspect of them that's really giving you that feeling. Right? but ultimately, like, it came from the device.

Right? And this device has to be of a certain kind. It has to be a computer, is my guess. But maybe, you know, like, obviously, a computer doesn't have to be electronic. It doesn't have to be RAM. It doesn't have to be. And so, like, what I think they're trying to get at

with these things is that, and we'll see more like what are not computers in a bit that I think makes it a little bit better. Yeah. But I think that this is about, you know, like at this point, we're saying, hey, some artifacts are of the same kind, but they don't give the same feelings. And what we want to focus on as a computer is only those devices that give the right kind of

personal meaning. So a server, often Amazon's data center, not a computer in this sense. Yeah, yeah. Right? That is not something that can at all give personal, intimate systems of meaning, right? I'd feel better if computer in this sentence was in quotes, like the sentence. For us, computer is the specific feeling of artifacts that will allow for intimate systems

of personal meaning. I am so happy you're being as pedantic as I am. So happy, because I worried you're going to just like go along with it and not have, so what they're trying to do, right, is they're trying to do what is called conceptual engineering in the philosophy world. It's time for change philosophy. They're trying to change the meaning of this word. Uh-huh.

They're offering up, at least at this point in the essay, they're offering up a different definition of computer. Yes. Right? Computer is no longer a noun that points at a device, right? Because computer is a feeling, not a device. Computer is a feeling, which seems very, like, bad English. Yeah.

I mean, it's like millennial, boosy-dozy English. Well, it's like, okay, yesterday, you know, I was really feeling computer. Yeah. Right? Like, that doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I think that's a grammatically incorrect usage of the new definition of computer. No, that would be a, that would be perfectly fine, new definition. I was feeling sad.

I was feeling happy. I was feeling mad. And substitute any, I was feeling depressed. I was feeling morose. But you couldn't say like I was feeling bumpy or I was feeling smooth or I was feeling. That's not a feeling. Put a feeling word. Paper can be bumpy or smooth.

It can feel bumpy or it can feel smooth. There's different meanings of feeling. But feeling here clearly means affect. I don't know that it does. We haven't gotten that far yet. Okay. So you're trying to think that feeling here means how something feels to my sense of touch? No.

I'm just suggesting that the word feeling is bigger than merely like one's personal internal emotional state and that the kind of... Feeling of artifacts that allows for intimate systems of personal meaning. So you're thinking like the feel of that guitar, right? This guitar, like you're thinking not like

an emotion. I'm thinking of emotions here. I never thought, I've never considered anything other than emotions. Yeah, like I would choose this one guitar over the other guitar because I know... Because of the feeling. Yeah, but...

The physical feeling. Or even the way that it It's physical feeling and it's like place in my life and it's the sense of nostalgia because it was my first guitar and the kinds of songs that it is good for writing because it's steel string as opposed to nylon string and like all of these qualia. Okay. That come together. I hope I'm missing using that word because I hate that word so much. All of these qualia that come together. Yeah, you are.

It's fine. Great. Excellent. Excellent. Yes. Yes. All of these Margaret qualia that come together and and give you a. a certain system of personal meaning.

It's like allow for... Yeah, I think that the text is going to dismantle this idea, that feeling is about, you know, the feel of the artifact rather than an emotion. Personally, I think that the text will undermine that. I don't mean the physical tactile sensation of it or its physical place.

I mean something else. Okay, but that's what's smooth or bumpy means. Right, but that was for me to point out that the word feeling has more than one definition. That was why I brought up smooth and bumpy. Okay, so what, what are you trying to say the feeling here is? Well, we'll get to that. That's my like, my grand ultimate thesis, but I'm just, yeah. Okay, cool. I just wanted to. So I just, I just want to be me for a second and say, are you thinking it's, you're not saying it's not an emotional state of reaction? Which dictionary? Just Googles. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

A belief, especially a vague or irrational one. Okay, wait, what was the first? Give me the first one again? An emotional state or reaction. Not quite. Close, but not quite. A belief, especially a vague or a rational one. No, not that.

The capacity to experience the sense of touch. The first half of that definition is getting closer to it, but not the second half. A sensitivity to or intuitive understanding of. That's, there we go. That's more like it. Okay. So that's, okay, that's what you're looking. for it. Like there is this certain computer feeling, this kind of like into this sense of, this intuitive sense of an object or something. Yeah. I'm going to say the word nostalgia right now. Okay. Because that's probably going to come up over and over and over again. But whatever kind of feeling nostalgia is and whatever it is that makes a physical thing have nostalgic properties for a person who perceives that physical object, that's the kind of feeling that I'm getting at. Okay. Okay. Cool. So let's let's move on to three. All right.

Point number three. The feeling is still present in your time as it was in ours. What? Point number four. The feeling is to the body, and it can kill. Point number five. The form of the feeling is an emanation of energy. Point number six.

The feeling is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. The place is best shunned and left uninhabited. What is this? Sorry, sorry, sorry. I had the wrong list open. Are these some lyrics to something? No, no, no, no, no. I had the wrong list open.

Okay, point number three. This point... Okay, reset. So point number two was, by this we mean that what makes a computer, a computer is nothing to do with commands, compilers, or even machines. For us, computers, the specific feeling of artifacts that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning. So that's point number two. Point number three.

This point has been obscured for two reasons. First, the language we use to talk of... about computing, established decades ago, has lost its original meaning and force. Point four. Consider the term personal computer. This phrase used to distinguish what was special in the moment about the devices that gave us computer feelings, the Apple 2, the Commodore 64, the Windows PC. They were personal, not big mainframes, and they were computers, a kind of device that runs instructions. So computers, now they have, by the text itself,

allowed us to say that there are, there's two different words of computer being used here, right? Because that's why you're saying in quotes. You could also do, which I did think about being that pedant, but it didn't actually matter, doing computer one, computer two, right? Putting little superscripts or subscripts next to each of the words computer. Yeah, I see what you mean. Yeah.

For the different uses of computer here, right? Because they were computers a kind of device that runs instructions. Yeah. So we've at least got, this is where I like, okay, they're not just being obnoxious. They do recognize that a computer is a kind of device that runs instructions. Yeah, it's a physical thing out there in the world. You can build them. You can build them out of water if you wanted to.

Yes, yes. They're out there. Yes. But they're now trying to have, and they also aren't saying the term, personal computer meant personal feeling of some sort. Yeah, no. Yeah, so they're not being trying to be absurdly revisionist here or trying to say we should get rid of the idea of using computer to mean a device that runs instructions.

They're just trying to piggyback on the word computer. They're keeping it clear that when they're talking about the new meaning, they call it computer feelings. Like these feelings that the computer describes, the word computer as a feeling, they're calling them computer feelings and they haven't yet really given us any examples of what these computer feelings are yet

however or ever spoilers but they do list some examples Apple 2 Commodore 64 Windows PC Now this is the point where I start wondering

how much of this like personal computer as opposed to mainframes How much of this is about the fact that I believe that Tim Wong and Omar Riswan are probably roughly the same age. I am probably late 30s, maybe early 40s, somewhere in there. I'm assuming that that's roughly where they clock in, which means that these computers that they've listed are not just, you know, the beginning of the personal computer revolution, having come out, you know, in the late 70s through the 80s. But maybe some of the first computers that these authors have used themselves and that there may be some sense of nostalgia creeping in here. That there may be some sense of like, like we talked about in the ESOLANGs app, that there's a kind of a yearning for a simpler time.

There's a yearning for what it used to feel like to use a computer before a computer was a job, before a computer was an obligation. that there was a time when a computer was just a place to go and tinker and to play, and that the feelings of tinkering and playing are kind of wrapped up in that time in one's life, and that what one is yearning for is not the computer is a feeling in and of itself, but the use of the computer for this sort of unstructured time. Yeah, and we do get a little bit of that later, but I do find that the, the mention of like a special moment about, you know, the Apple 2, the Commodore 64, the Windows PC. These aren't things that connect with me at all.

Yeah. Right. And it does feel like we're decidedly now trying to do it for old people. I'll take that. Trying to have this, yeah, this like former generation that does have this nostalgia about something. But like I had the same feelings about the Mac mini, the you. Buntu crappy desktop that was covered in mud that I had. Like, you know, I have this...

Windows M.E. Yeah, like anyone could have this same kind of thing. And I don't think that they're setting that aside and saying that that's not possible. But I think it actually is... Maybe it helps their audience if their audience is supposed to be old timers. Yeah. Elder millennials. But at the same time, I guess these, at least the Apple 2 and Commodore 64 are so iconic

that I know what feeling, I think, that they're trying to get at by making these references. The people who talk about the Apple 2 and Commodore 64 definitely have this kind of reverence for what these machines meant to them, how important they were, how much they opened their eyes to this world that they hadn't seen before, and they were able to do things with these devices that they never dreamed they would ever get to do. So, like, I think that that's, you know, why they're pointing to these. and because they're like iconic symbols, even if I've never worked on an Apple 2 or Commodore 64, never seen one in person, I get where this is coming from. There's another read of this,

which is that these computers that they're listing aren't actually the things that give us computer feelings. So if I read the sentence, consider the term personal computer. This phrase used to distinguish what was special in the moment about the devices that gave us computer feelings. Like, maybe they're saying,

that at the time, those were the devices that gave us computer feelings, but now the devices that give us computer feelings are different. It's not that, oh, hey, if you want to feel those computer feelings, you have to be alive at the time that these devices were the devices. No, no, I don't think they're saying that. I think they're saying the word personal has lost its punch. Yeah, yeah. Right? Because personal used to be like, not just I own it, I think is what they're trying to play on here. It's like personal because it's meaningful to me. So it's a personal computer because it's, you know, which I think is a, you know, a little poetic license here. I don't think that that's what the term meant at all in the time. I remember a business analyst

describing the original Mac as being a computer that you could lift with your hand, because it had a little handle on it and it was small, a computer that you could lift with your mind, as in it was like a GUI. It was simple. You didn't have to learn how to program to use it. And it was a computer that you could lift with your wallet, as in you could, you know, afford to buy it. So that is one kind of maybe less rosy way of looking at what made for a personal computer. Yeah. So I think I think point five kind of gets more at this. So maybe we should read it, right? Point five. Both of these features are now ubiquitous. Computer devices are now everywhere, nearly all of them personal in some sense. This comes from the commodification of

hardware. What was previously scarce and expensive is now simply an implementation detail. Computerization is the cheapest way to control any machine, whether it is a toaster or a fridge, or a car, or a smartphone. These devices may have the hardware of a computer inside, they may even run a computer operating system like Linux, but they're not computers in the emotional sense that we mean. computer, once an apt term for both the technology and the feeling it gave, has become less descriptive with time. Okay, so we do say in the emotional sense that we mean, boom, emotion.

So they are meaning feeling in the emotional term, right? And like, how seriously do we take the claim that this actually used to mean more, or is this just a rhetorical device to say like computers used nostalgia right like computers used to be magical and no longer are? Do you think they actually literally mean that

the term has become less descriptive with time? I think that what they are implying at the very least, I don't know what they mean but I think what is implied by their writing is that there are more things that are technically computer devices like a thunderbolt cable has a little computer

inside of it to negotiate transfer of data over the cable, but that I'm not going to go, you know, talk to my coworkers on Monday about all the fun I had with the computer inside the Thunderbolt cable. Like it is so small and removed from me as to be invisible. And so it's technically a computer, but it's not a computer that I have any personal relationship with. Yeah, maybe I'm being too pedantic here. But what they imply is computer.

has become less descriptive over time. Quote, computer, has become less descriptive over time. They are implying that, but I'm saying, do we take that idea seriously? Do you really think that they believe that at one point, the average normal person when they use the word computer, or not even the average normal person, the computer person when they used the word computer,

thought of it not as purely a device, but as a feeling as well? I think that can't actually be what they mean. they're doing it poetically. I think that's two things bundled into one, and I want to cut them apart. One of them is, if somebody a long time ago said computer,

would they mean the feeling? I'm going to say no. Yeah, yeah. But when somebody said computer, did they mean something that is no longer meant when somebody says computer? And I'm going to say yes.

I think the meaning of computer has definitely changed, especially in the wake of the smartphone, the iPad, that sort of thing, and software running in the cloud and that shift away from the 80s, 90s, early

O's version of the computer as, you know, only at the very end, internet connected, but mostly offline device that runs some software and that you go to and you sit at

and you do your work at and it does the work that you've given it the software to be able to do. I think that that has changed a lot. Okay. I can buy it. So you think,

like, do you think that, computer and desktop computer I like that's the thing that I don't understand because like I think people

would have accepted like oh yeah mainframes are computers desktop computers or computers right like all of these things are computers that calculator

that has the 808 in it or whatever the you know the Game Boy is a computer right they would have all said these things are computers but of course

they would have also said like I'm going to go sit at the computer and if they went and sat down on their desk and pulled out a gameboy people would look at you like what are you talking about like of course that's a computer but that's not what you meant right um so like i can see in some sense that the word computers changed over time i definitely think that they're taking poetic license with the fact that like uh it used to describe both it was once an apt term for both technology and a feeling it gave i maybe i'm crazy here but like

I doubt most people felt a lot of feelings from using a computer. I don't know that most people are the audience, though. I think there's a specific audience for this piece that it's meant to resonate with that are not most people. But the people who it resonates with, don't we already have that feeling going on with contemporary devices? Yeah. Have we lost that feeling, I guess? See, like, what I see is like implicit here. It's either one of two things.

It's saying we need a linguistic reform, or it's saying we need to bring back the computer feeling, as if we've lost it. Or another option is I think maybe they're trying to teach people who feel this feeling to recognize that they feel this feeling and give them some language to talk about this feeling so that the feeling can be preserved or, extended or expanded or, you know, that if the, that if the role of the computer in our world

is changing and there's something of value being lost, that giving us some language to talk about that value will make sure that we don't lose it. I think that's good. I think the other way I think you can also take that is, like, that we've been to, in some sense, is too narrow and too wide in our use of the word computer. right like I think that in some ways is a linguistic point but it's also in other ways trying to say like we try to say like hey you know scratch is programming Excel it's programming like all of these things are programming right like there are things that people might not think of as computing right that are because they have this feel the certain kind of feeling I have a nephew who's a little bit older now but when he was maybe 10 years old or whatever and he was playing Minecraft the thing that he would do is he would do hacking. He and his school yard friends would do hacking and what hacking meant like hacking the iPad where they were playing Minecraft meant like waving your fingers all over the

place and mashing all the buttons and just doing stuff really fast. And that's that is that is their notion of hacking was just like oh yeah I'm going crazy and I'm doing all this stuff. So there is there is some of this you know as the form factor is changing and as the the relationship that people have changes and as there's less, you know, perhaps a low level, deep connection with like, what is it that actually makes a computer, a computer, that there's some, if not like knowledge or skill being lost, there's some original meaning of these terms that continues to be valuable and continues to be useful that's being kind of like pushed to the margins a bit.

points one through six, like I can get behind it. I think there's little quibbles I would have, but I can start getting behind like, all right, so there's a certain feeling, I feel it, right? When I do computing, there's a certain way of thinking,

there's a certain way of being, there's certain emotional state that I have that I really enjoy, and it's what captured me. And then we get to point seven. Oh, before we get to point seven, man, I love an attempt at keeping this thing on the rails. I love a good.

love a good attempt to structure our conversation. We don't have to. We can just talk all the time. I just figure we want to get the thing out, right? Like, what is, what even? Yeah, we also want some momentum. I've been listening to a podcast recently where they started having these sort of off topic

like, oh, what have you been reading lately? Kind of discussions. And they had a little reckoning where it's like, oh, our listeners don't like it when we talk about this stuff peppered throughout the episode or at the beginning of the episode. So we're going to make a dedicated section

at the end of each episode where we talk about all the off-topic stuff. So lame. So that the people who only want to listen to the on-topic stuff can duck out at that point. And I'm just here to say that we're not doing that.

That is the worst possible idea. There's a podcast that I listen to partially examine life I mentioned a billion times and they had an episode very early on where somebody complained because they had like a 30-minute talk about Star Wars or something

at the beginning. And they were like, yeah, then don't listen. Like, if you want a podcast that's not that, go listen to the history of philosophy without any gaps, right? Like, it's like very, it's scripted, it's very straightforward. It's like, you know, I don't think we can go off on tangents all we want. But this is a tangent I want to go off on, and that's why I try to push us to seven because seven is...

Number seven. This feels like old man. Second, the modern internet exerts. it's a tyranny over our imagination. The internet and its commercial power has sculpted the computer device. It's become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms and protocols, not eccentric, local, idiosyncratic ones. This is out of necessity. If two or two hundred or two million or two billion computers are going to communicate with each other, they simply must agree on quite a bit. this is to me

such a like such a weird turn in this argument that's happening here because the thing that gave me the computer feeling to begin with was the internet

had I not had the internet and I remember you know even in the dial-up days right where I, because I don't think I had a computer for any extended amount of time that I used that didn't have some internet connected to it. But in the dial-up days, the computer, I played SimCity 3,000, and that was cool. I don't think I had the, you know, part of it was that I was young.

I get that, but I don't think I had the computer feeling from playing SimCity 3,000, despite how cool it was. And it was very cool. But being able to see what other people were doing, being able to learn from other people, being able to have lessons in education in a way that I would have never had access to if it weren't for the internet. And being able to see that I was a part of a bigger thing is what made me want to explore those things, made me learn how to explore those things.

And you could say, like, well, instead, you should have just had computer classes locally or something. Those existed. I couldn't go to them because they cost money. I tried to. I asked to go to them. They were at the local, you know, branch of IU, the Southeast. It's, you know, like this very small little campus. And they had them on the weekends for elementary school kids. And I was really interested in doing it.

I was encouraged to do it. But they cost, I think it was like $600 for the like multi-week program or whatever. And even with scholarships, I think it brought. down to like 200 we just didn't have that money so like I think that like having this I get that there's a problem with the internet and I'm not pretending there's not and I know that they say the modern internet versus like the old internet so we can be talking about X and you know blah blah but then it says uniform protocols okay like that that's like the internet like I don't know and like are really uniform protocols and common platforms instead of eccentric local

idiosyncratic ones. We have more eccentric local idiosyncratic things going on now than we ever had in the past. Like it just is a weird turn for me and it like almost lost me. Because like having the internet be the villain, not like big corporations. I know it says commercial power, but still, having the internet be the villain feels like such a departure from where we were. When was this written? Uh, 2023. Well, it was published 2023. I don't know when it was written. But presumably around the same time. So that's pretty late. Like that is already into the sort of like past the big reckoning with Facebook. Like past, you know, Facebook's role in election interference and in increasing depression amongst teenagers and all the sort of negative consequences of social media.

That's like past the resurgence of the indie web and of like, you know, just put your own website on your own domain name, static site generators. and like people trying to reclaim a little bit of the old weird internet. So it is a little bit of a, it feels like it is too, it is trying to make too big of a point without very much precision. Like it doesn't really, it's, it's like talking about the internet as a, as a monster, as a, as a, what's the gender neutral? form of boogeyman whatever it is do we need the boogie man to be gender neutral

yes we do I think we are allowed to say that I'm an equal opportunity demonizer okay okay okay yeah like the internet as as boogie mama is just boogie they

yeah boogie they as shuggy-buggy is too... As boogie. Yeah, it's not boogie, it's boogie. Yeah, that point has been made. But I want to do the thing where I look at this and go,

what could they have been trying to get at but didn't say? Like if I do my patented charitable read of this, I don't think they're mad about HTTP. Maybe they're mad about HTTP 3 and, you know, good for them. They literally say protocol. Yeah, but here's what I think

that they mean when they say And that it came out of necessity Like that has to be TCP IP, HTTP What else could it mean? I think it could mean that platforms like Facebook don't allow free personal

creative expression in the way that platforms like MySpace did. Like we've talked about MySpace customization. I don't think. I don't think I love

like that is like the most uncharacterious charitable read I could ever imagine. Like if they hear this, they're going to be like, no, HGTP is the problem, especially with 0.8 here, right? Like, it is the problem. It's not, they're not saying MySpace versus Facebook here.

If that's, come on. I mean, I would say that. I'm down. If this was written like, hey, you know, we replaced like little places where you can shame which one of your friends is really your top eight best friend with instead, places where you can watch AI videos and be shocked by your grandparents saying weird things. Hear me out. Okay, okay, okay.

Let's work backwards. So currently we have Facebook and X and truth social and... The big three. Hinge. The big four, sorry. And hinge. And growler. And if you...

Yeah, sure. And A.O3. Flat uniform common platforms. Stop there. Right. these are flat uniform common platforms. If you go back earlier in the realm of social media, you had things like live journal and MySpace and other platforms for people to get together and congregate on the internet that allowed

more personal customization and expression, but still gave you some tools so that you didn't have to be a programmer in order to make a space for yourself on the internet. and in that era, in that early 2000s era where you could put something up on the internet that represented you, but that you could impute it with a little bit of your personal taste, that was less flat, that was less uniform, it was less common. I had, like, many different friends who to keep up with what they were doing, I had to go to, like, you know, six or seven bookmarks to see what they were doing on different websites. There was no feed. But you have lots of choices now as well. Right.

But the... That are all very different. The dominant way that people interact with the computer is in this sort of homogenized, single, centralized platform that does not allow customization. I can agree with you, but that's not what this is saying. Is it become the terrain of flat, uniform, common platforms, not eccentric... And protocols. Not eccentric local, idiots and credit ones. And protocols.

The protocols bit is a... red herring, and we both hate it. We both hate the protocols bit. But I don't want our hatred of the protocols bit to cloud our judgment about the rest of this point. But okay, point eight. Yes, point eight, all right. Is clearly talking about protocols, not MySpace. Eight. The triumph of the internet has also impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression. The pre-network computer has no use. utility except as a kind of personal notebook. The post-network computer demotes this to a secondary purpose.

They're clearly not just saying, hey, bring back MySpace. I want my top eight. They're saying, sorry, I just always find, like, looking back at history and saying that, like, that we had this top eight. We had this, things are not one thing. MySpace is not just top eight. MySpace was also, you could write Custra. Custom CSS.

Yes, of course, but it's hilarious to just be like, I'm ranking my friends. And that was like peak social in that time. Anyways, like people, I was in middle school. So like, that was, it was a big deal. We talked about this. We have, we have. Yes, yes, yes. Anyways, I don't see them saying, Commodore 64, Apple 2, MySpace.

These were the good computing feeling things. They're establishing a gradient. They're saying, like, here's how. the internet has taken this existing problem of computers becoming less, you know, weird and personal, and has accelerated that problem. And here's the ways the internet has made it worse. And then we're on this next one, the triumphant of the internet, has impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for private exploration rather than public expression.

That's another facet. So it's this like... Let me get my presuppositions coming into this out. So maybe we can see where our different readings are. All right. Your presupplications, go for it. Yes, my pre-supplications. Okay.

This is from folk computer, right? Which folk computer? There's two of them now. What? There's Omar Riswan's thing. Yeah, which is one of the authors of this, which is folk computer. Which is called folk computer. Then there's Christopher Shank and Orion Reed's folk thing that they're doing also, which is not what we're talking about.

What? There's a second one. Christopher Shank and a Ryan Reeder doing a thing. I think they call it folk JS or something, but it's another like in our sphere, a thing that's trying to say, this is what folk computing is about. Okay, well, I'm talking about Omar Rizwan,

because that's the author of this paper. And I think Tim Wong is also a part of that. Ah, cool. I didn't know that. Right. I think I could be wrong, but maybe not. But definitely Omar is. Yep.

And folk computer is inspired. I don't know what word you want to use by Dynamically. Yeah. Right. It's a recreation. It's a remix. It's a something. There's a,

there's a lineage there. Yes. Right. And these anti-internet sentiments rhyme very heavily with dynamic lands anti-internet sentiments. Right?

And you'll see later, even some anti-open source sentiments, they seem very, very similar, right? It's this idea that computing ought to be local, it ought to be physical, it ought to be constrained to the environment in which you're in, rather than on the global internet and interconnected. And that it's kind of this, we had this, you know, in the 90s and early 2000s, this kind of utopian thinking that the internet is going to be the thing that solves the world's problems. because it's going to interconnect us with everyone. Once we see everyone and can communicate with everyone,

we'll have more empathy with those who are distant from us and that this is going to usher in this, you know, some people thought the collapse of all governments because we don't need them anymore in global communism. Like, you know, you can find people writing this kind of utopian thinking. And I see a lot of these reactions as kind of the opposite counter reaction saying, actually, look, all this interconnectedness is what ruins society, right? And it's this not focusing on the local, not being able to have people physically with you,

and we just all interface with people as abstractions on the internet that are ultimately like what's causing our societal ills. And being so obsessed with global politics and, you know, national politics rather than my local community. Very end of history. Yeah. And I admit I'm probably reading. into this this kind of concern partially because of that heritage of this

of this group or whatever right that I think that there has to be something about this because like the modern internet exerts a tyranny over our imaginations so it's it's not saying like it's already it's not saying that you know oh well it the internet itself is tyrannical but it's a tyranny over our imagination it stops us from thinking bigger thoughts because we're homogenizing everything so

like I I do think there's something very anti-internet in general, not just anti-Facebook, X, truth social, et cetera, right? Yeah. And that is, like, I think this point, this point eight is my, my least favorite personally, of all of the points in this. Specifically, because I think in its rush to decry the ill of, you know, global networking, it misses or it fumbles,

articulating the value of the pre-network computer. It says the pre-network computer has no utility except as a kind of personal notebook. That's just flat out wrong. That's just like, that's factually incorrect. Like, the pre-network computer most certainly has tons of utility beyond being some kind of personal notebook. It even has a social utility beyond being a kind of personal notebook. in that like many of my early pre-network computer memories

were sitting around the computer with my sister or my cousins or my friends playing games together or increasingly making little weird art things together that there's a there was a like very local communal art practice that that i got to experience over and over and over again making weird little flip book animations in hypercar and using keyboard shortcuts to flip through all the cards really quickly and make little stories, not even interactive things, just using it as like a sequence of drawings. And, you know, advancing into, I spent a considerable amount of time as a, you know, grade six kind of ish age, recording things on a little digital video camera, recording little

silly, you know, home video kind of things, or like recreating the matrix or something. something like that, like putting on, you know, black trench coats and making pretend guns out of cardboard and reenacting bullet time sequences and filming them and then loading them into the computer and editing them in a sort of a precursor to eye movie that we had called Avid Cinema that just like came with our computer as like, you know, shovelware. And making those little home video kind of things with my parents or with my sister, with my friends and spending hours and hours and hours with other people

doing creative or fun things and laughing and being silly and using it as a as a sort of an expressive toy and to me that does not feel like a kind of personal notebook like that that does not convey any part of the feelings that I was getting out of it and in fact as the internet

came into being I think that only, at least at first, deepened and extended the amount of that I was able to do because now I could do the same things with myself and friends sitting around, but also with people on the other end of the wire. So like me and some friends would sit around a computer taking turns playing StarCraft

against other friends who couldn't be there, like who didn't, you know, whose parents said, no, you're grounded, you can't go out or whatever. We could still play with them over the internet. And I feel like there is a way in which this sort of eccentric local idiosyncratic experience of using the computer survived through the advance of the internet and it was not at all captured by this point eight that it has impoverished our sense of computers as a tool for personal exploration

rather than public expression. I don't think that's true in the slightest. I mean, I see what they're getting at. I see where they're coming from. I see why they would think that. but what I see that as is the internet and modern things that are called computers modern computer devices are now used by every person on the planet whereas back then they were only used

by a much smaller number of people and that you know in relative terms sure the number of people doing these weird idiosyncratic things is a lot smaller but I think in absolute terms it's got to be a lot bigger than it used to be but I also like question obviously

I wasn't there so but listening back through history and things people talking about it. I question how eccentric, local, and idiosyncratic it was because it seemed to me it may definitely a vast oversimplification, but that the real common threads here were

the sneaker net, floppies, and basic. Yeah. Right? Like that was that was the networking of the time. Right? Like it was you know, people didn't just use it as a personal notebook. They were making games that then other people would you know, share wear. There was all this like

you know, commerce, whether money or not, like, you know, spreading around of these games being copied, being recreated, being whatever, right? And this was all pre, like obviously networks existed somewhere, but the computers themselves were not networked, right? And like people shared all of this stuff. They wrote, you had, you know, magazines where they would print basic programs and you would go copy them, right? It's things like that that were the way in which you would share. And I think you could definitely make an argument that I don't think is made here, but I think you can make an argument about the upsides of that that we lost. I think the same thing of like having physical albums or physical books or whatever that you peruse, right?

Like you might happen upon something that's like, oh, that perfectly fits the mood or like, I'm going to a store. And like, I wouldn't have seen that music ever, but like it happened to be there. Those kinds of serendipity that it's very hard to put in our. technological hyper-organized systems, right? Shuffle is not quite the same. I wish, I missed the days when music was deeply personal and individual and idiosyncratic and weird and expressive and creative and it was just everybody listening to the Beatles.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, right? Another one, HyperCard, right? Everybody's like, oh, man, remember the time when HyperCard was the wild creative tool that was supposed to be the bicycle for the mind, and it was supposed to make, you know, computational thinking ubiquitous, and it was this expressive dynamic medium, and we were like right on the cusp of that becoming the norm.

Hypercard kind of sucked then. It sucks by today's standards, and it's not eccentric and it's not idiosyncratic. It was like the one popular thing that a, you know, a handful of Mac people got to use, but beyond that, yeah, basic, right? basic was the thing that everybody who didn't have a Mac was using and it was not eccentric or idiosyncratic. It was like the thing.

Like everybody I talked to is like, oh man, remember VB6? Like, yeah, it was still a monoculture. It was just a different monoculture with different values from the monoculture we have today. But it's not any less of a monoculture. And I think like lionizing it and saying it was this great period of history where things were better is, it's, It's just like exchanging one set of tools that you're grumpy about because they don't conform to some, you know, ideals that you possess with your sort of nostalgia rinsed feelings of what you had when you were a kid. Now, I think points 9 through 14 minus a couple wording choices are the strongest points in this whole thing. And it's the thing that I resonate most with.

Yeah, yeah. So we're coming off of the low point. Yes, yes. We're getting into it. All right. Number nine. Number nine. Number nine. No, I'm not doing that joke.

We live in a world of ubiquitous computer devices, but fading computer feeling. Consider the smartphone, an indisputably personal computer. The smartphone is for you. It sits in your pocket. The smartphone is a computer. It is made of silicon and software. But the smartphone is not a philosophically meaningful computer. It gives only dim flashes of computer feeling.

Accepting it as a computer feels silly. Wrong. 11. Do you dream about your smartphone? 12. Does it feel like a place that you can inhabit and shape and reconfigure? 13. Does it give you a sense of possibility? 14.

Computers are a feeling, not a device. I think that is the best section of this, this listicle, as you called it. Best in what sense? I think it captures what was what we started with, right? That the computers are feeling not a device, and that, you know, it has nothing to do with the physical commands, compilers, machines, and that it's a specific feeling. And I think there is a very distinct way in which the relationship that I have with my phone is quite distinct from the relationship I have with whatever computer time I associate with that computer feeling.

For me, it might be my contemporary MacBook, but, you know, nostalgia tells you like, oh, it's the Ubuntu computer, that Mac Mini or whatever that I had forever ago. Right. But there's definitely like my phone does not feel like a device that I'm going to go to get that feeling from. There are some people who do. There's some people who program on their phones and, you know, really enjoy it or whatever and get that feeling. But it's definitely, it's not designed around that at all. It's missing the elements that bring about that computing feeling.

So there, right there, you've sort of. a tiny bit conflated the computer feeling with the ability to program. Yeah, we'll get to that. Yeah. But I think it's important to separate that right here, because I think that this, if you read 11, 12, 13, 14, which is,

Do you dream about your smartphone? Does it feel like a place you can inhabit and shape and reconfigure? Does it give you a sense of possibility? Computers are a feeling not a device. I think there are a lot of people who could like absolutely say yes, yes, yes to those. And that to them, what gives them the computer feeling is maybe not programming. Maybe it's something else that the computer lets them do that they've been doing since they were a kid. So there's the nostalgia angle.

But it is something that does not require a mouse and keyboard and thus does not feel. hamstrung on a smartphone. And I can give two examples of this. So one of them, I'll start with maybe a slightly easier to defend example. And it doesn't work on a smartphone, but it does work on an iPad, which is people who are digital artists.

iPad and smartphone, very different devices. Not if your computer feeling comes from your ability to program. Because I don't know anybody who's like programming on iPad and who's holding that up as like, the iPad is the place I go when I want to program something.

I still will, I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm still going to say the example you're going to give a digital art. I think that's one of the reasons why I would say the iPad and the phone are very different. Yeah, but they're not different in the dimensions that this listicle is articulating. I think it is, but we'll get there. I think your digital artist one's interesting, so it could continue on with the example. Yeah, so very, very quickly what the iPad gives a digital artist is like Procreate. Like Procreate is the art tool, the digital art tool. that I see everybody using. I see everybody talking about it.

It is the 8,000 pound gorilla in the digital art world now. It is remarkable to me how much cultural impact Procreate has had as a medium for expressing oneself. I know a lot of people who would much rather be using Procreate to do digital art than using a desktop PC. And that did not use to be the case before the iPad existed. And so that is something where the feeling that I had as a digital artist in the late 90s, early 2000s, I could really easily imagine if I was still doing a lot of digital art in the way that I was back then, feeling those same feelings doing digital art on the iPad. And I did not ever get those feelings doing physical art, like painting, drawing, that kind of stuff on paper.

Like even though I was a visual artist and I was learning color theory and composition, I was doing figure drawing and I was like developing art skills as an artist, the medium I wanted to work within had undo and it had layers and it had color pickers and it had gradients and it had you know, photos that I could take with my digital camera and load in and use as textures and do high pass filters on those photos to extract the fine grain detail and erase the course detail. Like it had, it was natively digital art and physical art was not the area that I wanted to work with in. And so the feelings I got from doing physical art were bad feelings and the feelings I got from doing digital art were good. And I could see the iPad being even better for that.

I wholeheartedly agree that those kinds of things are the computer feeling and are not programming. I'm down with that. And still on the fence of whether it's the computing feeling. Okay. Which is not what this talks about, right? But I will say that it definitely, I think, qualifies as the computer feeling. So let me give a tiny bonus. And this is really deeply unfair.

So I have a second example, but I'll give like a, you know, the seventh and a half floor. Is that the being John Malkovich? The half floor. Anyways, here's my half example, which is that the ink track at Inken Switch is trying to make a little notebook that is programmable. We've been trying to do that for a long time. And occasionally, occasionally we make a prototype that gives me that feeling, that gives me the feeling that I am, that I am in a space that I can inhabit and shape and reconfigure, gives me a sense of possibility that I dream about. I have a dreams about this environment, but I have dreams about lots of things.

I don't think that's a good benchmark. But it is, it does give me a little bit of that space where it's like, ooh, I wanted this thing to be possible. And then I made that thing possible in this space. I wanted a tool. I wanted a way of using this thing that it didn't have, and I built that thing for myself in this space. And now I'm going to go do a bunch of work in there. And one example that I'll give, which ties into my second example is for songwriting. I made a little version of this prototype that let me tear off a little scrap of paper and tap on it, and it would start recording with the iPad microphone, and then I could play some music, you know, on P.M. or guitar or whatever, and then tap it again to stop recording.

And then that little scrap of paper held that audio recording. And I made a whole bunch of these little scraps of paper, and I could arrange them and write notes next to them, and write staff notation, and write arrows and doodles and all that kind of stuff around these little physically embodied sound recordings. And I can't do that with a physical notebook. And that was something that this, you know, little programmable notebook wasn't designed to do. but it was something I could make it do.

And that gave me a little bit of that feeling. And because it was physically small and portable, I could take it with me to the piano or to the organ or to like curl up in my bed with a flute or something like that where I could not take my desktop computer. I can't carry my desktop computer around with me in that way. So there's something about that physical form factor that let me take that feeling with me.

So let me give an example that I'm curious, your thoughts on the computer feeling here and if it is captured in this example or not. Sure. Okay. All right. And this does use a smartphone. Okay.

So my mother-in-law has been thinking about doing some different decorations around her house, changing some paint, doing, et cetera, right? There's this like little spot above the fireplace that was painted a distinct color and she's been trying to figure out what color she wanted to paint it. She'd got swatch, put them up there,

but just could not figure out, imagine what it would look like. Now I used Gemini, which is actually quite good at doing things like this, where unlike a lot of the other image generations, they like to just like kind of go off and do their own thing.

Gemini is pretty darn good at. Take a photo, change an element of it. Not perfect, but pretty darn good at it. And I showed her. Like, you know, I can, I asked her, I was like, I could do this with AI and show you what different colors look like. She was like, really? I showed her, and I showed her different color options.

And it absolutely floored her and made her really excited. And she, you know, we tried a few different colors. She ended up finding the color and she's super happy with that. And now, like, their front yard has had trouble with keeping grass and they were trying to turn it into like a zero escaped garden. And Janice used Gemini to be like, all right, describe what you want the garden to look like. took a picture of their home and was able to show, you know, various things. And now they're going and like they, they find that, you know, this, they're now using it themselves to try to go come up with new things that they could do in their life. Right. To me, this seems like

the computer feeling. This seems like maybe it's not, you know, it's definitely not programming. It's definitely not, you know, maybe what the, you know, local and totally unnetworked and Commodore 64 and all of that stuff, right? But it gave them a sense of possibility that they could do with their physical space and made them really care, like do things that they might not have done before because of the inability to imagine it, right?

And some people might say, the reason I bring this up because it involves a big corporation, it's networked, it's AI, it's all of the stuff that's like the negatives, right? but it feels like actually it's quite positive to me. It's a great example, yes. And I think, and I'll give my second example that I want to give because I think it's very similar to what you've just given,

which is that my second example is the early smartphone era app revolution, and especially like Apple's whole, there's an app for that way of framing, you know, what the iPhone is, is the iPhone is not just like a little phone that you can surf the internet on and do some messaging with, but that, you know, it's a guitar tuner and it's a measuring tape and it's a camera and it is, you know, virtual reality goggles if you want to shoot it, tie fighters flying over your schoolyard. And it is like, because it is a computer and because there are a whole bunch of programmers making things for this computer, it can transform into all of these different uses. It can become all of these different things. It can be, you know, all things to all people. What that allowed for was it allowed for it to be, and I'm not the first to say this by a long shot, but like the most personal computer

because it brought that dynamism and it brought that ability to calculate and to generate into whatever physical space you wanted it to be in. And so if the computer feeling comes from what are you able to do with this dynamic changing responsive object, then the smartphone and the apps that you could put on smartphone

could take you further in that direction. Now, let me defend, because I said I think this is the strongest part, let me defend it, because I do think that there's, you can definitely try to argue for the smartphone to be, because they don't, first off, they don't say that, like, you can't get it. It says it only dim flashes of computer feeling, right? But what I'll try to say, the reason I think this resonated with me is that while I know the smartphone has all these capabilities, while it is this, dynamic device while it can do all of those things, the design of it and the ecosystem that we're in,

I think pushes more and more and more for the phone to be this notification device, to be this place for endless scrolling, for doom scrolling, for consuming, right? Like it is designed in such a way and there's apps all designed in such a way to keep you on it, to keep you consuming, to stop you from creating and going out in the world. And this is where AI actually does have some of these uses, like I talked about with Gemini, that can actually do the opposite. I think all of these technologies can do the opposite, but so many of them are designed over and over again to keep us in, rather than to bring us out.

And I think the smartphone is like on the forefront of that design. that's where all the attention and focus is going. Like TikTok is an app, right? Like YouTube, the iOS version versus YouTube, the desktop version, I think there's definitely way more trying to pull you in and keep you on there on the iOS. There's also a lack of control over ads. There's all of these things that I think the iPhone, like the phone, whether iPhone or Android, are more locked down, fewer possibilities and are designed to kind of fun.

you. And I think like even though yes, there of course are these uses of of of the phone as a way to get computer feeling. The design doesn't want you to have that. It wants you of each app, right? And like Apple hasn't really, I don't think done enough to try to bring you back to that moment of creativity rather than consumption. Well, and let's recognize the one that is probably going to be most resonant with our audience, which is that the smartphone does not give you the tool to make a new tool that is not available in the app store. Like you have your menu of options for what the smartphone can be. It can be a piano tuner, but it might not be good at tuning a zither. There might be some idea that you have for like, ah, I really want to use this thing as a tuner. It's got a microphone. I can analyze the frequency content or whatever. But I really want an interface that is optimized for tuning zithers. And there's no app. for that, if I could take this existing really great piano tuner app and modify it, or if I could make my own app that had just the interface I want and that did its, you know,

pitch detection in a certain way, it does not give you the tools to do that. And so it is not going to give the kind of people who want to make their own thing the ability to do that, and that is a whole category of computer feeling that just doesn't, you know, doesn't exist for them. I think it's worse than that because your example of a tar tuner I actually recently had this I used to have a

when I had an Android phone I had a can't remember what it was called but there was a guitar tuner app that was real simple and nice and I was like all right what do I use on iOS for a guitar tuner I hadn't done it a while I was like it would be nice to have

if you go to the app store and try to get a guitar tuner they all suck it's almost impossible right like they're like in-app purchases they're Hey, people listening to this, if you know a good tuner app for iOS, please send it to me.

I have several. I have guitar tuna. I have clear tune. I've tried a bunch of other ones. They're all bad. I have not found a good tuner and I need one. Right? Like, it's just like in-app purchases, in-app purchases, in-app purchases, in-app purchases, right?

Like, even doing the things that we talked about doing where it's like, hey, I just want to tune my guitar. and I have this thing become like an exercise and like how do I get around all of this. I thought about building myself, right? Like, and like that's,

that's insane that like I think it might be easier to have an AI. Go build me. On a desktop computer. On a desktop computer. And then figure out how do I load it in as a developer and blah, like I thought it may be. Or make it a web app.

Yeah, yeah. And that's what like, it's just like the fact that like that like that's the direction this thing is going, right? It's so frustrating because it should be really easy to find a free simple guitar tuner

that just shows me, I hit a string, I see where I'm at on the notes and I do it, right? And like actually that's a very hard, difficult thing to find. Right. And I think the smartphone is on the forefront of pushing more and more in that monetize everything,

monetize attention, et cetera, direction than desktop computers are. Yeah. But I don't want to discount the fact that there was a brief golden era for indie iOS app development. Oh, without a doubt. That birthed a lot of incredible, creative, beautifully made apps that severely underpriced themselves and were unsustainable and there was a race to the bottom and commercial pressures, yada, yada, yada. And so the problem to be solved there is not just a technical problem. Like, there are things you can do with smartphones that are great. And there was at one point a culture of doing great work on

smartphone and that we need some commercial solutions we need some cultural solutions to this problem but i don't think it's i don't think that the the silicone or the software of the smartphone is the thing that stops it from creating the computer feeling yes agreed it's the social aspect of it right like i think that that's always what's happening with the just like the internet It doesn't stop us from having good things, but it's the social uses of it. It's the ways in which we start preferencing, like, why was Twitter so important, you know, politically that Elon Musk had to buy it, right? Like, that kind of. Like, that's what, that's what happened, right?

Is this, like, this social importance we place on something that's actually materially not that interesting. Number 15. An old dogma is that true computer feeling emanates from certain technical commitments. Open source and free software partisans hold to the orthodoxy that the computer feeling depends on the capability to read and write source code. Number 16. The modern era highlights the absurdities of this creed. We live in a world awash in resources shilling the self-help doctrine of learn to code. but as yet, the computer feeling continues to ebb away. Programming is a means to evoke a computer feeling,

but no iron law requires that one will use it for this purpose. I'm so confused by these two points. Confused why? In multiple ways. So first off, I don't know that anyone would take it as simple as that the computer feeling depends on the capability to read and write. code. What I think people, you know, just trying to be more charitable to open source advocates, of which I would consider myself one, it's that it, you know, there's certain freedoms that we want for your software, for you to, for it to not be controlled by other people, for you to be able to make changes, et cetera.

And I'm not saying that open source does that and solves that problem. I'm not pretending that that's the case. But like we talked about, you know, these, these apps that. that now they are locked behind paywalls in a weird way, or they're just shoving ads and I can't do this and I can't remix and I can't change it, right? Establishing a certain baseline freedom, I think can be a really good safeguard

to making sure people can have the computer feeling. I don't think anyone would say it's necessary to have the computer feeling that everything's open source and free software. I think people are saying, look, if we want to guard this, assuming they talk about the computer feeling at all, but let's pretend that they do.

If we want to guard this, these are good safeguards that can help ensure the computer feeling going on in the future rather than somebody gives you a device and then goes and locks it

and stops you from doing the things that you wanted to do. Right? So that's the first point. But then, like, I'm trying to understand what it means to program

without evoking the computer feeling. Well, I think we talked about that kind of thing. in the ESOLANGs app where it's like programming now for many people who do programming is a profession and it comes with all of this pressure and stress and it's something you do as an obligation, it's something you do because you have a mortgage to pay and, you know, dependence to feed. It's not something that you do for the joy of it. And so the feelings that are, that emerge from the programming that you do are not the computer feelings that I think that,

the authors here are longing for, which is actually an interpretation of this listicle. It's mean for me to call it a listicle, but that's the joke, so I'm going to keep going with it. The feeling could be a negative, right? Like, we're assuming that they're longing for this feeling in a kind of a positive way. And aside from a couple of small passages, you could do a reading of this where it's like, actually that feeling is bad, like that the computer feeling is bad and that there's another feeling that's different from that that's possible. Except for point 20, but...

Yeah, I know, I know. So, no, it's not a valid reading. It's a charitable reading. Patent pending. Most uncharitable reading ever. Patent pending. So, okay, so I'm not saying that you have to, at all times, feel the computer feeling when you are programming.

But I, like, okay, I don't... I'm not saying I'm like, I think that there's no problems with this learn-to-code movement, because of course there are. Oh, yeah. Right. I'm not pretending that there are art. But the people who successfully go through a learn for code program and get a job and have upward mobility in a way that they didn't before. I'm not saying that's everybody. I'm not saying it's likely. I'm not blah, blah, blah, blah. But some people do that. But some people do, right? Yeah. Along the way, are we really suggesting that they never, ever, ever, ever, ever felt the computer feeling?

I do not think that these authors are claiming or trying to suggest. What they're saying, though, is like the computer feeling continues to ebb away. And then programming is a means to evoke computer, but no iron law requires that one use it for this purpose. So I guess what they're saying, if I'm trying to be more charitable, is like we have a lot of programming, like you said,

like that is not evoking this. But I don't understand how this is at all connected to learn to code. Well, let's, here, let me read point. Because if you want to get people to, let's say there's somebody who's never experienced the computer feeling before if they successfully learn to code

they will have at some point experience that computer feeling let me read point 17 because it answers this so point 17 okay number 17 this orthodoxy is also a kind of fetishism programming can conjure a computer feeling

but it is not the computer feeling itself the sense that programming is the only way celebrates the tools, but not the experience. We want the experience. I think my read on these last three points is that like point 15 talking about, you know, that there's a dogma that says that computer feeling emanates from certain technical commitments like open source and that kind of thing. I think what that is doing is trying to say, hey, if you are an open source advocate and you have read up till this point, you might be thinking that what has happened is that open source is not. as widely adopted as it should be and that the things you're complaining about arise from a lack of open source and the authors are trying to head off that criticism at the past and say no what we are not saying is that open source should save the day in fact open source is orthogonal to this problem but is it and then point 16 is just kind of an expansion of that i personally believe that open source is orthogonal to this problem and my read of this is that that's what they're saying okay what is the cause

of, to their minds, right? Because I don't, don't buy this point. But that there's a, there's less computer feeling that it's fading, that it's ebbing, etc. What is the cause of that? They say, right? So like, just to go back to their things, this point has been obscured for two reasons. They don't really say that this is fading for two reasons. But it seems to be that they're saying one of the reasons is the tyranny of the internet over our imagination.

the other are things like the smartphone, right? Like these seems to be the things that they're pointing to as the things stopping us from having the computer feeling so often. The things like the smartphone is that the internet tyranny, those are part of the second point. The first point is that the language we use to talk about computers has lost its meaning. That computer...

But that's not what's caused the fading. That's what has obscured the fact that computer is a feeling. Right, which is what you said. You said, this point has been obscured for two reasons, and then you listed both of the second one. The first one was just that the language is eroding. I'm asking this question. What has caused the fading of feeling, right? And I thought they said that there were two points that have caused the fading, but they don't.

They say that there's two points that have obscured the fact that the computer is a feeling. The first one is, I think, not something that's caused the fading, but rather just obscured the fact that the computer is a feeling. feeling because words have changed. Yeah, the meaning of computer has changed. Yes. So that's just, but that's not like what caused the fading of the feeling, right? That's just like what. Yeah, it just made it hard for them to call it computer feeling.

Yeah, exactly, right. But the things that have actually in their mind, it seems, made this feeling fade are the uniform, flat, common platforms and protocols. And I think that is, and then the smartphone is an example of those uniform flat common platforms and protocols. So like the platform there is like iOS, Android. Like that's the right. Yeah.

So like that's what's caused it. And what open source doesn't do is it doesn't solve the diversity of those things. Open source doesn't guarantee that you have lots of idiosyncratic local eccentric ones. But boy, does it sure help. I think it helps a very small subset of people who are overrepresented. And like among us people who make computer stuff, we're going to see those people because they're the people who used to not make computer stuff who are now making computer stuff, but that they are like the vast minority of people who are using smartphones and who are not getting the computer feeling according to the authors. Yeah. Like it increases in absolute terms, but.

So what's going to help? Is what's going to help more proprietary software? That's what's going to give them more feeling? No, that's a bad argument. No, no, I'm intentionally. Like, what, so that's what I'm saying. No open source people say, if we just have open source, it will solve all problems. What they're trying to say is that there's a class of problems that proprietary software has that open source mitigates because if people so choose, and it's a big barrier and it's a lot.

of work and it's difficult, they can change the software, whereas with the proprietary stuff, it's impossible to. Yep. Right? And so, like, if you're somebody who says, I want to maximize the amount of computer feeling out there, and you have two choices on the extremes, a world of only proprietary software, a world of only open source software, which world will be more capable of maximizing that computer feeling, I'm going to say the open source one.

I'm going to, without an ounce of contrarianism, say the world of proprietary one, because unless you change other things about the world that we live in, the economics of proprietary software are very well understood and we know what it produces and we know how it works. And similarly, the economics of open source software are very well understood and that open source software struggles to flourish under capitalism and proprietary software does not struggle. I think very much the opposite, especially since open source software was created to make capitalism flourish more and has. I don't know about that. We got to go and read the bazaar and the whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cathedral, there we go, cathedral and the bazaar.

Yeah, we should do that. Because like open source was a rebranding of free software intentionally to make it appealing to big companies. I don't mean capital O, capital S. I mean lowercase O, lowercase us, as in like source available, as in like, I can take this and modify it. But like the reason open source has flourished so much is because of capitalism, right? Yeah, I'm not saying that's like, how do I say this? I think that there is a lot of software that I use that would not exist if it was all open source.

But that's the thing. We don't live in that world. And so this is kind of a bit of a pointless exercise. No, no, it's not. It's not a pointless exercise. Okay, what's the cure here? Like, this is, you know, we're decrying the lack of computer feeling and we're saying open source is not the answer. Fine. I don't, I'm not, and programming. They're saying open source is not the answer and I agree and you disagree. I'm not saying it's the answer either. Oh, okay. Never said that. That's my point. I think this is a straw man. Literally no one on planet Earth has ever uttered the words until now. Open source is the answer for. for bringing back the computer feeling. No, but it is easy for me to imagine people making that point. No, no. Then you're not being charitable because nobody thinks that.

Like nobody is saying as soon as you open source software, now everyone who uses that software gets the computer feeling. That's not the thing that the authors are saying here, that they're saying that it's, or sorry, that you can't get a computer feeling from closed source software. Okay, so okay. Nobody's saying that. I am, so this is the sentence we're arguing over.

Yeah, yeah. Open source and free software partisans hold to the orthodoxy that the computer feeling depends on the capability to read and write source code. And nobody has ever said that. Right, and my charitable read of this sentence swaps out depends on with would be benefited by, and that's the point that I've been arguing.

So you think it would, in no circumstance, would the computer feeling benefit from open source software? I think that open source software would benefit computer feeling, but to such a minor degree that it's not worth, you know, it's not worth pursuing. So you don't think that, this is a sincere question, not a leading question. You don't think that like the fact that open source software exists

and you can go look at the source code of other things and explore how things were built and use libraries for free, et cetera, help you experience the computer feeling more often? Almost universally, no. I do very little reading. Coffee script. Like the fact that coffee script, I've never read the coffee script.

But if you couldn't use it because it was, you had to pay for it. I would still use it. I pay for software and I use software that I pay for a lot. And I know that I am lucky to have the money to be able to do that. But I'm not arguing against software being free to use. I'm arguing against source availability. And I'm not even, like,

like source availability. I think it's good. I'm just saying that I don't think source availability and especially the ability to modify and extend source code and like upstream your changes and have that whole culture of open source. I don't think that that has more than like maybe a 1% effect on the predominance or lack thereof of the computer feeling in the general public. Yeah, I will have to like, hold on, of the general public or of some people. Oh, I mean like of the, of, you know, like... Who cares about at scale? I'm talking about four people.

That's what this article's about. No, it's not. Yeah, it is. No. If it were, then it's very wrong. Because at scale, there's more computer feeling than there's ever been. Well, then who is it talking about? Who are the people who are not feeling the computer feeling that this post is...

So, so hold on. If we're talking about, like, this is where we haven't gotten to this. But like, I'm, well, let's get to the article one second. I mean for what your claim is. Your claim is that, like, it doesn't matter at scale. that I could can like yeah there's billions of people or even for me personal like stuff being open source has but do you think that there's very much a I would say there are probably hundreds of thousands of people for which it has made a big difference in their lives maybe millions yeah that's great I'm not one of those

people that's fine what I mean is has it made a big difference for a large number of people and I would think the answer is clearly yes yes absolutely yeah yeah right and so to have something that's a straw man, like in this article, right? I think your points are, well, I have no, no tension with your points. I don't think this is a straw man. I think this is a legitimate response. The straw man, hold on, no, no. Open source software and free software parsons hold to the orthodoxy

that computer feeling depends on the capability to read and write software. He is a straw man. Not a single person in the world has advocated for that viewpoint because they just invented the computer feeling, right? here in this essay. It doesn't exist until then, so no one could have advocated for that. Well, no, they're using computer feeling. Computer feeling is not a new thing that didn't exist previously. It's a label applied to a bunch of things that already existed. Find me one person who says, yeah, if you used proprietary software and you thought you felt

a certain feeling, you're wrong. Nobody thinks that. No, but what they're saying is that there would be more people feeling the kind of feelings that we mean when we use the term computer feeling, now that we've introduced that term. There'd be more people feeling those feelings. That's not what this sentence says. That's not what this sentence says. Please read the actual sentence instead of your fake version of it.

Open source and free software partisans. Hold to the orthodoxy that the computer feeling depends on... Depends on... Depends on the capability to read and write source code. Nobody thinks that. Nobody says you can't have a computer feeling

unless you can read and write the source code. It is so much less interesting to me to, because as a person who has written things like this, man, we're on a tangerine, all right, go with me for a sec. As a person who has written things like this and who has sweated over word choice in writing, when I read something like this, I don't read it as the words that they have chosen are the only words that could exist in any of the positions where they're used. I read them as, we struggled to convey something,

and these are the best words that we found to, convey the thing that we're trying to get out there, but that language is lossy and that the choice of words that we've made may express things that we didn't mean them to express or they may not express things that we wanted to get out. And so anytime I read something like this, I am reading a little bit between the lines because I can't just look at the exact words that are used and assume that those words perfectly capture what the authors meant. Can I give a different interpretation of what I think you're doing in this moment? Yeah, sure. Yeah, go for it. What I do in general when I do my charitable readings.

Yes, what you do in general in this show. Anytime definitive statements are made, you make them non-definitive. Yes, that's my problem because I don't think, I don't believe in definitive language. And that's, that is not a charitable, that's not a charitable way to read people because many people, myself included, mean things definitively when they say them. and if they don't want to make the definitive statements, they will intentionally hedge. And there's zero hedging here. There's not some open source and free software partisans.

It's open source and free software partisans hold, not may hold, no, not a single hedge word in this sentence appears at all. They're not, they're intentionally not trying to make you say, okay, here's a soft claim. And this is a, you know, we've called it a listical. This is actually, I think, a, why did I just blank on the word?

Screed? I didn't want to say screed. I wanted to say, oh, what's the better word? Treatise. Treatise, yes, a treatise, right? This is a treatise, right? This is like, or treatise was not the word I'm looking for, but it's fine. This is a treatise that fits perfectly.

Like, this is something that's trying to say, here is the way the world ought to be. we're making a strong definitive stand. Yeah, it's a position piece. It's meant to be persuasive. There's like the futurist have the word that I'm looking for here. Manifesto. Manifesto. This is a manifesto.

That's what I'm looking for. This is a manifesto, right? Like, it's intent, yes. Is it trying to make overly bold claims in certain parts be cut for rhetorical effect? Of course. But my point here is they could have chosen to, be charitable to open source partisans, but they chose not to, right?

Agreed, yes. I do not think they're being charitable to open source partisans, yes. They chose not to intentionally for good reason in their mind, I assume, right? Sure. They could have been charitable and they chose not to be, and I think

what the actual literal words they wrote are a straw man. Whether they personally hold that straw man as true or not is a different question than what the text says. What the text says in its literal meanings is a straw man. Nobody holds that.

And then what we get is a complete non-sequitur. The people who are open source and free software partisans are not the same people shilling the self-health doctrine of learned to code. Yeah. Often, they're the people who hate that everyone's learning to code. They're the ones who are gatekeepers, the Richard Stallman's of the world,

who want all software to be complex and complicated, and don't want it to be user-friendly and don't want everyone to learn the code. The Learn to Code movement is so far separated from the free software and open source movement that I don't see how these points are connected at all. Send all email to Jimmy Miller at I hate open source.com.

I don't agree with this position at all. I love open source. I also love Learn to Code, but I think these are totally different movements. I don't think so. I think there are a lot of people who are advocates of, Obama is not a free open source advocate, and he's a learned-to-code advocate.

No, I don't mean learn-to-code.org. I mean, the more general, like, coding is a literacy, and we should encourage people to be literate in code, not just in, like, you know, software and media literacy. The self-help doctrine of learned-de-code is not the literacy version of learned-to-code. The self-help doctrine of learned-to-code is go to that coding boot camp, get a better job stop being

economically poor and get a job that actually is the future right like that's what the self-health doctrine of learned to code has to be referring to and describing it as shilling implies that it's the one

that we should look at with a negative lens so it's whichever one we feel bad about we're going to mean that that's the one they're talking about right we don't know what they actually mean by resources shilling the self-help doctrine of learned to code they might mean the broader thing

of literacy. We don't know that. But that wouldn't be self-help. That wouldn't be self-help. The literacy movement is about giving organizational, structural things where in school we help people learn to code because we think it's just as important as them learning to read. That's the opposite of self-help. I see that as part of the Schilling self-help doctrine of learned to code. Also, I see those two things as being together. How? You're not having to learn it yourself by yourself. you're, and go out on your own, you're being... Or no, code.org, that's what it is.

Code.org, that thing. That's also about programs in schools. Yeah, teach with code.org. That's parents get started at home. That is about, like, to me, that is the... Parents get started at home is very different from... We ought to... Students, explore learning, educators, teach with code.org, dot org.

Parents get started at home. Districts, code.org for districts. It's about teaching kids to code at school as literacy. I see that as part of the same culture as the Barako Obama boot camp. How is that self-help? In the same way that learning to read or write is, is like a... It's not self-help. Learning to read the rights not self-help. Why not? Like, so much of this is depending on when we read the words, resources showing the self-help doctrine of learned a code, what do we think they mean by that? Okay, can we give some definitive

examples of self-help that we both agree on? I don't, no, I don't think that's a interesting. I think we are like way, way, way too deep in nitpicking their language. It's not nitpicking. The big point they're trying to make is that programming, oh, you can stop talking about the open source and this. That programming is not the sum total of the computer feeling. Completely agreed. Completely agreed. Completely agreed. Right. And I think they did themselves a disservice by picking on things that are totally unrelated to that broader point in order to make that point? I think that they did themselves a disservice by imagining a reaction that this

write-up was going to receive from the community that was most likely to pass it around and talk about it and that they wanted to come out strong with a statement saying, hey, that thing that you're thinking is not the thing that we're thinking. So stop thinking that thing. and that they came out a little bit too strong in doing that. No, I will again bring back my interpretive lens that I admit that I have that this is the same exact argument we hear from Brett Victor against open source. It has nothing to do with worried about people's reactions to an article that they're going to have.

And it has everything to do with a principled stance that says open source software is bad because it depends on this mass networked effect of large systems that you need in order to hold up the edifice of open source, and that what we need is small, local, idiosyncratic, etc. And so by making something open, you're by default making it global and large and networked in a way that is wrong. And I think that that's where this is coming from. but focus like super duper open source like i think that that these authors are are are like count themselves among the people who are like um open source advocates who believe in you know openly distributing the things that they're doing well then they if they're open source partisans

yeah i i i just i think you are too narrowly reading what they're writing like i think you think i'm too broadly reading it i think you're too narrowly reading so so you think i should just like I think I should, you think I should just take partisans to mean those, only the crackpots. Because if they're advocates of open source, then I took partisans to mean. Or like, practisers of it, let's say. Practices of open source. But like, then I don't know how to read this at all, but that's fine. Like, either, I have one of two things.

Either 15 and 16 are just complete asides that make no point in their main argument of programming isn't the only way to make this computer feeling. That's the way I can take this. Or there are random insertions of points that have nothing to do with the computer feeling. That's my, I guess, really my point. I don't think, I don't see how these 15 and 16 were edited out. I think this would be way better. That's all I'll say.

That's my editor note. Yeah, I think if 15 and 16 were taken out and 17 was rewritten to not be kind of building on them, but instead just making the point that it's like the computer feeling is about more than just programming. I think that the piece would be better. I think what these are, how I take them, is that they're anticipating a reaction that the people who are most likely

to read this impasse it around are going to have, and that they just want to shut down that reaction in advance. It's objection handling. I can't make that work with this text, but I believe that you can. Yeah.

Well, that's how I take it. This is what it means to me. This is my understanding of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. I just don't think the text supports it. I think that if they wanted that to be the case, they should have written the text differently, is all I'm saying. Did we read seven? Yeah, we read 17. Yes, we read 17. Yeah, 17. And we didn't, we didn't, well, we didn't talk about 17 all that much. I don't think we need to because we talked about it earlier, but it's basically trying to make the point that, like, the sense that programming is the only way celebrates the tools,

but not the experience. We want the experience. I think that's pretty, straightforward. I will just say this. I think we often in these kinds of trying to broaden the tent conversations and trying to say, hey, we want more, we often put down programming, and I'm not saying they're necessarily doing this here, but we often put down programming in a way that I think is actually detrimental to the cause. I think if more people learned to program, they would then have the skills to do more of the things that they wanted to do in their art practices and all of those things. And I'm not saying that it's good that that has to be the case right now. I just think it's a fact of the actual world we're living in that like that gives people more possibilities, more freedom,

more opportunities. And I think we should emphasize that more rather than because I think right now despite the shilling of learn to code, most people I've talked to are very afraid of ever even the thought of programming, and it holds them back more than the like upholding of programming as like the pinnacle does. Yeah. Send, send AI out of the room for a second. Because what I'm about to say, you know, I want to say it, ignoring AI for a second.

I think that there was a time where loud voices in the room were saying everybody needs to program, that programming is emancipatory, that if you have a problem with the computer, the solution is programmed. and that there were people saying, you know, we need more people to code. Coding literacy is important. There were like people making inelegant arguments to that effect on the internet that were being widely circulated. And that there was for a time a push in the opposite direction to say,

hey, it's more complicated than that. It is more nuanced. That just being able to program doesn't mean that you'll be able to go look at any old source code and understand what it does and modify it. Can we make this our bonus episode discussion? Why? Because I've never understood this take. Oh, you mean this thing that I'm bringing up right now?

Not this computer is a feeling? Yes. Oh, okay. I thought you meant this recording. No. Okay. This take. Yeah.

I want to talk about this because I've never, I think there's a bigger discussion to be had here, and I've never understood, and I think it's a lack on my part, just to be clear. I've never understood why people criticize the people should learn, to program movement.

Should we do that right now? Do you have time? Yeah, I have time. Okay. Well, let's have that discussion right now, and then I'll cut it out of this episode and then just release that as our bonus episode. Okay, cool. Okay.

We just edited out of this a very lengthy side conversation about learning to code and about the learn to code movement. You can go to feeling off.com. That is our new domain name for our Patreon, where every month we release a bonus episode. I think the bonus episodes are better than the main episodes. Let me be the first to say that I have really enjoyed all of our bonus episodes that we've done a lot. I think that they're very good. And that at first when we started doing them, I thought they were just going to be like a little unedited, low quality side kind of thing.

No, I think that they are increasingly where we can let our freak flag fly a little bit. And I like that. Isn't that always the case? The second channel becomes the main channel. Yeah. So if you, for some reason, like this podcast, heaven help you. And you want something shorter. Yeah, you want something shorter and more frequent.

Feelingoff.com. I think the broader thing I would say, actually what I would probably advocate for, more than code, is everyone should learn to program in your sense. And I think you would not agree, and you would go, everyone should learn computational thinking, which is like one step higher. Yes. Okay. And they can learn it through.

programming, but that's not the only way to learn. Yeah, I think if they learn computational thinking without programming, they have an impoverished understanding. I think they're lacking in a very major, important way. I think the important thing comes from programming. It might not be the

computer feeling. That's our segue back. But it is the important thing. Yes. 18. Making computer mean computer feelings and not computer devices shifts the boundaries

of what is captured by the word. It removes a great many things. Smartphones, language models, social media. Both social and media get their own set of scare quotes. I love it when people wear their colors on their sleeves.

That is great. Social media. Okay. Starting again. This is all staying in This all staying in Number 18 Making computer

Mean computer feelings And not computer devices Shifts the boundaries Of what is captured by the word It removes a great many things Smartphones Language models Social media

From the domain of the computational It also welcomes a great many things Notebooks, Papercraft Diary, Kitchen Back into the domain of the computational I found this like I this one this point 18 I thought at first I'm like okay gets rid of these things I'm getting them following language models well okay I see where they're coming from there's some bias there and then they're like what it includes I'm just now lost I wanted to be completely on board can be honest like this this actually does like I think this resonates me more with me while I've like had my nitpicks here it's because the general thrust of this resonates with me so much I love it the idea. I mean, that's the feeling of computing, right? Like, that's what we're called like this, right? I love the idea that computer is a feeling. But like, how do notebooks, paper, craft, diary, and kitchen become computational? Not, like, and we can add computation to them. Yeah. That's fine. Like, I, we could do that. But, like, how do they make the computer feeling, not just good feelings? Yeah. Is it the craft feeling, the, the, the personal, like, what is the feeling now? I thought it was about computation.

And these don't have computation. I'll say that directly. You can use computation in notebooks and papercraft. You could write about computation. You could use computation in the kitchen, but none of those by themselves have to be computational. Yeah. So maybe it's that when you are using a computer

and you have this like, how did they describe it at the beginning, specific feeling of artifacts that allow for intimate systems of personal meaning. So there's some kind of like you get this constellation of feelings out of using the computer and it makes you think in a certain way and approach things in a certain way and problem solve in a certain way. And it gives you this like this cluster of feelings. You can take those feelings with you and do things away from the desktop computer or away from the smartphone. you can do things in your life in ways that also produce those kinds of feelings.

So it's like using the computer taught you a way of thinking or how to feel that you can then go and do in other parts of your life, maybe. So it can't be that like all uses of notebooks, papercraft, diary kitchen are by themselves somehow evoking the computer feeling. It's something that you're, just like not all programming, they say invokes a computer feeling. it's a way of approaching these various things that could invoke the computer feeling, which I can buy. Yeah, could be that. It could be that that's what they meant.

Or here's another one. Here's another one. Here's another thing that maybe they meant. Which is that, like it says, it welcomes a great many things back into the domain of the computational. Yeah, back. That was an interesting choice of words.

Notebooks, papercraft, diary, kitchen. Those are things at the, you know, at Inkinswit, when we're doing our programmable ink work, one of the things we often do is look at, okay, this little programmable notebook that we're making, what should you be able to do with this programmable notebook and what shouldn't you be able to do?

And we look at things like, you know, oh, I have a little notebook that I use where I, every day, write down, like, here are the kinds of pain that I felt in my body. Like, I have this chronic condition and I'm trying to manage these sensations, of pain in my body and I use the notebook to like write down a record of those things but I don't just write it down as as like a linguistic you know sentential paragraph structured description

I draw the shape of my body and I color in the parts of my body where I felt something and the next to that I write what I felt in my body like today I'm going to highlight my hands and say that like I've noticed that my thumbs have been hurting a lot lately that when I try and play with my daughter, there's a true story now, when I try and play with my daughter by making these little fox characters out of my hands, who are called talking cupcake, and they're the two little foxes, um, when I hold my hands in that shape, for a long time, my thumbs start to really, really hurt. And that has become a recurring thing. And so now I can't do that anymore. And so I've had to say, okay, talking cupcake aren't going to be around as much as they used to, because now it hurts my hands

to, to hold them in that shape. So what this sentence might mean is that, the kinds of things that we do when we're on the computer, like how do we use this dynamic space, teach us that there are other dynamic spaces that we can use similarly. We can use a physical notebook both as a space to express ourselves more broadly than just a traditional kind of way that you write notes,

but that also you can look at the notebook as a source of inspiration for things to do on the computer. Or you can look at papercraft or, cooking as a source of like, ah, here are things that we do outside the computer that we can learn from to do more things inside the computer. Yeah, I think the first interpretation, I think, is more likely than the second one. Yeah, but we don't get to know. That's the real kicker is that this does not tell us.

It does not tell us what they mean. It says making the computer mean computer feelings and not computer devices, shift the boundaries of what is captured by the word. Sure. Inarguable. Well, I think it does tell us, right? Because computer devices, right, are the things, a kind of device that runs instructions. Cool.

Like a loom. Yeah. And we're saying that we don't need those devices in order to have the computer feeling. We can have the computer feeling without those devices. And notebooks, papercraft, diary kitchen, blah, blah, blah. Devoid of those devices can still give us the computer feeling. So it's not necessary that we go back to the computer and learn and do those things, because we didn't need the computer device at all, right?

And in fact, we get 19. Number 19. The agenda is to expand our understanding of what makes the computer feeling. And number 20. The agenda is to advance the computer feeling in devices, objects, and cultures. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to understand what it is. what makes this computer feeling? Now, I find it interesting.

It's not understand what the computer feeling is, right? Yeah. There was no explanation or, you know, attempt at... There are no examples. Yeah, there's like nothing... Well, we get the Commodore 64.

What was that in? As devices that gave us the computer feeling. Right. But there's no examples of the feeling itself. I will say that, yes. Yeah. Yeah, it's just saying that, like, at the time, personal computer

was around, it was used to distinguish what was special in the moment, about the devices that gave us computer feelings. So these are the devices that gave us computer feelings. So we at least get pointed at. Here's the thing we're talking about. It's in the 1980s, if you had one of these devices, you had a certain feeling. You know what? I bet the people who are older than elder millennials would say, yeah, I got those same feelings programming a mainframe. Oh, I mean, yeah, of course. But so. That's the thing is like, this essay is so interesting because it's both trying to be expansive. It's to expand our understanding what makes a computer feeling and advance the computer feeling. And yet it has categorically decided that some things can't.

Yeah. Right? Like it's saying smartphones, language models, social media, social media, can't. I get so much computer feeling from Claudecode. When I'm clod coding, I get wild tinkles of like, wow. this reminds me of what it was like when I was first making stuff with computers as a kid. Yeah. Like what's to stop?

Or have we just, you and I not experience the computer feeling? Are we thinking? Entirely possible. Right. We're over here thinking that you and I know what the computer feeling is, that we've had the computer feeling. But maybe.

We have the audacity to name our community feeling of computing. Yeah. Like maybe we've never experienced the computer feeling that they are talking about here. right and like that's it seems to be the only conclusion if we have to like by definition mark these things off rather than something like because it removes those things right like there were no longer we don't have those things it does feel a little weird because i think definitely my space right which i don't know if you're going to call quote social quote media but my space definitely gave the computer feeling yeah same smartphones

like I said, like you mentioned a bunch of things. I think especially when smartphones first came out and there were apps and all these things, there's definitely some computer feeling there. But I think even today, you know, using Jim and I to help give possibilities for what your home could look like definitely had. And like now, you know, they're going and doing themselves in a way that they wouldn't have thought to do before. You know, like that kind of thing, I think is the computer feeling. It opens up these possibilities, right? Yeah.

It's like the feeling that like anything's possible. Yeah. Like, wow. I have this computer on my desk. I can make anything I want in this. It's this. That's the term that I've heard people use over and over again, is this feeling that they can do whatever they want,

that this is a space where you could do anything. Yeah. And yet, what, you know, like it, and yet we're like writing off where we could have it. Instead of, like, what I would love to say is, like, it's to advance it, but it's also, like, why can't it be to search it out and find it and cultivate it in the places, in all places that we already have? Why can't we find the computer feeling in language models? Why can't we find

the computer feeling in social media? Find the computer feeling in smartphones, right? Like, yeah. Why can't it be there? So let's have a dialogue with this piece that point 19 says, the agenda is to expand our understanding of what makes the computer feeling. And I think in this conversation, having read through this piece, we've done two things. Number one, we've gone oh hey actually they're getting at something that resonates with you and me and probably a lot of other people yeah there's something in here that they're speaking to that i i empathize with and i recognize and it it excites me and it feels like it's it's hinting at something important and true and at the same time the exact way that they've tried to outline what that thing is i disagree with so if their agenda is to expand their understanding of what makes the computer feeling,

and to the extent that I share that agenda, I think we've done some of that by showing that the lines that they've drawn aren't maybe the lines that ought to be drawn. Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is interesting to advance computer feeling in devices, objects, and cultures. I don't know, okay, to devices, right?

I can imagine that one. I can imagine objects as this, you know, especially when I'm thinking full computer dynamically We somehow may bring these computational objects. I don't know what it means cultures. Like, it can't mean in the same sense that devices and objects are. So, like, are we saying that we just want cultures to care about the computer feeling more?

How would a culture bring about the computer? Like, I just don't know what that means. This is a really interesting question. Let's give some examples of what it means to advance the computer feeling in devices. And then we'll talk about objects. Then we'll talk about culture. So what might it mean to advance the computer feeling in devices? I think this, what do they say about possibilities and customizing and all of that stuff?

We're 13. Oh, 12 and 13, yeah. Yeah. Does it feel like a place that you can have it, shape, and reconfigure? Does it give you a sense of possibility, right? Those, I think, are things that in our devices, we're often lacking. Yes. Myspace versus Facebook.

Sure. Right. It's been the canonical example here. but, you know, I think some people might say the iPhone versus Android. I didn't feel that I could inhabit shape and reconfigure my Android phone. It never really felt that way. But if some people do, I don't want to deny them that. Yeah, yeah, exactly, right?

But, like, to me, it would need to go further. Same, like, the reason I switched is because, like, I didn't feel like I was getting any of those freedom benefits that I maybe wanted. Old Android, I did have more of them, and it stopped being that way as time went on. Right. Right. I mean, this is obviously an example of doing. doing what I'm not supposed to do or whatever, but I could tether without my network, no, my carrier knowing that I was tethering because it's ridiculous to me that I get charged

more for tethering. That's insane. Than not tethering because it's all just data, right? Where you get charged more for sending, you know, certain kinds of text messages as opposed to data packets. Like there was a long time where text messaging was, like when I message came out, the whole point was stop paying text messaging fees. Use our free alternative.

And it's like, yeah, that's, you know, net neutrality, that whole thing. Yeah. And in fact, just a tiny aside. The Android versus iOS, where Android was championed by some as the more open platform and that you would get this feeling of openness from using Android and then open is going to win and whatever. And the iPhone's locked down, Android is open. And you personally share that actually Android didn't feel that open to you and certainly not now. maybe that feeling that you felt there is the same feeling I get when looking at textual code

where a lot of people say textual code is this way of expressing what you want the computer to do and anything you can do you can do with textual code and when I sit down and write textual code I do not feel like I am expressing myself. I do not feel like I am like able to do whatever I would want and that it is a slog and a struggle and that the promise is unfulfilled in the same way that the promise of openness on Android is arguably unfulfilled. So that just like, the way you described it made me go like, oh yeah, I know that feeling. Yeah. No, I think that's great.

That's why, even though for me, textual code is fantastic, I think, I think for a lot of people it's not. And that's why we need to, you know, keep pushing. Yeah. So that's how we advance the computer feeling in devices. Yeah. How do we advance the computer feeling in objects? What does objects even mean? I took this as, well, you know, the, the, the, the, again, I, I,

I'm imputing dynamic land onto full computer in a way that I probably shouldn't. And I admit I shouldn't, but I also don't know enough of the manifest. I know way more of dynamic land than I do full computer. But, you know, I assume this is like that same kind of idea of like, hey, why can't everything be computational? Why can't we take it away from the screens and put it in an object? so now I can you know use this

this beaker right and now I know some stuff about it because it's computational in some way that's computational that's not computer feeling like yeah I know but I can't imagine anything

that creates the computer feeling without there being computation I mean maybe there's that like the way that the computer teaches you to imagine that anything is possible and to treat things as a world that you can reshape is something you could take

outside the computer. Like Wood does that too. Yeah, I was going to use that as an example. But I just don't think of that as distinctly the computer feeling. If all we mean here is the creative impulse that feels cheap, right? Yeah.

So like, to me, okay, you could try to say, like, one way I could try to think of an object having the computer feeling would be some sort of like, okay, I'm doing, a pour over and I'm taking a maybe like ultra precise analytic approach to my pour over, right? So I measure a bunch of different things. I look at the draw time.

I look at, you know, like I really am like trying to understand the pour over as a whole system, right? And I'm thinking about the system as it and I can control all of those variables in this like very clear way, right? Rather than kind of shot in the dark trial and error, I'm systematically thinking through it. But that's not put, like, the reason I hesitate on that one is that's putting it into the process rather than into the object itself.

Right? And so like to me, an object having computer feeling, the problem is like objects and it not being a device at that point. Like I just don't know where the distinction between device and object goes. the objects themselves have computation. But, you know, the Brett Victory way of objects having computation is not for the object

to have computation. It's to layer the computation over an object. Yeah. And your poor over example is like you applying the computer feeling to the object, not the object creating the computer feeling in you. Exactly. And like if I made it so that it was in the thing, we would just call it a device. Yeah.

And then it would be back in that first group. Yes. Maybe, maybe something is I, I, um, you could mentally sub out the word computer and computer feeling with something else and that might help us understand what is meant here. So one that I do is music. Like there's a music feeling. I get a feeling from playing instruments and playing with other people and having developed musical skill. I then apply those music feelings everywhere in my life and respond to other things as if. they are acting in a musical way. So like something can fall off of the counter, and to me that is a musical experience because the way that it clanged around had a certain pitch that I noticed

and it had a certain rhythm. But it's the sound, right? Uh-huh, but it doesn't have to be the sound. It can just be like something that happens in time. Yeah, yeah. Music's a little... Like if I wave my fingers... Yeah.

In a certain pattern... But, okay, it's got to be rhythm or sound. Could be. It could be, or it could be. or it could be like somebody could say something and it's like, ooh, that's a good band name or ooh, that's a good song lyric. Or, oh, the way that you're writing is musical because you're approaching it as an improvisational exercise

and the way that I learned about improvisation is through music. So to me, I map music onto all instances of improvisation. Whereas if somebody came from a theater background, they might map all instances of improvisation as a theater feeling. But isn't that just what I talked about with the, pour over? So it's, yeah, it is another example of like

mapping these feelings onto the thing, but it's like those things don't exist other than what you bring to them. Yeah, so is it in the object or is it in you, right?

And it does say that it's to advance the computer feeling. Is anything in an object? Yeah, yeah. But like these devices, when we're talking about devices, right, the feeling

we're getting needed those devices in order to get that exact feeling, right? The feeling I get, whether we call this computer feeling or not, the feeling I get playing SimCity was evoked by SimCity. Obviously, I needed to be there and I needed to have a certain way of being and attending and etc. But I couldn't get that exact same feeling outside of that computation that was going on by my computer playing, sim-s-city. And so, like, I would think it has to be something about the objects themselves that is bringing forth this feeling. And so that's why I'm thinking the dynamic landy, folk computery kind of thing where

eventually the objects themselves have the computation, that's the only way I can think of it. because otherwise it's just an imposed thing. So like your example for, you know, taking the music, like the thing clanging, yes, technically if something falls that, it needed to fall for you to have that, but it's really way more about your musical background than it is for the object itself, right? Yeah, like could somebody develop a suite of computer feelings, a intimate system of personal meaning

without ever using a computer. I think without ever computation existing, no. Without ever using silicon, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, of course, right? Then that yeah, would be without devices. It would be with objects or something else. No, it would be with their head. It would be with their brain.

It would be with them being the computer. So that's probably the culture's part then, is like... Yeah, like, so that's what I'm wondering. Like, cultural, is it like that we should imbue our culture with computing practices? Like, there's almost part of me that reads this essay as if, because with, especially with this, like, inclusion of diary, paper, craft, notebooks, kitchen, as if computation is an unnecessary element to the computer feeling. Hmm. Mm-hmm.

And that feels wrong. Like, if that's what this essay means, then I'm sad Because that's not what I mean And that's not what I resonate with it And if that's not what the essay means, then you're happy. It's really simple. And like, I just, I think that there is something so So beautiful about the externalizing

Of computation. Yeah. That is what is, what to me creates, not necessarily, but is a necessary component of creating this computer feeling. Is this... Like, you could just do math all day and you could do computational mathematics

and maybe you get some computer feeling. I'm not trying to pretend you don't. But like, it's an impoverished sense of computer feeling that I think really it's that external factor, this world beyond you. And the only way in which you're getting it when you're contemplating it internally is because you're thinking of it

as something beyond you. And so, like, the fact that it actually can be embodied is what makes the computer feeling so cool. Just like singing in your head is way less cool than being able to sing out loud or make that instrument or play that song. And it's not like you couldn't get musical feeling just all internally,

but it would be impoverished compared to the physicalization of it and the fact that it's out there in the world. Yeah. I mean, maybe some people get, computer feeling doing something like civics or something like if they're helping out

with a political campaign or something like that where it's a sense of like hey we are building a system that is going to help us live in a better world where there's like you know this mass organization

of people and we're all applying our individual skills and we're everybody's helping out in their own way and we're doing this project together

and that like you know, there's a way of approaching that. And I think this maybe gets back to the systems thinking thing that we talked about in the bonus episode. Is that there's like this computational thing that is happening doesn't, it doesn't have to just be inside the computer. And it doesn't just have to be about some kind of like a mathematical process. or something like that. Like,

it can be about people organizing themselves to some greater purpose. And that the only reason that that would give somebody the computer feeling is because, like, that's what they have most strongly associated that feeling with.

And it would give somebody else a feeling of, you know, familial love or something like that. Or it would give somebody else a feeling of, like, duty and honor and purpose

and that sort of thing. And so, like, different people are going to get that, get different feelings out of that same. activity, but that for the people who have developed the computer feeling in themselves, that that's the feeling that they take away from that experience. Yeah, I can see that.

And so if we're trying to advance the computer feeling, what I'm surprised at is we're trying to advance it in devices, objects, and cultures, but not like, I would expect to have, like, we're trying to get more people to feel the computer feeling. Yeah. And what isn't clear to me is, is this a get more people to feel it? because again, I've mentioned a few times they're saying it's fading. And if they mean by absolute numbers,

it definitely isn't, right? By absolute numbers, more people are feeling the computer feeling, assuming we felt it at all, right? Assuming that it's not this thing that you could only feel in 1980. But, you know, more people by absolute numbers, are feeling the computer feeling. And I would imagine

more people actually by percentage are feeling the computer feeling as well than ever was before. Yeah, I'd agree with both of us. And so I wonder if it's instead not saying that we're lacking in quantity of the computer feeling, but somehow quality, and that here the advancement is not a trying to get more people to advance,

but to deepen each of our own computer feelings, and part of how we could do that is by imbueing it in a culture in which we all participate. Right, yeah. As a culture, we're doing more computer stuff together. Like game jams, for instance, right? Yes, and it could be a very small culture. It could be a very insular culture.

But we have this depth. And so instead of this being a call to evangelize, it's a call to, you know, seal ourselves off and focus on our, which would make sense. We're away from social media. We're away from the Internet. We're local and idiosyncratic. And so this is yet again a cloistering call rather than a, you know, a way. advancing meaning spread far and wide. Yeah. Yeah, it means like maybe an unfair way of, unfair to both sides.

The way of looking at this is that it's like, oh, hey, all of the people who used to come out to church have kind of stopped coming out and everybody's kind of losing their faith and are no longer, is there a strong religious feeling felt by people who used to feel it. And so let's, you know, bring them back to church and feel that feeling again. But that's the thing is there's two reactions to that problem, which is exactly, you know, I said the word evangelize intentionally, right? It's exactly where my brain goes to. There's two ways in people reacted. One, we need to, you know, get everyone to come back or two. Ultimately, of course, we want everyone to be this, but they don't.

And so now at least we get just the true believers. Right. Right. And we can cultivate that and have deeper personal experiences. And I almost feel like this might be saying the latter, not the former. This is not a, because we already said, like, everyone should learn to code. Yes, they don't want that. But maybe they don't even want everyone to feel the computer feeling. They just want the computer feeling to be felt more deeply by the people who feel it.

And maybe they do believe, of course, it would be great if everyone went that way. way. But they're less interested in that than they are cultivating the computer feeling because maybe that, the deepness of the computer feeling is what's going to lead to more people being attracted to it, more people wanting to see this way of life, you know. And I think that that's the Brent Victory intake, whether it's computer feeling or not, but it's definitely like, hey, we don't want to spread this thing far and wide. We want to cultivate a community that feels it deeply. Or maybe especially like a community of people who would otherwise be perfectly okay, like taking a job at Facebook and advancing, you know, the unprogrammable beast that is repressing us all. Instead, hey, remind those people who are already predisposed to do computery stuff or already programming or already like taking this on as a career.

Hey, there is another way. Like there is a way to recognize the beauty in this thing that we're doing. and go with your career, make things that nurture that. Don't make things that repress that feeling or that ignore that feeling. Yeah, and if I'll, if I put my thumb on the scale

of one of these interpretations rather than the other, I think it's that we need to cultivate the widespread computer feeling. I think in the same way, we need to get more people to have the music feeling, more people to have the art feeling,

more people to have the literature feeling, more people to have any of these, I think, deeper, expressions of our humanity. I think of computation in that same way. I think the computer feeling is an expression of a way of being, a way of acting, a way of doing things that is unique, not because it's somehow better or special than other ways of being or doing. It's just like all of the other ones are unique, art and music and poetry and literature and all of that. I I think math, right?

Like, I think they're all, they all have their own domains. And I think we should experience all of them and experience them in a good way, not just cheaply, experience great food, experience great music, et cetera, like all of this. And I think we, we are too often ready to keep the computer feeling to ourselves and not share it. And I think if we're going to advance the computer feeling, that's the way I think we should advance it. Hmm. Hmm. So, and that's what you personally feel should be done, not necessarily what you think the authors are trying to encourage. I can't tell. Yeah. And that, so that, that, that, that, what you just said sounded like a really nice kind of summarizing statement. What I will say is popping up one, one level. Um, I don't know whether I like or dislike this piece and I don't think that that's important. Like oftentimes, you know, people say, oh, oh, I like this. Oh, I didn't like this. People meaning us. Um, this. Um, this. This. Um, this. Um, this.

This one, I don't know if I like it or dislike it, but I really like the conversation that it encouraged us to have, which is weirdly self-congratulatory, but fuck it. I think that this is a provocative piece that feels maybe clumsy and that we really struggled to interpret it, but maybe that's our fault, not their fault. but I do really feel spoken to by this piece and I feel that it is getting at something

that feels true in my experience I do feel like there was you know this sense of possibility and sense of like room for expression

that computers used to create that feeling much more strongly than they do now and specifically for me it was like in the heyday of what was the company called?

Metacreations was that company? The company that made like Bryce and Poser these like early 3D modeling kind of apps and also like the early flash era that early days like that to me and the beginning of like the dot com bubble like the late 90s kind of early 2000s. There was a period where it felt like

there is this explosion of tools that you can use. to do all sorts of weird new things with computers that we'd never really seen before that like I'd also say I didn't have the money to buy all of these tools but you know I knew some websites where I could go and find a copy of these tools

and a CD key and these tools were amazing for giving me that feeling of like hey I can make stuff in this virtual space that uses the same skills that I was using before I was in this virtual space, but I feel so much more empowered to do them here. And there's new kinds of things that I can do by bringing in interactivity and bringing in

animation over time. I just could never do before. And I remember that feeling very fondly, and I have spent basically the rest of my career trying to make things that recreate that feeling. So, yeah, I don't know what they meant, but I like what it made me. think of and feel.