[NetBehaviour] Code as Software as Literature

Tue Feb 4 15:37:16 CET 2014

Ah, I mis-understood. My apologies. 

••• Sent Mobile •••

On Feb 3, 2014, at 10:53 PM, Alan Sondheim <sondheim at panix.com> wrote:

> 
> 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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