reflections on systems and subjects February 3, 2006

I was offered a couple of reflections on recent writing that i wanted to note here.

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.

My initial brief reaction was; even in a system which is wholly and only comprised of myself, there is still a kind of subordination of part to whole inside the relation. Then i realised that i was probably slipping into the category error that Ken Wilber talks about in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality; given the thought tendencies towards postmodernism and feminism that i already have running, i’m overly inclined to view an aggregating hierarchy with structural suspicion.

But one can re-view this in terms of a holarchy of part-whole relations. When i first read SES i was thinking very intensely about software, so i read in it a story about the software i enjoyed making and enjoyed using. I definitely saw in Unix/Linux a holarchy; kernel space, user space, network space.

My own software design was was like an onion with another onion inside. First, the originally envisaged set of components, each built on top of the other, was completed. The the outer part of the onion ring emerged. The components in the outer layers of the ring co-operated with each other. Each would work in-and-of-itself and do one thing reasonably well. They shared a world model and knowledge base which formed by the inner-onion, so when one part-hole was used alongside the other, the outer layers became more powerful with almost no extra effort. My software design reach has always outpaced my software implementation grasp somewhat; i felt compelled to Stop Coding, waiting for the depth of data available in the world around me to catch up with what i was trying to achieve by aggregating, re-annotating and re-publishing that data.

The systems discussion also reminded me of Christopher Alexander’s early work, Notes on the Synthesis of Form, and being able to make systems work better by identifying subsystems into which the inputs and outputs could be identified, treated as black boxes. Alexander’s later collaborative work on A Pattern Language constitutes in part a transcendence of the appealing over-formalism in his individual Notes, yet his two works share a spirit, drive from the same place. A Pattern Language and its companion volumes were more or less rejected as trendy Californian holism by the architectural establishment. But in the 1980s they came to inspire a whole group of people who were trying to think about software architecture in a new way. The original wiki was created in order to discuss and work out the practise of Alexandrian theories of software creation in a collaborative way, in a spirit of every-document-writable-by-all which was very much the spirit of the World Wide Web when it started – the first client software to it was for writing first, not for reading first. So it goes…

FT offered a wiki link as a commentary on the terrible zen poetry i wrote about WePrime; a description of the Subject-object problem which included this:

The range of pronouns available in a language is a key influence on how the subjects and objects are perceived by any native speaker of that language as a mother tongue.

WePrime reflects that because We only have one kind of We available to us, We can hide one kind of We behind another; We can play enjoyable games with the semantics of We; We can also become caught up in codecisions about who We are. If We had the ability to semantically differentiate with different pronouns for up to six different kinds of We, perhaps We’d have better tools to help us have Governance Discussions while actually enjoying them, and actually getting somewhere.

I did once write a manifesto and get a goodish pile of people to sign it. It was something i had to be talked into doing quite resolutely. Once it was done, i felt good about having done it; it became a useful reference point in future discussions about the same subject. It was an indicator that a lot of different classes of people were affected by something that prevented them from pursuing personal and professional happiness through their own interests. I tried to keep the manifesto itself WePrime: the we was only instantiated by the list of signatories; the messages were just statements of common sense. As Douglas Adams wrote, perhaps not verbatim but in words very like these:
Common sense won’t help us; we have to help each other.

co-operating systems February 1, 2006

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.