Ludovico Caluori
@ololiuhqui

Time to work into the digital realm to make us more connected and happy as human beings. Time to go against every tendency of programming people for machines with the intent of controlling and shaping them for purely individualist interests.

My journey into software development is best described by the words of Douglas Rushkoff in his amazing book Program or Be Programmed.

The debate over whether the Net is good or bad for us fills the airwaves and the blogosphere. But for all the heat of claim and counter-claim, the argument is essentially beside the point: it’s here; it’s everywhere. The real question is, do we direct technology, or do we let ourselves be directed by it and those who have mastered it? “Choose the former,” writes Rushkoff, “and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter, and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”

In the long run, each media revolution offers people an entirely new perspective through which to relate to their world. Language led to shared learning, cumulative experience, and the possibility for progress. The alphabet led to accountability, abstract thinking, monotheism, and contractual law. The printing press and private reading led to a new experience of individuality, a personal relationship to God, the Protestant Reformation, human rights, and the Enlightenment. With the advent of a new medium, the status quo not only comes under scrutiny; it is revised and rewritten by those who have gained new access to the tools of its creation.

Like tourists in a foreign city sighing in relief at the sight of a Starbucks or American Express sign, users tend to depend more on centrally defined themes and instantly recognizable brands. They are like signposts, even for the young people we consider digital natives, who turn out to be even more reliant on brand names and accepted standards for understanding and orientation than are their digital immigrant counterparts. Activism means finding a website, joining a movement, or “liking” a cause—all of which exist on a plane above and beyond their human members. Learning, orienting, and belonging online depend on universally accepted symbols or generically accessible institutions. Likewise, achievement is equated with becoming one of those universal symbols oneself. The digitally oriented activist is no longer satisfied with making something real happen where she lives but, rather, dedicated to building the website that solves the problem for everyone. Everyone wants to have his or her model of change scale up, to host the website where the most important conversation takes place, or aggregate the Twitter feeds of all the people one level below. This tendency is only natural when working on a platform biased toward abstraction.

The digital age brings us hypertext—the ability for any piece of writing to be disconnected not just from its author but from its original context. Each link we encounter allows us to exit from a document at any point and, more importantly, offers us access to the bits and pieces of anyone’s text that might matter at that moment. In a universe of words where the laws of hypertext are truly in effect, anything can link to anything else. Or, in other words, everything is everything—the ultimate abstraction.

Of course this can be beautiful and even inspiring. The entirety of human thought becomes a hologram, where any piece might reflect on any other, or even recapitulate its entirety. From a Taoist perspective, perhaps this is true. But from a practical and experiential perspective, we are not talking about the real world being so very connected and self-referential, but a world of symbols about symbols. Our mediating technologies do connect us, but on increasingly abstracted levels.

By recognizing the abstracting bias of digital technologies, however, we can use it to our advantage. Our digital abstractions work best when they are used to give us insight into something quite real and particular.

While the dangers of living and working in an inherently abstracted environment are very real, so too are the benefits. Abstraction has been around since language, perhaps even before. Money, math, theology, and games would all be impossible without abstracted symbol systems, accepted standards, and some measure of central authority. The digital realm is no different in that regard.