AUGMENTATIONI’ve heard the noise of a virtual machine.
Now I’m stuck in the reality of backlash
And the cashed–in chips.
The end of the world is nigh.
The history of the world as we know it is written in the language of deliberate reason, but the confusion that it’s in any capacity, reasonable—stems from grim misunderstanding of language.
No amount of reason can conflate contradictory accounts.
The best we can expect from a history is that it preserves the contradictions that are inherent to it.
One can imagine that such histories would become increasingly ever so verbose and would have to lend
much of the interpretation to reader. This is a very cruel joke, unless you can come up with a way to off–load the interpretation part. And yes, you can!
You can use computation—an arbitrary inquiry into the state of the affairs—to justify histories in a whole bunch of ways. In a way, this is what the last hundred years was all about.
Computers are bound to further augment our ways.
We deal with computation using language, and the big array of activities associated with it is called programming.
Although programming is full of mindless machinations, there’s also poetry in there. Programming language Haskell is notorius for how it enables exceptionally beautiful, succint programs. But what’s poetry anyway? Risk not to mislead, poetry is the distillation of language.
In philosophy, poetry is meant to clarify.
In programming, it encodes complex computations beautifully.
There’s a reason why the outmost thinkers of the past such as W. Blake, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein—resorted to poetry in their pursuit of clarity. The idea is to use high–bandwidth language to render thoughts special and meaningful. This heavily mirrors the sentiment of functional programming towards computation.
The more computation we introduce to our discourse, the more these two, seemingly unrelated kinds of poetry will collide.
The future of poetry lies animated with computation, whereas new poets will be capable of incorporating computation without having to resort to programming.
Augmentation is what happens when programming dies.
A regular text to augmented text is what JPEG is to a GIF. Why bother with programming amongst other things if you can simply animate in natural language?
Unless you want to build something overly sophisticated, or if you’re looking into some particular piece of hardware that you’re interested in, nowadays you can afford to think of your computer as some easily disposable, ephemeral virtual machine in the Cloud™.
Patch yourself.
Autonomous actors have the ability to compute and interact with each other in the cyber space independently, without having to rely on the likes of multinational corporations for anything but cloud hardware.