homophobia in tech: took 50 years for admission that JvN's arch (sic) was Turing's. "it was only after the the war that we learned he was a homosexual. it was lucky the security people didn't know about it early on, because if they had known, he might not have obtained his security clearance and we might have lost the war." -- I J GOOD, NPL from hist comp 20th C, MIT Press what's a "website" document vs cms-driven ref: ALMANAC OF THE DEAD p224 "rocks all look the same" relates to to-simon below. p227 on photographs as representation m28 printing long, nice closeups https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1BYGNj-L_Y BBS on coleco adam, eg. "glass tty" reddit on tty! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C9N-TktncM "Even though the CPU does not intrinsically recognize one information type from another, the different instructions in the instruction set expect that the information to be operated on will be in a specific format." (From the Data General NOVA 4 Programmer's Manual, ca 1980) but the utterance is year-independent. we've all heard these categorical statements forever. It's just nonsense. we all twist our brains into pretzels for it to make sense -- that although the CPU is agnostic to information, that all information is fungible, it also expects that information to conform to a [quite stringent] fixed format, given in the rigorous pages that immediately follow the above assertion. i'm not even taking advantage of lack-of-context here. It's the first statement in the "INFORMATION REPRESENTATION" section. Its it's own introduction! The ideology of the purity of god's love, or bit patterns in computer memory, is muddied only by mere reality. But why is the interchangeability of information (sic) even desirable? or achievable? or who cares? where'd that itself come from? How do we even get through a day? NEEDS CLARITY (just read an amazing chapter in a novel by leslie marmon silko; it gets across the profoundness of ruinous cultural assumptions of europeans, in contact with natives in 19th C.  regarding the hunt for 'geronimo', confusing a rallying cry for the utterer, there were at one time multiple 'geronimo's pursued. in the brutal hunting of suspects, lured into TX/AZ badlands, the locals consistently evaded the white/spanish mercenaries ... europeans got lost in the desert because 'all narrow rocky arroyos look alike' while the locals knew each of them individually, they were known by name and description and color and character. the european hunters just saw 'narrow rocky arroyo'. our taxonomies reduce things in the world to instantiations of categorical existence. rocks differ in their makeup, but a rock is a rock, an arroyo an arroyo. looking over an ancient weathered plain, we are taught to see countless nearly identical features; we seek the commonalities, not the individuals. uninterested in the time-consuming individuality of an unimportant, 'useless' landscape, there is, almost literally, nothing to see. 'once they have a word for a thing, they can no longer see the thing itself'. the insistence that 'all rocks look the same' is like a Sapir-Worth-type recursion... and therein lies the ruination of commercialized public verbal culture; everything reduced to fungible text, a death threat at one pole of a linear scale, a love letter on the other.) there is nothing in the nature of the stored-program computer that affords any insight into the functioning of the brain. 'the brain is like clockwork' 'the brain is like a steam engine' 'the brain is like the telephone network' 'the brain is like a computer' 'the brain is like a network' none of these are remotely 'true'. once we have a word for a thing, the word replaces the thing. the internet is based upon a corporate model, not the 'mil-redundancy' story. growth and cost-cutting foremost. resources shift to avoid legal/political or other limits (trans-national data accumulation and storage). growth (maximum) cost (lowest) profit (highest) are foremost; redundancy is in service to those criteria above all. not the alleged mil requirement of reliability (which is counter to lowest-cost, and where growth is immaterial). HISTORY OF COMPUTER INNOVATION: the earliest development in computational machinery (pre C20) was in mathematics-dependent fields (ref ROCKS AND CODE) and as C20 approaached, heavily physics. these scientific fields have a long history of openly engaged and consciously rigorous discussion and methodology, eg. the "scieintific process", university/academic critique, etc. the wartime (ww2) needs of math-heavy technologies (war machinery, ballistics, crypto, logistics) eventually drew heaviliy from various scientific communities in ways that are now fairly well documented. however those "clients", the military and their corporate suppliers, did/do not have the intellectual culture to satisfy these needs. the social collision of these cultures is also reasonably well documented, but i think the historic implications are not fully grasped even today: in short, that the initial explosion of novel design and thinking dissipated quite quickly as industry (and mil) assimilated the results of this most early work, and rapidly purged computing and related of its novel thinkers, as it routinized development and production. the open source movement is the final historical vestivge of this earlier computing culture. it is a direct descendent of the "user group", which dates back to computing's earliest post-war history (IBM SHARE, DECUS, etc; tape-based distribution, ... --> shareware/freeware). SITES THAT FULFILL 1995 INTERNET PROMISES: wikipedia github discogs 4chan slashdot? fora "linux" "open source" MICHAEL WARNER: PUBLICS AND COUNTERPUBLICS (2005) what is a public? what's a counterpublic? 1. a public is self-organized. by nothing other than the discourse itself. 2. a public is a relation among strangers. 3. the address of public speech is both personal and impersonal. (self and strangers) 4. a public is constituted through mere attention. (nations, classes, ... are not publics) 5. a public is the social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse. (a text or sender is not a public; discourse is) 6. publics act historically according to the temporality of their circulation. (publics/culture are ongoing/evolving, not timeles) 7. a public is poetic world-making. (public discourse says 'let a public exist this way, and have this character, see the world this way'.) Paul Goodman Reflections on the Anarchist Principle Anarchism is grounded in a rather definite proposition: that valuable behavior occurs only by the free and direct response of individuals or voluntary groups to the conditions presented by the historical environment. It claims that in most human affairs, whether political, economic, military, religious, moral, pedagogic, or cultural, more harm than good results from coercion, top-down direction, central authority, bureaucracy, jails, conscription, States, preordained standardization, excessive planning, etc. Anarchists want to increase intrinsic functioning and diminish extrinsic power. This is a social-psychological hypothesis with obvious political implications. Depending on varying historical conditions that present various threats to the anarchist principle, anarchists have laid their emphasis in varying places: sometimes agrarian, sometimes free-city and guild-oriented; sometimes technological, sometimes anti-technological; sometimes communist, sometimes affirming property; sometimes individualist, sometimes collective; sometimes speaking of Liberty as almost an absolute good, sometimes relying on custom and “nature.” Nevertheless, despite these differences, anarchists seldom fail to recognize one another, and they do not consider the differences to be incompatibilities. Consider a crucial modern problem, violence. Guerrilla fighting has been a classical anarchist technique; yet where, especially in modern conditions, any violent means tends to reinforce centralism and authoritarianism, anarchists have tended to see the beauty of non-violence. Now the anarchist principle is by and large true. And far from being “Utopian” or a “glorious failure,” it has proved itself and won out in many spectacular historical crises. In the period of mercantilism and patents royal, free enterprise by joint stock companies was anarchist. The Jeffersonian bill of rights and independent judiciary were anarchist. Congregational churches were anarchist. Progressive education was anarchist. The free cities and corporate law in the feudal system were anarchist. At present, the civil rights movement in the United States has been almost classically decentralist and anarchist And so forth, down to details like free access in public libraries. Of course, to later historians, these things do not seem to be anarchist, but in their own time they were all regarded as such and often literally called such, with the usual dire threats of chaos. But this relativity of the anarchist principle to the actual situation is of the essence of anarchism. There cannot be a history of anarchism in the sense of establishing a permanent state of things called “anarchist.” It is always a continual coping with the next situation, and a vigilance to make sure that past freedoms are not lost and do not turn into the opposite, as free enterprise turned into wage-slavery and monopoly capitalism, or the independent judiciary turned into a monopoly of courts, cops, and lawyers, or free education turned into School Systems.