I wrote the following passage in a different document where, as it was kindly pointed out to me, it clearly didn’t belong. I liked it a lot when i wrote it, and wanted to figure out where it does belong in the complex of thoughts that surround it.
The words “operating system” are pretty ghastly when you think about it. You are operating a system, or it is operating you. Operation is an intrusion and a misdirection. If a system is operating you, how is it possible to bypass it, and create more time and space for you to participate in activities which you enjoy? A surprising amount of software hackers, artists and theorists have managed to get into a position like this, and so far it seems to be working out pretty well.
Our capacity to program each other with words is amazing to me.
The words that people have to use, are words created through power, for use by people with power to describe people without it: people who have not had the means to record their thoughts.
Yet some of the most powerful, vibrant languages that have existed, are patchworks created by the need of the subjugated to communicate together. English came about this way, a language fused together on a small island that was constantly overrun and re-ruled by different waves of other more powerful cultures. The language that emerged became the defacto language of power; it travelled with the Empire that had to build boats to find resources to build more boats because the island it originated in had run out of trees. Right now, English is de facto the world’s second language; the global lingua franca, a phrase which amuses S greatly, given what it reveals about the patterns of cultural/linguistic empires overwriting each other.
Some people think that one day, wol wan tok; the pattern of fusion languages created together by subjugated people under the expression of power, reforged and simplified from the vocabulary of powerful people, will fuse into one world language when it comes to be that no person is any longer subjugated, or subjugating.
I can become very carried away with my own sense of rhetorical facility. At the same time I somehow fear the expressive power of words to program and deprogram people, particularly myself. Writing here, I can indulge in flourishes; what i am trying to write in the book that is parallel to this blog, are words that are as simple and clear as i can make them be. Reading, i can often see three distinct messages in any given statement. The power we have to program the world through words is incredible.
The Collaborative International Dictionary of English is new to me. It gives a much broader and more interesting, more nuanced description of ways in which power can exist and can be used than the ontologically hierarchical, institutional WordNet, which is very much about formalising machine cognition.
To veer back to the point of this loose piece of writing: what about operating systems? What kind of a metaphor, a verbal construct and a conceptual construct is an operating system to have so very much power as it has? What we know as an operating system is a kind of framework that nothing else will work without. The free software movement may have been impelled by frustration with a printer driver, but it quickly moved towards the software core of an OS; a place to re-begin, that everything else could be rewritten upwards and downwards from.
I’d quite like to use the words co-operating system instead, because i enjoy bad pseudopuns. Perhaps i should avoid use of the word system at all. As a word it encapsulates subordination-to-other in its very being. It carries a lot of pro/anti resonance with it, accreted during its recent history of use and re-use. I want to dream up a better word to use, and somehow persuade other people to decide to share its use with me.
In English and a lot of European languages, the words that describe decision, interaction, and frameworks, are very military in origin, very oriented towards ownership of states and goals; when one breaks the words down into components, the parts often convey Man As Person in a way which jars with me.
To reprogram myself, and then to inspire or encourage others to do that to themselves, i need to find a new kind of language inside the language in which i always already interoperate, in which i think. If i want to make a language entirely new, from my own mind innately, I am concerned that I may be for a long time in the position of being unable to communicate at all, unless I find the focus and word time energy to teach another person my entire new language. To interact with a lot of people, this could be a lot of effort. Yet when I come to want to relate that word time energy to one other person, i think that person already understands.
[...] KS offered a viable redemption of the word system, which i was starting to think just couldn’t be re-used, carrying too many implications within itself of one part of a system being governed and subsumed by another. K said: the “operating system” is a system for operating the computer so you don’t need a computer operator. in that sense, “system” doesn’t imply subordination-to-other, just complex aggregation, as in general systems theory. it denotes routinization, systematization; what deming called “a process”. which is something that a person can do with no interaction with anybody else. [...]