[NetBehaviour] Code as Software as Literature

Tue Feb 4 05:53:15 CET 2014

That refers to canons, not listservs or majordomo - email lists - which 
I've run both moderated and unmoderated for years. The quote is completely 
out of context.

On Mon, 3 Feb 2014, Bishop Zareh wrote:

> See [2] below, I copied the exact quote. 
>
> You said you hate them, and for good reasons. Lists have problems with sustaining heterogeneity. 
>
> ??? Sent Mobile ???
>
> On Feb 3, 2014, at 9:01 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:
>
>> 
>> I reject lists? I don't; I've run some for decades - I'm not sure what you mean.
>> 
>> - Alan
>> 
>> On Mon, 3 Feb 2014, Bishop Zareh wrote:
>> 
>>> Hey yall,
>>> I am not online as often as you, so apologies in advance for not being more
>>> timely.
>>> Cucumber (http://cukes.info) is definitely my favorite code to read. Jasmine
>>> (https://github.com/pivotal/jasmine) can sometimes be a 'close second',
>>> despite the overbearing assertions and 'be' verbs. It all depends on the
>>> author. 
>>> Behavour-driven-development may be just another blip on the
>>> natural-language-code timeline, but then again, it may not.
>>> I echo the many thanks going around for references, dialogue and
>>> perceptiveness by all involved. There are two threads that I would like to
>>> tease out a bit, as I felt they got sidelined along the way.
>>> [1] Late modernist literature as it relates to code wurk. Rob's defense of
>>> an instinctual off-hand comment. Some wit from me.
>>> [2] Jimmy Wales daughter. Alan's rejection of Lists in general.
>>> Wiki-literature and collaborative writing.
>>> Let me know your ideas!
>>> Bz
>>> ========================================================
>>>
>>>      > <I loathe "Infinite Jest" > do you? it always rather a shock
>>>      when
>>>      > *someone* one respects & admires hates *something* one loves.
>>> I do. I know I'm in a miniscule minority here. I have read the whole
>>> book, read reviews and discussions of it, and read about its genesis
>>> and
>>> production but this is a largely visceral reaction that I'm not
>>> particularly proud of. It wasn't germane to the discussion so I really
>>> shouldn't have mentioned it. I'm sorry.
>>> [1] Late modernist literature as it relates to code wurk. Rob's defense and
>>> dismissal of an instinctual and off-hand comment. Some wit from me.
>>> Of course we all must respect the brilliance set down in word by giants of
>>> contemporary literature like David Foster Wallace and Thomas Pynchon. Many
>>> followed in their tradition, and I have spent much of my waking life
>>> marveling over their foldings of language. 
>>> Yet, after reading more Marx, Foucault, Lacan, I came to believe that this
>>> genre called "post-modern literature" missed some very fundamental mark.
>>> Their hearts were in the right place, but when the future story of past
>>> thought is told, I felt these authors would be found in the narrative of our
>>> era's growing, extreme, and almost baroque excesses. That in-fact Wallace
>>> was an example of well-crafted late-Modernism, and not what comes next.
>>> That said, I think it is exactly this breakdown-in-transition IN Literature,
>>> or at least in popular academic literary analysis, that prevents Alan and
>>> Rob's critique to spread/permeate into places like Yale. 
>>> I'll give one example of why I think this. Save for very few practices an
>>> author rarely concedes crafting the social affect of their literature, nor
>>> do most academics publicly study the social function of literature as
>>> part-in-parcel with linguistic accomplishments. Not that the two fields
>>> don't sometimes overlap, but the idea of Einstein's Proofs being an example
>>> of code that is worthy of literary analysis, falls so completely flat to
>>> someone that has never considered the physical universe as a prosthetic of
>>> language. 
>>> Most bookworms gots distracted by the bindings; forgots that the words have
>>> the powers, because the words have the peoples. Maybe Lot 49 was crying
>>> because it forgot its point, or its peoples? I always felt like Pynchon was
>>> leading me on a wild goose chase toward red herrings, but then there would
>>> be these plateaus of sense-making, all too inconceivably arranged.
>>> ========================================================
>>>
>>>      Or another ugly way of putting it, I hate lists, however defined
>>>      (again) - on a personal level because someone or some group is
>>>      always excluded, and since I'm more often than not in that
>>>      group, I see them, themselves, as hegemonic in function,
>>>      although not in intention.
>>> [2] Jimmy Wales daughter. Alan's rejection of Lists in general.
>>> Wiki-literature and collaborative writing.
>>> I played legos with Jimmy Wales' daughter one time. I showed up to some
>>> random Hackathon in an attic of an old office building and there was a
>>> five-year-old playing in the corner. So I helped babysit, since there seemed
>>> to be a lack. Only to find out that the father, inventor of Wikipedia, had
>>> been mobbed and absconded in the green room, prior to his presentation to
>>> twenty or less completely unprepared "bar-camp"
>>> participant+volunteer+organizers. Childcare was not the only thing they had
>>> failed to provide, but the event is not the important part.
>>> Along the way, Jimmy uttered this amazingly concise statement on network
>>> technology; he said that wiki was the only technology that brought people
>>> together in agreement. Forums and mailing lists like this, have
>>> statistically demonstrable problems with sustainable agreement. Usually the
>>> loudest and most extreme voices push out the meager marginal voices,
>>> approaching both hegemony and harmony, and eventually banality as a room
>>> full of bullies agreeing with e'chotha'.
>>> Don't get me wrong; I love this list and I think Alan does too. None the
>>> less, Lists in general, have issues. My critique is that if, if the source
>>> code of both a forum and a wiki were fun to read, it would be the wiki that
>>> best responds to literary analysis. I believe there must be some
>>> 'functional' requirement that cannot be explained computationally,
>>> mathematically or linguistically. In this way, a wiki is more functional
>>> than a forum or mailing list, and thus its source more literary.
>>> Now, the word "function" has 15 different meanings in these contexts, so let
>>> me be specific. I am using "function" as a User Experience designer would,
>>> to mean the eventual social affect of the work. I am not talking about
>>> "functional mathematics" and I definitely am attempting to discredit "code
>>> quality". If we consider software as literature, one could write the most
>>> efficient program ever, but if it does not change someone's life or show
>>> them something special, then it has failed as literature. Imo, code as
>>> literature has even more qualifications: achievement in linguistics,
>>> readability, computational artistry, mathematical relevance and functional
>>> evocativeness.
>>> But even this 'functional' becomes its own little rabbit hole (read:
>>> problematic). Wikis are a collaborative writing engine, so to measure the
>>> social ramifications of this technology, we would have to compare all of the
>>> literature that the technology begot. Additionally, the source code, Media
>>> Wiki, has it's own lineage of forks, each of them enabling reams of
>>> derivative, affected works, ripe for analysis. Mathematically, some Media
>>> Wiki forks do super advanced shiznit with "distributed" updates and their
>>> "eventual synchrony" though this comes more from cloud computing than wiki
>>> technology. The Media Wiki source code is pretty well commented, but of
>>> course it could be more poetic if somebody had half-a-mind to write it that
>>> way.
>>> Even then, Authorship takes a nose dive into oblivion (read: existentialism)
>>> say when you consider wiki-fan-fiction to be a derivative work relevant to
>>> the reading of the source. Collaborative Writing then bares it's ugly head,
>>> and the whole situation starts to feel like families of fungi popping
>>> up, disparate yet globally connected through a vast underground (read:
>>> imperceptible) root system (read: diaspora).
>>> Then what do we have? A big ball full of yarn? notin' but electrons and
>>> economics I guess.
>>> ========================================================
>> 
>> ==
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