hydra

love in a hive mind

jrandomhacker — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 01:33:00 +0000

Language programs our behaviour in such heavy ways; how we interrelate and decide one anothers’ fate is hedged about with possessives.

I’ve recently been involved in a couple of different kinds of governance discussions. In one, a group of decision makers is assembled, some of whom are engaged in philosophical disputations, others are rigorously attepting to make decisions. Given a majority, there is no real valid discussion. In the conversation there are a lot of assumptions about what “we need” which don’t stipulate who we are or what our problems are. We need different things depending on who talks. There’s a lot of “I think” in the conversation – exchange of opinions about things which can’t act on things – which aren’t presented in terms of immediate facts, near potential consequences. people talking about what We Need get it pointed out by a couple of others, maybe build a little circuit devoted to it in themselves.

Seven of Nine talks up the concept of a hive mind, of a borganisation – a seeming perfect vehicle for collective action. I read We, Borg then re-read bits of Hobbes’ Leviathan. Inside a hive mind, relations would be all different. “Governance structure” of a cellular network isn’t the right term; just mediation and exchange mechanisms; operations, not instructions. If this-I were inside a hive mind, i’d feel a very different kind of connection to the other-I people inside it with me.

Our words for describing relations are all possessive – emphasise difference between i and you ness, differing status, differing privileges, control ability. My brother, my friend, my staff, my wife. Of-me-ness shouldn’t be necessary. The constant stating of it can be un-learned. Action on any implicit assumption about rights, precedence, ability to tell one another what to do, can be unformed.

In all conversation between two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a common nature. That third party or common nature is not social; it is impersonal; is God.
Ralph Emerson, The Over-soul

In a hive mind there would be no such situation where “a blank I loves blankly a blank You“; love in a hive mind would be complete, or be more complete.

theosophical investigations

jrandomhacker — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:15:34 +0000

Where the remainder pile in that bookshop is concerned, i have no free will. Books often come in pairs, but today I couldn’t leave without a set of three; God’s Last Words, The Book of J, and The Devil in the Shape of a Woman.

Why am i reading about how the Bible has been read? In part this goes back to my fascination with the combination of Taoism with misogyny+anti-technology elisions in Ecclesiastes. I knew i was groundless in understanding, missing connection to a world of biblical hermeneutics, without which i’d be underequipped to think this through. I took a look at the tradition and shied right away; no ten years in a theological seminary for me, looking for questions that i’m half-sure I won’t find, finding too much that I cannot accept. S’s mother, perhaps keen to reclaim her seed’s seed for Judaism, offered God Is A Verb and a syncretic approach not unlike S’s own pick-and-mix mysticism. I enjoyed it, didn’t fire with it, and dropped the thread for some time.

Recently T drove a spike through my mind, pile-driven with puritan sermons supporting a Word-literalist worldview unlike anything i have known a peer to express; a complete and perfectly-circular honesty of intent; a meta-framework for understanding what has been meant.

The King James is a great program; it makes my thoughts ring in syncopated metre. It jars me all the time with statements like “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” (I was told that i was a witch once, by a person who otherwise called me very accurately from almost no context. This was meant in the “we are all witches” / “we are all christ” sense, but i found some “truth” (or at least “truthiness”) in the statement. (Not in the wiccan sense; i still think that’s mostly disingenuous schlock and self-involved creative anachronism.) Thus the third book I picked up; while i’m in the geopsychic hotspot of puritanism and its discontents, i might as well learn in-place about what happened here hundreds of years ago.) I’m more or less scared to get to the post-gnostic bits near the end, Paul of Tarsus‘ flashes of casual violence and offhand misogyny; how can one read past this, if one cannot draw a line in the text?

Yet if all of us have been for some time cursed; to be subordinating and subordinated; to be conflicted with desire; in communication only to be displaced; then i always want to know why, with the insistence of a six-year-old child; to help figure out how the curse is lifted. I don’t expect to find out myself, but am glad to have an extra reason to try, wanting to understand my friend.

On moving things from one place to another

jrandomhacker — Sun, 07 May 2006 01:52:57 +0000

Work on the book which led me to start blogging as a 'yak-shaving' activity, stalled halfway; I wasn't feeling connected to where I was writing it from. Essays tending to lack narrative constraint due to overambition, containing not quite enough and also too much. As i had a bit of poetry going on already, i thought i'd try to translate one. No-one has time to read work of serious length, attention is parcelled into smaller packages, even a few thousand words will probably be a chore. So this is bite-size sub-philosophy.

On Moving Things from One Place to Another

One enjoys a taste for other peoples' tastes,
tastes for things one might otherwise have never
realised existed. The other reasons to gather here
are more pragmatic; this is how energy is distributed.

You and I live in a machine for living in; space
divides us as much as it unites us; fair
in your distribution, water and waste
flowing through one place, data and energy
undivided until needed. If to be fair
is to leave an unsatisfactory compromise,
please do not be fair with me.

The sheltered citizens of this mind city
are distantly crowded about one another,
taught an infrastructure that provides
us with a necessary means to a null entity.
Given what we have, look how we have optimised
each center core; dull plenty, a pace of growth
frankly cancerous, massive size, great speed and mobility.

The city we get to build together is built
from an old machine, previously complete,
made when we were less able to communicate.
Mobility loosens our bonds to our labour
and to our relations; we are transported
into a new condition. I move towards
what my life wants, or move it towards me.
We can help each other to work best; to share
is to move things from one place to another.

As we become bigger and better, we find better
ways to get more things that we want near to us,
get the things we don't want to get away from us.
You and i can get by in the balance, each
compromise on what to endure; with more of us
in one place, the balance is harder to locate.
The spaces that we create together can be filled
or not-filled on a completely collective basis.

The arteries of public space are clogged,
as they say in Connecticut. I can't get to
where i'm going without a vehicle. I'd like to
get there with quite a few other people. I would volunteer
to move less, pay a lot more for what is brought to me,
in return for being able to connect for less effort;
shorten the circuit.

A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau

jrandomhacker — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 03:23:09 +0000

P was so kind as to send me the collected poetry of W.H. Auden (less the few poems that he repudiated as being insincere, later in life) for a birthday present. I find it grippingly readable and sometimes very affecting, and bearing a lot of resemblance to the sort of thing i'd like to be able to do:

Sometimes we see astonishingly clearly,
The out-there-when we are already in,
Now that is not what we are here-for really.

All its to-do is bound to reoccur;
is nothing there-fore that we need to say;
How then to make its compromise refer

To what could not be otherwise instead,
And has its being as its own to-be,
The once-for-all that is not seen or said?

Under the influence of Auden, I wrote a reasonably long poetic letter to Thoreau. I could bang on at it for a while longer, but sometimes it's better just to finish these things and send them. Perhaps i'll one day reach some optimistic conclusions.

A Short Letter to Henry David Thoreau

A sensible measured decision
becomes an inviolable standard;
It's not clear from the documentation
how to get out when one's stranded.

Somhow you avoided becoming branded
a cynical tout of subversion;
today not even the naive are candid;
the canon of public speech has become recursion.

Never a big fan of the establishment,
you called for "Civil Disobedience"
and tax refusal; "Government
is at best but an expedient".

"What is it but a tradition,
though a recent one, endeavoring to
transmit itself unimpaired to posterity,
but each instant losing some of its integrity?"

I don't think that much of your poetry,
to be honest, but I hear this piece
helped inspire Mahatma Gandhi
to 'Satyagraha'; resist in peace,

work hard, seek equal representation;
"Law will never make men free;"
you dictated, "it is men
who have got to make the law free,"

"That government is best which governs not at all",
doesn't bankroll the new downtowns,
bunker its embassies, respond to heaven's call
or declare war on abstract nouns.

We investigate the space around
us, looking for the world, for all
that are unsatisfied with what we've found;
unable correctly to make or hear the call.

We are vulnerable in numbers,
it takes practise to stay of sound
mind, and our effort to share endangers
the profit to be found in rallying round.

Lewis Mumford saw a lot coming;
he thought that Marx had it all figured
out, saw the structure's future becoming,
the tend to collectivisation that he triggered.

He says that at each shift, a successor machine
helps a system that's not of its essence
to prosper; to automate mental routine,
to oppress people and to compel acquiescence.

I hear often, "the best lack all conviction,
while the worst are full of passionate
intensity"; our laws have become science fiction,
the sum of our customs extortionate.

Most people scurry and scrap, a few become fat
off the land; the rest suffer retaliatory eviction
from public space; cut out of a silly spat
that is quite indifferent to ex-urban dereliction,

Suburban isolation, post-industrial flatlining,
collapsing infrastructure, tit-for-tat
planning; oh, please forgive me for whining;
if we can fix this, if only we can see that.

One may still visit Walden Pond; your shack
is painfully reconstructed; a fence
keeps the wanderer on a predefined track,
within two hundred yards the suburbs start to condense.

"Let everyone make known what kind of government
would command their respect,
and that will be one step toward obtaining it."
Sir, with the greatest of my respect,

I am your servant.

skewed distribution

jrandomhacker — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 20:33:09 +0000

I was lucky enough to spend time with RG recently, and i had a fun conversation with him about singularity related optimism, positivism. He talked of Information-carrying, information-sharing objects, simple replicators, a revolutionary potential therein, in the Bruce Sterling type narrative, to provide a basic level of material support to every person on the planet. A level of sufficiency that could guarantee 100% literacy, time for every person to pursue their interests, to participate in the collective genius.

It’s a good narrative, but i wonder what basis there is for equitable and ubiquitous availability of technologies like this. The suggestion that at a certain point in development, a new infrastructure will reach everywhere at once, very fast, is appealing. I wonder how replicators will be powered, will be distributed from place to place; i wonder how an economic system based on the allocation of scarce resources and pricing by establishment of arbitrary scarcity, will encourage the distribution of powerful ne technologies. My offering to RG on this subject was the following anecdote which i read on a mailing list, a few months ago.

When a project put recycled computers into rural Indian villages without providing expensive training or support, the kids were able to figure it out for themselves — against received judgment. Well, the boys were able to pick it up for themselves — the girls were firmly told they weren’t even allowed to enter the shed where the computer had been deployed. I saw film of the boys crowding around the terminal whilst a couple of girls lurked about longingly outside the shed and most girls retreated to discuss the novelty at a safe distance. The boys treated the equipment with respect and formed heirarchies amongst themselves for access to the computer and for the provision of solutions to problems they encountered… the boys narrated the exclusion of the girls in terms of “propriety” (they shouldn’t mix with boys in physical proximity around the computer).

Imbalance can become a license to profit.

Distribution can become skewed according to the distribution of distribution networks.

The narrative of such as Bruce Sterling, of Kurzweil, does not reflect on the nested complex of social-environmental factors around it, that has always been problematic for me. I don’t mean to deny the potency of such a narrative, but it is the creation of a bubble of apparent prosperity which contains the occlusion, the unvisibility, of many kinds of people.

I think i still hold to my weird theory about the singularity: i don’t think we see a big shift, a kind of “Boom!”, everywhere at once, but a series of supercessing waves, each building on the last. I don’t think there is a need for a totalising narrative; shared stories differ in every place.

a kind of kindness in kinds

jrandomhacker — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 05:20:03 +0000

I have become used to thinking of what RC has been calling “datamancy” as something that one does only with abstract information networks. I remember that a network of interconnected information is something I used to find in words in the world, and still do now. I recall one summer when i read three books in a row, of different provenance, each of which talked about an Armenian restaurant. I’ve still never been to eat an Armenian. When i read my notes from that time, half a year later, they formed messages to the future me, with an unnerving accuracy. So datamancy has come to work alongside psychogeomancy for me, because it always did; they are/become the same thing, become complementary.

A couple of months back, on a random walk, I found two volumes of science fiction classics in a soggy box in the street, outside a bookshop that often draws me in to find something that i discover i need. I dried the books out on the radiator and ate them up.
One of the volumes contained …And Then There Were None, which i was happy to find out was already a reference text for the classic community currency movement. It also contained A Rose For Ecclesiastes; i can’t say that i really enjoy this, the indulgent poesy of it grates at me, as does the ambient misogyny of so much of the otherwise wonderful writing of that group of people at that time. The story did, however, send me off to look at the text of Ecclesiastes, to figure out what all the fuss was about.

A little while before that, i’d found for the first time a truth that made sense to me while reading the Tao Te Ching, after about three nonchalant passes over it in the past when it had made no sense for me. I had what i felt was a structural realisation about Ecclesiastes then: that the Tao Te Ching is an ur-text for it; they join in enough places to convey the same sense; the second must have directly informed the first. They contain least one common message that helped inspire me to try to put some essays together touching on balance in technology, on why we build the things that we build, in a light of postgenderism, and postdualism. I wrote in email at the time:

The things that we build, they have what we perceive
to be divisive, destructive uses, and they have apparently creative,
constructive uses, and they can look and behave like just the same uses. And i don’t think it is possible to not-build, only to not-apply. But i have yet to find a “religious” message which is in favour of building, but plenty in favour of not-building.

I formed a realisation that messages in fear of tools that help build tools, and messages in fear of women, are aspects of the same complex, the same kind of pathology of fear. Be careful what you build, in case you build something that bites you; safer to build nothing at all. Be careful what you think, in case you think something that breaks you; safer to think nothing at all.

Of all the essays i’m trying to express, this is the one that feels like the most struggle. It’s the ground on which i’m least sure-footed; the best place to demonstrate the power of ignorance, yet the place that wants to set me off on six months to six years of new research. Most of the other ideas have been with me for a long time, feel fairly simple, and i think i can enunciate them clearly. While writing towards the book, each time i want to use a word of three or more syllables, i check myself and try to re-explain; but the Eccleasiastes thread almost compels me to drop in phallologocentrism as a given.

While random walking, i feel a tug in a certain direction, into the reach of some aesthetic object that i can’t quite see. With ideas, this feels natural; linearity as a narrative form, is a path traversed through a complex of forms which is massively N-dimensional. In the world, objects that contain ideas produce the strongest tugs; i find myself unconsciously dowsing for books.

In the remainder pile in that same bookshop i picked up Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Civilization Vol 1 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano at the same time. The latter is a parable of fear, that helped me explore an extreme difficulty i’d come to feel in building very descriptive local information systems, innately public, whose future uses are impossible to predict or control. The former helped me come to terms with my own tool-building, concept-organising compulsions. It explained to me that what i have always wanted to build is not something carrying an innately coercive, suppressive capacity that deserves to be resisted; but is a neutral good that works differently according to the cultural structures around it, and deserves to be constantly reinspected. A soft architecture, always being re-formed as our needs change.
The new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid out by previous economic and technical structures.

I’m digressing wildly, and did not mean to talk about the theory of the PaleoInformation Age right now. I meant to talk about yesterday’s tug into that same bookshop, down to the remainder basement, towards a pile of Stephen David Ross’ The Gift of Kinds, which i opened at random where my eyes lit on this:

The dangerous magic of technology. The exalting magic of language, Griffin’s pronouns linking nature and women in domination and celebration; linking as exposure, mimesis and proximity. All who live in the earth, where every creature and thing speaks, knows, touches other creatures and things in proximity, endlessly exposed to others.

A small part of me wanted to resist walking away with this book; while i am trying to write something clear to me, superconscious of my own ignorance, others’ readings can too easily distract me into a kind of psychic masturbation. But it sets up a lot of resonance in me, in my dippings into it. In just the first few pages the author touches on WePrime, the dissociative effect of pronouns, post-duality and goodwill economy. I feel glad to see a similar narrative so clearly nearby, and so threaded through with reference points to philosophical texts that people have told me i should reify my ideas against, that Ross’ work offers a shortcut to.

On the other side of town today, i found myself in another bookshop with one of its companion volumes, The Gift of Truth, in my hands. Ross’ writing style reminds me of nothing so much as James Kelman’s Translated Accounts, a book which fascinates me, which i find something new in each time i lose a copy and acquire a new one, as if the words shift subtly in each instance of it. A self-conscious tone of machine-mediated writing from the future, intentionally broken in flow and in syntax, leaving an impression of knowledge intuited, waiting to be found. It always made sense to me, made more sense for me to read books in parallel, think about them in parallel, just as binocular vision offers better depth perception. I wanted to drop two excerpts from the Ross books that here, that i will be able to return to and remember and find more, or less, sense in.

A philosophy, an ethics, without contested borders is no philosophy, no ethics, at all. Philosophy and ethics are geophilosophy and geoethics. Yet geography cannot contain its borders, takes the gift of the earth for granted and the endless responsibilities from it, to find oneself a place, in place, and to resist every domination of place.

The goods and truths we know, within the ordinance of time, respond to something beyond time, immeasurable. Desire is the name for this excess, giving itself excessively everywhere, instituting a circulation beyond any restricted economy. Whatever desire touches goes to excess. Desire is the memory of the good.

I don’t pretend in the writing or in the software that i make to create new ideas; if i arrive a point where this or that Greek had been at thousands of years before me, i shall feel vindicated, or at least terribly cheerful. But if i can see enough to be going on with, then i want, by placing one idea next to another, by drawing threads visibly through them, to help immanentise connections that have always been.

What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun.

reflections on systems and subjects

jrandomhacker — Fri, 03 Feb 2006 14:28:58 +0000

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

jrandomhacker — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 13:38:54 +0000

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.

what WePrime means to me

jrandomhacker — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 10:39:55 +0000

I wanted to use this space to start clarifying what i have meant when i have talked about WePrime, because a couple of people who have asked me about it, seem to think i meant something different and more direct than I intended, when i used the term.

The word WePrime started as a play on E-Prime. I just found this piece by Robert Anton Wilson that describes E-Prime more fully than i want to here. In short, E-prime, a form of English that does not use the word ‘is’ in a definitive way, works at demonstrating that one can indeed write and speak without using any form of “to be”. I find it hard to talk about E-Prime or We-Prime while staying E-Prime without sounding prim or verbose, so i’m not going to attmept that here.

In PS’s lovely phrase regarding something completely different, E-Prime works for me as a kind of mental foundation garment. In those terms, it feels nice to be able to take the foundation garment off and relax sometimes. For me, E-Prime works as a nice way of keeping in check a tendency that i sometimes have to be super-judgemental, especially about the aesthetics of the written word and about other peoples’ books.

WePrime also works as a kind of rhetorical foundation garment. But WePrime is not intended to be a flavour of English which doesn’t use the word ‘we’ at all; though i found a short experiment with the technique of avoiding any reference to we, to be interesting and useful to me when i first started thinking about what WePrime is, how it works.

WePrime is a way of looking harder at what We are doing when We talk about what We need to do, how We must act, what Our priorities should be. It can be very easy to make these kinds of blanket statements; It can be very easy to talk about ourselves, within ourselves, without feeling the need to make explicit references to who We are.

Yet when We move outwards and try to connect to more people, to find others who share ideas that look like ours, or to find others receptive to having our ideas; We can’t rely on that assumption any more. If We talk about who We are, what We believe in, how We define ourselves, in public, it becomes easier for others who want to share in our ideas to find us. But to do that, we have to make internal agreements about who We are. If We spontaneously arise between ourselves, We make statements that can seem exclusive, divisive, to people who don’t identify as We.

If someone is making statements about the We that they are part of, but i do not know them well, or know them at all, and i that person is not providing a clear means for me to look up the referent of We; i become suspicious. In this context, We looks like a rather old-fashioned rhetorical trick, used to help compel a mass of people to belong to or support a cause, without revealing how the organisers of that cause are motivated, without talking about how they describe themselves internally.

But that internal, ongoing group discussion about principles, identities, can quickly turn into ontological soup. My referent here is the classic of the feminist consensus organising tradition, The Tyranny of Structurelessness. Groups that attempt to organise by a rigorous process of total consensus in every decision, come to slow down, suffer groupthink, because people end up working around consensus informally and out-of-band, in subgroups formed by friendship groups. The formal consensus process becomes little more than a ritual of people who either know about a subtextual conversation or don’t, shouting about What We Need Now at each other. So WePrime for me is a strategy for being more circumspect about what is being assumed inside a decision making process, which hopefully helps to throw it off recursive, repeitive tracks which become much more about semantics than about goals and dreams.

Yet We can also be terribly useful. If a clear referent is provided, and maintained as something current over time, then it is convenient shorthand for spelling out peoples’ names.

People who’ve read Soren Kierkegaard and run across WePrime have said, “ah – click – Kierkegaard”. Among the many things that Kierkegaard said during his life was this (although, presumably, he said it in Danish; and on sight I distrust Victorian era English translations):

“What rules the world is not exactly the fear of God but fear of
Man. Hence this dread of being a single individual and this proneness
to hide beneath one or other abstraction, hence the anonymity, hence
the editorial ‘we’ etc.”

I sense that We is falling out of fashion in the discourse of power, of control, of contracts. When i first “got” WePrime, it really drew my attention to certain kinds of political statements. Now i seem to see those kinds of political statements less in the world: what i hear coming from those quarters is a new kind of emphasis on You.

This is an interesting factoid that S found out while attempting to bring a new kind of sophistication to the spam filtering on our email system, playing around with different linguistic analysis techniques:

Spam messages are almost identifiable simply by their relative overuse of the word ‘you’, in comparison with messages that are actually communicating.

When i am in a WePrime quandary it helps me to write terrible zen poetry. I notice that We, like suspicion itself, is a powerful dual device in English. One can refer to two kinds of We, in the same terms, appearing to have the same sense, looking the same in their actions, but with a very different quality of intention in the different qualities of We, and the ways in which We are used to induce an impetus to action in people around us.

Kierkegaard’s Fear of Man also seems to be falling out of fashion, as We regain some balance. The sense in which We can be used as a control instrument starts to recede, as We get the monkey off our backs. A different kind of integral We, that was always hidden underneath the dialectical We, starts to re-emerge. To notice a new kind of We emerging can be wonderful. To me this is another core topic that can’t be fruitfully examined, or understood, by staring at it directly. Then i think of that wonderful line from the Bruce Lee movie, Enter the Dragon:

“It is like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory”

advaita, or so i am told

jrandomhacker — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 16:24:29 +0000

A friend of mine once took me along to a kind of postmodern sorority party in West Oakland. My friend was the only non-female at the party (he was DJing, and i think wanted me along as the functional equivalent of a “beard” – a “muff?”). The crowd were all peers, all about 10 years younger than me, and having a triumphant experiment with the cultural stance of lesbianism.

What blew my mind, was that everyone there was mimicking the polarisation of gendered self-representation which is in the world around them. They were either in baggy plaid shirts, jeans and shaved heads, or terribly, ostentatiously femme, long hair and lipstick and PVC miniskirts. No-one there really knew how to look at me or talk to me; you have short hair, but you’re wearing a skirt? Where do you fit? How do you fit? I spent most of my time at the party hanging out with a couple of gangster girls who didn’t fit either (long hair, but jeans and black t-shirts), who taught me to make the different West Oakland gangster hand signs, and tried to explain which ones not to make where.

Another friend took me to a transvestite party in the basement of a nondescript office building on the edge of the City. I’d never been in a scene like that before, but once my eyes refocused, i started to relax and have a great time right away. My highlight was, taking a break from the dancefloor and gossiping in a corner; my friend gleefully pointed out a particularly beautiful and unusual person across the room. “You see that girl, there? She’s really a girl!“

In the course of what i do, because i enjoy talking about the toys that i make, i speak at a lot of open-source oriented technical conferences. More than once, especially when i started out, i’ve been billed as ‘Mr.’ on the programme. It often seems to be a default assumption about any active and vocal technologist.

It used to drive me crazy, when i first became a software hacker and started going to meetups and talks by Famous Geeks, how unbalanced the “gender ratio” was. I got used to being one of three women in a room of 150 people (usually me, the Lost Journalist and the Fearsome Stalwart), or the only woman in a gathering of 20 people. I saw one technical community i was involved in, really change shape, gain balance over the time i was there, following a slow momentum. I moved away for a long time, and when i came back to visit, the balance was gone again.

Ten years later, the balance does not publically, visibly seem to be getting better. I didn’t start speaking at technical conferences because i wanted to address this; i just wanted to spread messages about the tool-building techniques, the evocative prototype applications, that were burning a hole in my head. I used to think i got more slots than i “deserved”, because conference organisers are concerned about addressing gender balance issues in who they put on the stage. I come to realise that most people don’t even think about it.

At a big Euro Open Source conference last year, i got hauled in, right at the last minute, onto a panel on “Women in Open Source”. I felt abashed about it, because the other panellists were all Big Names with Big Affiliations. But that was not the only reason i did not think that i belonged there.
It’s such a difficult thing to resolve. Back in 2001 i met a lot of people from the original genderchangers – a group who’d all got together to teach each other computer recycling, linux sysadmin and hacking, because they felt more comfortable that way, had more fun, and got to throw off their dependencies. I tried for a while to start my own local chapter. There was an internal imbalance in the people i knew; they were either hardcore , Sun-trained network admin gurus, who weren’t really motivated by teaching because there didn’t seem to be much they could learn; or they were complete newbies, very enthusiastic, but without enough bootstrap knowledge to teach linux to each other collaboratively.

Recently, I hear a lot more people trying to make noise about the appearance and possible reality of gender imbalance in open source software culture. Gender Dimensions of FLOSS development was a recent summary article in MetaMute – they tend to notice a lot of things just before they come to the surface. The article claims that only 1% of people actively involved in open source software development are non-male. I struggle to believe that absolute; but even if the true figure (echoed in the balance at technical conferences) is 5%, that’s still really not very good.

This is one of the cores of what i am talking about, here on this blog and in the book, but it’s part of a nested complex of shared cores: not, i think, something that can be “fixed” on its own, especially by staring harder at it directly, by selecting highlights of hackers who represent an ideal of women’s engagement in the many different threads of how the open source software creation process, the open source culture process, generally work. I tend to think that the bar to casual contribution, of an improvement however small, however irrelevant, is often set too high; it takes a long time to bootstrap yourself into the position where you have the skills, and the rights, to commit to a project.

Ubuntu Linux seems to be thinking about this pretty hard – i see tabs on some of the system user interface saying things like “Translate this into your own language right now”. I wonder how this process works on the inside; is someone at Ubuntu always watching, being rapidly helpful, encouraging. I hope the people making even the tiniest contributions are being given a conduit through which they can read a message which says,

Your smallest action improved the life and effort of someone who’s working really hard at being committed to this.