[ExI] The Codescape

The Avantguardian avantguardian2020 at yahoo.com
Mon Nov 8 00:40:58 UTC 2010


I liked your post on the codescape, Emlyn. The interesting thing from my 
perspective is how much it has changed in my lifetime. When I was a kid, knowing 
even a single programming language made you (un)cool. These days you need to 
know almost half a dozen to put together a decent website. And if you want to 
be a serious codejockey, you need to know about a dozen. That's quite a bit 
different from the way meatspace works where most people know one or two 
languages and get by just fine. IMO what the codescape needs is a "lingua 
franca".  
 Stuart LaForge 

“To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.” -Carl Jung 



----- Original Message ----
> From: Emlyn <emlynoregan at gmail.com>
> To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
> Sent: Fri, November 5, 2010 9:02:01 PM
> Subject: [ExI] The Codescape
> 
> Hi all, sorry I haven't been around for a while, coding ;-) But I
> thought this bit that I just wrote was on topic for the list.
> 
> ---
> 
> http://point7.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/the-codescape/
> 
> There’s this incredible place where I like to spend a lot of my time.
> Everyone I know is near it, closer every day, but mostly they don’t
> come in.
> 
> When I was a kid, it barely existed, except in corporates and
> universities, but it expanded slowly. There wasn’t much you could do,
> even after it began to really explode through the 90s. But lately it’s
> become somewhere new, somewhere much bigger, somewhere much more
> interesting.
> 
> It’s a place I call the Codescape, and it’s becoming the platform on
> which the whole world runs.
> 
> The Codescape is simply the space of all computer programs (code)
> spanning the world. The internet is implemented in it, but it is not
> the ‘net. “The Cloud” is one of the more interesting pieces of it, but
> it is not the cloud. It exists in every general purpose machine, as
> soon as anyone tries to make it run code. Some of it is in your
> computer, some is in your phone, there’s even a little bit in your
> car. There might be a tiny pocket in your pacemaker.
> 
> In fact it’s something that many of us grew accustomed to thinking of
> as a lot of isolated little pocket worlds – the place inside one
> machine or the place inside one network. It’s related to the computer
> scientist’s platonic space of pure code-as-mathematics, but it is
> really the gritty, logical-physical half-world of the running program
> instances, and the sharp edged, capricious, often noxious rules that
> real running environments bring. It is the space of endless edge
> cases, failures, unforseen and unforeseeable interactions between your
> own code and dimly perceived layers built by others.
> 
> The platonic vision of the code is a trick, an illusion. We like to
> fool ourselves into thinking that we can create software like one
> might do maths, in a tower of the mind, all axioms and formal system
> rules known and accounted for, and the program created inside those
> constraints like a beautiful fractal, eternal in its elegance and
> parsimony. Less a construct than a discovery.
> 
> The platonic code feels like a clean creation in the world of vision
> and symbols. Code is something you can see, after all, expressed as a
> form of writing. If you spend long enough away from the machines, you
> can think this is the real thing, mistake the map for the territory.
> 
> But the real Codescape isn’t amenable to this at all. It is a dark
> place and a silent place. You know you are in the Codescape because
> your primary sensory modalities are touch, smell, and frankly, raw
> instinct.
> 
> It is an environment composed of APIs, system layers, protocols and,
> ultimately, raw bytes. It is an environment where the code vibrates in
> time with the thrumming of the hardware. You feel through this
> environment, trying to understand the shapes, reach perfectly into
> rough, edged crenelations, looking for that sensation of lock, the
> successful grasp. Always, though, you are ready for the feeling of an
> unexpected sharp edge, a hot surface, the smell of something turned
> bad, the tingle of your spidey sense.
> 
> It is a place that you can’t physically be in, but you can project
> yourself into. The lines of code are like tendrils, or tentacles, or
> maybe like a trail of ants reaching out from the nest. That
> painstaking projection, and the mapping of monkey senses and instincts
> to new purposes, turns most people off, but I think those of us most
> comfortable with it find the physical world similar. Possibly less
> abstractable, and so more alien. Certainly dumber.
> 
> Oddly enough, we don’t talk about codespace much. It isn’t because we
> don’t want to, but because largely we cannot. We who travel freely
> between worlds often can’t express it, because it is a place of system
> and not of narrative.
> 
> During periods of hype (mostly about the internet), a lot of bad
> novels and terrible movies get written about it (while missing it
> entirely), with gee-whiz 3D graphics and faux h4XX0r jargon. Sometimes
> some of us are even fooled by this, and so we pay unfortunate
> obeisance to notions like “virtual reality” and “cyberspace”, and
> construct things like 3D corporate meeting places, or Second Life, or
> World of Warcraft. Those are bonefide places, good for the illiterate,
> and a pleasant place to unwind for people of the code. They even
> contain little pockets of bone fide codescape inside themselves –
> proper, first-class codescape, because all of the codescape is as real
> as the rest. But there is something garrish, gauche about these 3D
> worlds, like the shopping mall inside an airport, divorced from the
> country in which it physically exists.
> 
> The main codescape now, as it exists in 2010, is like the mother of
> all MMOs. Many, many of us, those who can walk it (how many? hundreds
> of thousands?) play together in the untamed, expanding chaos of a
> world tied together by software and networks. Each of us play for our
> own reasons; some for profit, some for potential power, some for
> attention, and many of us, increasingly, for individual autonomy and
> personal expression.
> 
> It’s a weird place. It’s never really been cool (although it’s come
> close at times), because the kinds of people who decide on what’s cool
> can’t even see it. These days the cool kids (like Wired, or Make
> Magazine, or BoingBoing) like open hardware, or physical making. But
> everything interesting is being enabled by software, more and more and
> more software, and so becomes at heart a projection out of the
> Codescape.
> 
> Douglas Rushkoff’s recent book, “Program or be Programmed”, talks
> about how we are now living in this world where what I call the
> Codescape is shaping the lives of everyone, and where we are divided
> into the code-literate and not. His book is mostly dreary complaining
> that it’s all too hard and the ‘net should be more like it was in the
> 90s (joining an increasing chorus of 90s technorati who are finding
> themselves unable to keep up), but that first sentiment is absolutely
> spot on. If you can code, then, if you so choose, you can feel your
> way through codespace, explore the shifting landscape, and maybe carve
> out part of it in the shape of your own imaginings. Otherwise, you get
> internet-as-shiny-shopping-mall, a landscape of opaque gadgets,
> endless ads, monthly fees, and the faint suspicion that you are being
> constantly conned by fagan-esque gangs.
> 
> I contend that if you care about personal autonomy, about freedom, in
> the 21st century, then you really should try to be part of this world.
> Perhaps for the first time, the potential for individuals is rivalling
> that of corporate entities. There is cheap and free server time on
> offer, high level environments into which you can project your
> codebase. The protocols are open, the documentation (sometimes just
> code itself) is free and freely available. Even the very best
> programming tools are free. If you can acquire the skills and the
> motivation, you can walk the Codescape with nothing more than an
> internet connection, a $100 chinese netbook, and your own wits. There
> is no barrier to entry, other than your ability to twist your mind
> into the shape that the proper incantations demand.
> 
> Everything has a programmable API, which you can access and play with
> and create with if you are prepared to make the effort. At your
> fingertips are the knowledge and information resources of the world,
> plus the social interactions of 2 billion humans and counting, plus a
> growing resource of inputs and outputs in the physical world with
> which you can see and act.
> 
> It’s a new frontier, expanding faster than we can explore and settle
> it. It’s going to be unrecognisable in 2020, and again in 2030, and
> who knows what after that. But the milestones are boring. The fun is
> in living it. The first challenge is just to try.
> 
> -- 
> Emlyn
> 
> http://my.syyn.cc - A service for syncing buzz and facebook, posts,
> comments and all.
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> http://point7.wordpress.com - My blog
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> 
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