Algorave as Soulcraft
Way back in 2009, on holiday in New England, I bought and read The Nature of Technology by W. Brain Arthur and Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. I thought the Arthur book was brilliant and ripped it off for my talk at dConstruct that year. The Crawford book bothered me and has been bugging me ever since.
Part of his premise (as I remember) is that working on (pre-digital) cars and bikes is inherently satisfying and meditative because their engines and mechanics make physical intuitive sense to us in a way that digital devices don't. It's obvious and comprehensible to our hands and eyes how they connect up and work, fixing them gives us a sense of accomplishment that we can't get from working on a computer. He talks about the transparent affordances of carburettors and such-like and how the inner workings of a VW beetle engine reveals itself to us.
Which is great. Except they don't. Not to me anyway.
I'm a big fan of old cars. We have too many of them. I used to love our old Series III Land Rover because the air conditioning was a big flap at the front that you waggled up and down and I could easily work out how to fix that. But when you get inside, when you get to the engine, I'm utterly lost. There's nothing intuitive and comprehensible in there. You can't just guess how an internal combustion engine works.
What he's done there is mistake intuition for education. Or, at least, experience.
(Though, thinking about it now, it's entirely possible that this is not Mr Crawford's argument at all, and that I've misremembered and conflated his book with many other similar pieces over the years. If that is true I hope he'll forgive me.)
What I'm finding interesting now is looking at a world where more and more people have the same familiarity with computers and code that Matthew B. Crawford has with his bikes.
More and more people understand code as a material, something they know how to work with, something they can push and shove and tinker with. I'm beginning to wonder if that's what makes something like Algorave interesting. It's not just improvised dance music, it's also dance music where much of the audience has a real sense of how the music's getting made.
Ursula K Le Guin's brilliant rant about technology also seems relevant here.
Anyway
(There are currently 414 of you. 414 is so interesting it has to be disaggregated on wikipedia. Do you mean the light plane or the bomber, the hackers or the asteroid? All of them.)
Oh - and the podcast is still going! Have a listen to the latest episode.