Create things that come alive
Hi friends,
(welcome to my email dispatch! You can sign up for these or read the archive at buttondown.email/thesephist 💌)
This week, I discovered The Objects of Our Life, a piece from Steve Jobs Archive about a talk he gave to an audience of designers in Aspen in 1983, one year before the Macintosh. I found this section aspirational:
One American industry after another—cars, televisions, cameras, watches—has lost market share to foreign competition, he explains, and he is worried that the same will happen with the computer if it becomes what he calls “one more piece-of-junk-object.” This moment, when “computers and society are out on a first date”—and here he interlaces his fingers to show how close that relationship could one day become—offers a rare opportunity that they must seize together. The audience is present at the birth of something monumental, and they can help define it. His voice rises with emotion. “We need help. We really, really need your help.”
Building technology is fundamentally an affair by humans, for other humans, and objects of technology ought to be ensconced in romance and history and all manners of color and details and textures of life. It ought to come alive in our environment. Technology is not what’s shiny and boxy and delivered in metallic wraps;
Technology is the active human interface with the material world.
This is from sci-fi author Ursula Le Guin’s A Rant About “Technology”. She goes on:
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms and fleece vests spun from recycled glass grew on trees, and we just picked them when they were ripe…
Within my little corner of the world, I think we’re often victim to an even more myopic pathology of this kind: we think that technology involves a computer, or spacecraft, or a microscope, or some other fragile thing cursed to be beholden to software. But writing is technology. Oral tradition is technology. Farming is technology. Roads are technology.
Technology exists woven into the physics and politics and romance of the world, and to disentangle it is to suck the life out of it, to sterilize it to the point of exterminating its reason for existence. to condemn it to another piece of junk.
If you consider yourself a technologist, here’s your imperative: build things that are unabashedly, beautifully tangled into all else in life — people and relationships, politics, emotion and pain, understanding or the lack thereof, being alone, being together, homesickness, adventure, victory, loss. Build things that come alive, and drag everything they touch into the realm of the living. And once in a while, if you are so lucky, may you create not just technology, but art — not only giving us life, but elevating us beyond.
Friends & family updates
Sarv made a beautiful video capturing his ideas and projects about improving our relationship to computing. Watch the video here and read about the project at matchacomputing.com.
Sandbar, my favorite New York-based computer company, is hiring an AI Engineer who will lead architecture and engineering of a new kind of personal computer. They’re a fully integrated hardware-software shop, and have beautiful ambitions. If you’re crafty with LLMs and think about our relationship to computing, please reach out → https://sandbar.inc/ai-engineer
What I read
Live, Rich, and Composable: Qualities for Programming Beyond Static Text — one of my favorite HCI papers about end-user programming and interactive media; a survey of interactive programming tools with some sharp insights.
Musical Notation for Modular Synthesizers — synthesizers are cool, and notation design is cool. Need I say more?
I saw a cool prototype for visualizing language model feature activations on Twitter — https://x.com/anotherjesse/status/1807900430485409922
Not a lot of project updates and writing this week! They will return next week.
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Wishing you a happy and safe week ahead,
— Linus