I came across this chapter on Unix and race by Tara McPherson (h/t Yvonne Lam on Mastodon) and couldn’t help but think about Tinderbox and the rather unique way that it enables text(s) to have context(s). I like how Tinderbox enables me to think with a computer (not doing it for me but facilitating me doing it for myself) – it’s pretty different from the linear or even other linked information architectures that I’ve come across. I’ve always appreciated the way @eastgate has shared his humanities-informed perspective on software development and how that influences his design decisions. I’d wager a proper valuing of context(s) is increasingly essential as social media and viral posts lacking context are ever more frequently driving public discussion.
Thought I’d share a couple quotes from the chapter here since some folks might also find this interesting.
Many of the methodologies of the humanities from the Cold War through the 1980s also privilege text while devaluing context and operate in their own chunked systems, suggesting telling parallels between the operating systems and privileged objects of the humanities and of the computers being developed on several university campuses in the same period. - Tara McPherson, US Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX
and also
I have here suggested that our technological formations are deeply bound up with our racial formations, and that each undergo profound changes at mid-century. I am not so much arguing that one mode is causally related to the other, but, rather, that they both represent a move toward modular knowledges, knowledges increasingly prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century. These knowledges support and enable the shift from the overt standardized bureaucracies of the 1920s and 1930s to the more dynamically modular and covert managerial systems that are increasingly prevalent as the century wears on. These latter modes of knowledge production and organization are powerful racial and technological operating systems that coincide with (and reinforce) (post-)structuralist approaches to the world within the academy. Both the computer and the lenticular lens mediate images and objects, changing their relationship but frequently suppressing that process of relation, much like the divided departments of the contemporary university. The fragmentary knowledges encouraged by many forms and experiences of the digital neatly parallel the lenticular logics which underwrite the covert racism endemic to our times, operating in potential feedback loops, supporting each other. If scholars of race have highlighted how certain tendencies within poststructuralist theory simultaneously respond to and marginalize race, this maneuver is at least partially possible because of a parallel and increasing dispersion of electronic forms across culture, forms which simultaneously enact and shape these new modes of thinking. – ibid
Yes of course. I didn’t mean it to come across that way and I’m happy to take down the post if folks prefer.
I thought it was an interesting academic piece arguing that both the development of software (in this case UNIX) and how we interact in society are influenced by broad conceptual trends (in this case the fragmentation of broader contexts with a move toward modularity).
I thought it might be of interest to folks on the forum since many think deeply about how ideas relate to one another and how to use software to capture those relationships – my thinking about sharing it here in particular is that I think Tinderbox enables the capturing or encoding of context(s) in a way that I think few other tools do, and so is in some ways an antidote to the loss of context that plagues many modern software approaches.
I found the paper well worth reading — I’ve got some notes on details if people turn out to be interested. But I also found it poorly argued.
My core objection is that McPherson never actually shows that the modularity of UNIX involves race in any meaningful or causal way. We could as easily write that the trend of women in trousers, which happened at the same time and that also involves interchangeable parts, was in some way complicit with neoliberalism.
The core ideas of computing were worked out by Viennese Jews and a British homosexual. All touch upon concepts that McPherson calls “modularity” but I don’t recall any reference to race. How many people of color did one meet in a Vienna café in 1930? I’d expect that Gödel, von Neumann, and Turing, at least, had other questions more prominently in mind as the Anschluss approached,
I also think the history is deeply faulty at several points. Modularity, in the sense that society is made up of myriad individuals who work together but who also possess inalienable rights, is a core value of the Enlightenment, not merely an expedient of late capitalist oppression. As an engineering principle, its heyday was the 19th century, not the 20th.
McPherson is also fundamentally mistaken about the nature of the digital, which is a shame because, earlier in the essay, she castigates new critics who searcher for essential natures. She’s wrong, too, about databases: normalizing data doesn’t strip it of meaningful context.
I think you’re right, though, about the way Tinderbox and its many forms of linkage can express context.
If I were interested in reading more about the influence of broader cultural milieux on software design (with a particular focus on software for thinking) and vice versa, are there authors/articles/journals/books I could start with?
Is there some academic discipline that focuses on this type of thing? For my own discipline (Biology), this would be Science and Technology Studies. Some wikipedia sleuthing has led me to articles on the social shaping of technology and the social construction of technology, which seem to be in the right space, but since I’m not a practitioner I don’t know if there are other frameworks people use when thinking about these topics.
Well, that’s the book I’m working on. This is the Next Book, though the current book, Thinking With Tinderbox (out soon from Eastgate, I promise!) is relevant. In particular, it’s got a chapter on the Software Tools as the roots of the Tinderbox streaming interface. In any case, I myself think McPherson’s opposition to modularity and containment is bizarre.
There’s a lot to explore. Right now, I’m studying Byzantine ideas about scholarship and representation, and how they relate to the fields we know. And I’m also taking a long look at those cafés in Vienna where computer science got started, and trying to connect that to the cafés where a good deal of modern art and design got started. Did Gödel, for that matter, know Max Beckmann? Did Von Neumann know Klimt? Had anyone in that circle read Leibniz?
One caveat — pertinent to McPherson, but of general applicability — is that a number of people associated with STS and Codewerk don’t really understand the elements of computer science, such as the undecidability of the Entscheidungsproblem, as well as I think one might wish.
Thinking with Tinderbox will have a bunch of suggested readings; if those aren’t enough or aren’t right, let’s take up this question in a few weeks.
(And if I’m being unjust to McPherson, I’m quite open to being convinced.)
I agree – I think this is one of the core issues with this kind of work. There are very few deeply versed in both/multiple worlds; deep in the weeds but also able to view the whole landscape. Even the best STS work on biology (some of which I have found really insightful) is often by sociologists or anthropologists or philosophers, and very rarely by someone steeped in lab/field science. I get it though, doing one thing well is often hard enough.
In anthropology there is the idea of the ‘participant observer’, but I remember long arguments in college classes about how one can never really participate fully if there remains enough distance to maintain the ‘separation’ necessary to be an observer.
I don’t have a particular horse in the race with that article, it just got me thinking about STS-type things in the context of computing paradigms in a way that hadn’t fully occurred to me before. I appreciate you engaging with it and I am now really looking forward to your Next Book.
In the wide net that you’re casting for your research, Mark, you might find Georges Ifrah’s Universal History of Numbers stimulating in the right ways. Specifically volume 3 (of 3) is nominally about the development of computers, but he begins by recapitulating the invention of number systems, and how these gave rise to systems for mechanical calculation, which when combined with the technology for automata, eventually made the creation of digital computers possible. His research (in vols 1 and 2) on number systems is remarkable, while the approach he takes to assembling a narrative of the needs that drove and the requirements for creating computers struck me as unusual and illuminating.