Category Archives: pragmatism

In theory there is no practice; in practice there is no theory

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For rea­sons diverse enough to need their own book, tonight I’m read­ing Shusterman’s Prag­ma­tist Aes­thet­ics. Not merely from a grow­ing inter­est in art and aes­thet­ics as such, but as a sort of explo­ration of why we work and think and act the way we do.

For some def­i­n­i­tion of “we” that seems to be grow­ing quickly in our cul­ture: Crafts­men, folks with adap­tive lifestyles, those with “grit”, Edi­tors.

To imag­ine there is no aes­thetic sense in the expe­ri­ence (that is, the mak­ing or learn­ing) of sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is ridicu­lous. Worse, I think the preva­lent aca­d­e­mic denial of the impor­tance of such aes­thetic expe­ri­ence in sci­ence and engi­neer­ing is what’s ruin­ing it: pushed it out of reach, atten­u­ated it into a spe­cial­ist eso­teric “advanced” pile of dis­parate things, enabled its mak­ers to treat lay­men as boors and enabled lay­men to treat mak­ers as unin­tel­li­gi­ble nerds, and priv­i­leged the inces­sant nov­elty of con­cepts over repro­ducibil­ity and applic­a­bil­ity in the professions.

Have you ever noticed how each spe­cialty, each dis­ci­pline in the acad­emy tends to find the small­est num­ber of com­pe­tent spe­cial­ists, and grow the field of boor­ish lay­men to include not just the une­d­u­cated but the dif­fer­ently edu­cated spe­cial­ists of other fields? Yes, we need to advance the fron­tiers of the­ory and prac­tice. We also need to ship. That’s our job too. You need to ship your work not to a jour­nal where it will sit on a shelf behind a fire­wall, but to peo­ple who will act upon it.

It needs to be expe­ri­enced. Like a work of art on a shelf on a museum store-​​room, it’s dead until it’s experienced.

In other words, I nod a lot read­ing this book.

For exam­ple, last week’s con­fer­ence reminded me that the wall between “The­ory and Prac­tice” is an impor­tant cul­tural dis­tinc­tion in my “field”. Shus­ter­man on his “field”, and the need to coa­lesce “the­ory” and “prac­tice” into a sin­gle expe­ri­en­tial whole:

Thus, though our the­o­ret­i­cal imag­i­na­tion is always largely con­strained by estab­lished prac­tice, it is not con­fined to slav­ish con­for­mity and reac­tive rep­e­ti­tion. For chang­ing cir­cum­stances and encoun­ters with other prac­tices can pro­vide new nour­ish­ment and alter­na­tive ori­en­ta­tions. Since no prac­tice is defined for all pos­si­ble sit­u­a­tions, there will always be a need of imag­i­na­tive pro­jec­tions and cre­ative deci­sions as to which of the pos­si­ble pro­jec­tions should actu­ally be pur­sued, deci­sions which are apt to be con­tested and which again raise second-​​order prob­lems of how to jus­tify those deci­sions. Since no prac­tice exists in utter iso­la­tion, unaf­fected by oth­ers, there remains the need to relate, coor­di­nate, or arbi­trate between dif­fer­ent prac­tices. As long as our prac­tices present us with such prob­lems and admit of improve­ment, the­ory will not only be pos­si­ble but necessary.

Con­ceived in this prag­ma­tist fash­ion, which rec­og­nizes the pri­macy but also the prob­lems of prac­tice, the­ory is not exter­mi­nated but revi­tal­ized by the loss of its tra­di­tional sta­tus as tran­scen­den­tal cog­ni­tive priv­i­lege. For, once we give up the foun­da­tion­al­ist view of the­ory as reveal­ing the invari­ably nec­es­sary prin­ci­ples for prac­tice, and fur­ther relin­quish its hope of apo­d­ic­tic, incon­testably final jus­ti­fi­ca­tion; once we instead see our prac­tices (and our the­o­ries) as con­tin­gent prod­ucts whose encounter with chang­ing sit­u­a­tions has neces­si­tated con­tin­ual adjust­ment, clar­i­fi­ca­tion, jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and improve­ment; then theory’s abid­ing role as crit­i­cal reflec­tion on prac­tice is secure and seem­ingly ineliminable.

If systems were fishes we’d all something something

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Peo­ple want sys­tem­atic advice. Uni­ver­sal advice is always best. Lack­ing uni­ver­sals, then some sort of sys­tem­atic advice will do, along with a com­pre­hen­sive but attain­able onto­log­i­cal key that one can use to quickly iden­tify the reader’s posi­tion in their sys­tem so as to get at the advice part faster.

Then there is the lesser sort of advice, framed as a sort of arti­fi­cial appren­tice­ship: pre­sent­ing a series of lessons in the form of a long (and cum­ber­some!) path or jour­ney which—if con­ducted dili­gently and mindfully—will instill in the sup­pli­cant the min­i­mum set of skills that might pos­si­bly help them when “real sit­u­a­tions” arise in their sub­se­quent journeymen’s lives.

And finally, I sup­pose, there is the sort of advice which is no advice at all: a pile of tools, or user’s man­ual, maybe with some shod­dily cat­a­logued “here’s a pretty one” anec­dotes shuf­fled in to ground the vast uncon­nected diver­sity of stuff in some sto­ries. But of course the reader is left hav­ing to map their prob­lems of inter­est onto that ran­dom pile of anec­dotes, and reminded when­ever they ask where to start that it depends, really.…

So I’m writ­ing this book about Genetic Pro­gram­ming. In the seven or eight weeks I’ve been pok­ing at it, it’s been a fas­ci­nat­ing tra­ver­sal of this hier­ar­chy of advice-​​giving. And I think there’s some­thing in the pain I’m feel­ing, a thing I need to get at.

All the other books I’ve ever seen are tool cat­a­logs. Mine is—as far as I’m aware—the first of the long (and cum­ber­some!) jour­ney kind. There are no exam­ples of either if-​​this-​​then-​​that keys, nor of uni­ver­sal principles.

Yet the field is twenty-​​mumble years old. Isn’t that weird? What’s our problem?

Talk­ing about talk­ing about

I’ve just (nine hours ago) fin­ished read­ing John Levi Martin’s excel­lent The Expla­na­tion of Social Action. Not because I’m writ­ing about a social sys­tem, which depends inti­mately on the sub­jec­tive and con­tin­gent fram­ing nar­ra­tives that mod­ern nerds report using when they under­take to solve com­plex prob­lems of a know-​​it-​​when-​​they-​​see-​​it category.

Oh no—heaven for­fend! I’m writ­ing about com­put­ers and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, of course. I was read­ing it just because, you know, I needed a break from writ­ing about com­put­ers and tech­ni­cal stuff. Yeah.

Any­way, dur­ing this brief “break” from “tech­ni­cal mat­ters”, I found myself read­ing this book in which Mar­tin essen­tially tears the social sci­ences a new ass­hole. In a pro­fes­sional and well-​​cited and fun­da­men­tally help­ful way, of course. Because his­tor­i­cally, the main stream of the sci­en­ci­est brands in the social sci­ences have been premised on mod­els of peo­ple doing things as if there were exter­nal­i­ties in their lives. As if their goals were inbuilt or con­cocted by exter­nal ratio­nal plan­ners; as if their beliefs were genetic or self-​​contained rules spelled out in some extra-​​social rule­book; as if their inten­tions arose from some rar­i­fied “ratio­nal” think-​​space, or as mat­ters of ingrained habit. Social expla­na­tion of that sort is—to para­phrase and elide a lot of Martin’s won­der­fully snarky overview—trying to make all that messy peo­ple stuff go away.

There are a lot of ways to make all the messy peo­ple stuff go away in social sci­ence, as it hap­pens; that’s at least one rea­son Martin’s book is so enjoy­ably long. You can con­found cor­re­la­tion with cau­sa­tion, and use regres­sion equa­tions to sug­gest that devi­a­tions from expected behav­ior are “errors” on the part of will­ful rebels. You can impose a good old-​​fashioned Great Chain of Racial Being on folks you quiz in a desert, and ignore the incon­ve­nient facts that folks in a desert have not only never seen line dia­grams of cubes, but have no social frame for “how to answer right when being quizzed”. You can cat­e­go­rize the stuff peo­ple do into a few handy cat­e­gories they them­selves don’t use, and then ignore the lit­tle tense knots of con­tra­dic­tion inevitably tucked in at the cor­ners. And—this is my favorite, for rea­sons you may already be suss­ing out—you can assume that human beings carry around for­mu­laic com­pu­ta­tional and algo­rith­mic rule-​​books in their heads, and as they per­ceive “sit­u­a­tions” in their “envi­ron­ments” they refer to these just like com­put­ers do to decide among “plans”.

This is not an asper­sion cast on indi­vid­ual soci­ol­o­gists (very much), but rather the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion of a sys­tem­atic fail­ure to think of peo­ple liv­ing in the world as being any­thing like peo­ple liv­ing in a world.

As you can tell, I enjoyed the… break it pro­vided. Because of course I’m writ­ing about how you can use com­put­ers to bet­ter per­ceive “sit­u­a­tions” in your “envi­ron­ment” to decide among many “plans”.… Com­pletely dif­fer­ent thing.

Just to fin­ish this arc, Mar­tin is not point­ing and laugh­ing at his col­leagues’ intel­lec­tual short­com­ings here, he’s mak­ing the case for a rather dif­fer­ent approach to the social sciences—a field approach. Not “the field” as in “out there with a pith hel­met and note­book mak­ing obser­va­tions”, but fields as in Maxwell and mag­net­ism (or Pep­per and aes­thet­ics). Fields as com­posed by objects and their rela­tion to one another, and more impor­tantly as per­ceived by the vec­tors imparted on objects by their rela­tions to one another. Very few things are new under the sun, and Mar­tin does a good job build­ing this notion up with an arm-​​long list of paths-​​not-​​taken in the social sci­ences, and ties it all up in a pleas­ant lit­tle bow at the end labeled “What else are you going to do?”

But the inter­est­ing thing, to me, is that in stir­ring the pot of soci­ol­ogy, Mar­tin has wielded the same spoon I’ve been wav­ing for years in… well, what­ever the hell my “field” is. “Genetic pro­gram­ming” maybe (have I told you how much I dis­like the phrase yet today?), or machine learn­ing, or arti­fi­cial intelligence.

That is: the Spoon of Re-​​drawing Sys­tem Bound­aries to Include the User as an Inte­gral Part of the Sys­tem. [Or, as I like to call it, SpoRSyBoIUIPotS]

So it begins

I hang out with well-​​meaning peo­ple who are sad much of the time, because they give good advice and peo­ple for one rea­son or another don’t fol­low it. Includ­ing me1. They are artists dis­ap­pointed with how peo­ple fail to appre­ci­ate art, and crafts­men dis­ap­pointed in how few peo­ple are will­ing to take a crafts­manly approach to their work-​​lives, and var­i­ous other train­ers of cre­ative skills whose focus is not on skills so much as on stance.

And you know, it’s funny. The peo­ple I hang out with who seem least sad about peo­ple not fol­low­ing their advice seem to all be GP peo­ple and Arti­fi­cial Life peo­ple, and the other ones who work in the var­i­ous sub­dis­ci­plines of com­plex­ol­ogy. This is not to say that they don’t try to train peo­ple how to do things, or that the peo­ple they have trained imme­di­ately do them cor­rectly every time, but rather (I think) that they are still—twenty-mumble years into their col­lec­tive adventure—pretty much OK with peo­ple who fail to fol­low in their footsteps.

And, thanks to John Levi Martin’s big blue hard­cover, I may have real­ized what one dif­fer­ence is between the sads and the sad-​​nots. The sad peo­ple have all framed their work in broad sys­tems of expla­na­tion: man­i­festos and First Rules of Fight Club and guild­ish guide­lines. My com­plex­o­log­i­cal peo­ple are still in that heady low-​​hanging fruit stage where one can make a lot of head­way by just mod­el­ing things and see­ing what hap­pens. “Look! emer­gence!” and “the agent is your model of the world; run them inter­act­ing to explore the con­se­quences of your model” and so forth.

That’s chang­ing, I expect. Smart peo­ple are nib­bling at the philo­soph­i­cal edges of “emer­gence”, try­ing to sys­tem­atize it away. Wol­framism is grow­ing in power, col­lect­ing together under one big Math­e­mat­i­cal umbrella all the work other peo­ple have done in their enthu­si­asm. Peo­ple have filled enough large vol­umes of col­lected papers on Why My Genetic Pro­gram­ming Approach is Bet­ter Than Yours, and they’re start­ing to notice that X writes one of these about Y one year, and Y writes one about X the next, and so they’re start­ing to frown a bit. And (as I’ve pointed out else­where), com­plex­ol­ogy is enter­ing a stage of pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion war, hav­ing its hand­i­est tools coöpted (sym­bolic regres­sion comes to mind), at the same time it’s den­i­grated into nonex­is­tence wher­ever it threat­ens some other field’s sinecure (the Sta­tis­tics folks already have their frowny faces at the ready).

So yeah; my GP peo­ple are going to start being mopey a lot more. And soon. Which I’ve told them so, but hey. I think it may be ben­e­fi­cial to look at what’s hap­pened in a closely related field, in prepa­ra­tion. Maybe an ances­tral predecessor.

How to write a com­puter program

Some of the sad peo­ple I spend time with are founders of the agile soft­ware devel­op­ment move­ment. I’ve hung out with them for a long time (more than a decade now), lurk­ing in the back­ground since back in heady low-​​hanging fruit days.

They are sad, I think, because they are forced to work with peo­ple whose job it is to think pro­gram­ming is not a social endeavor. Go ahead and parse that; it took me a while to get the words right.

The Agile Man­i­festo starts off talk­ing about peo­ple, not process. And right there, they are snap­ping their fin­gers in the face of an awful lot of peo­ple who want their work to be sim­pler than that. Peo­ple who want aver­ages to be more impor­tant than devi­a­tions from the con­trol chart. Who want pro­gram­ming to be an infi­nitely divis­i­ble pro­duc­tion plant, that can be allo­cated among projects with­out ref­er­ence to geog­ra­phy or soci­ol­ogy. Who want a clean sep­a­ra­tion between the body of work­ers from the mind of plan­ners and managers.

Note, these aren’t all just “man­age­ment” (what­ever that is); it sounds to me as though there are plenty of pro­gram­mers in the world who want to go sit in their cubi­cles for eight hours exactly, Be Very Smart for exactly the nec­es­sary time, and avoid as much as pos­si­ble talk­ing to any­body or let­ting them change “their” code in future.2

Go look at how they write instruc­tional mate­r­ial about their work. Com­pare an agile “How to write a com­puter pro­gram” pas­sage to an inag­ile old-​​fashioned one. What’s different?

As I see it, it’s a mat­ter of SpoRSyBoIUIPotS.

Since the early days of the “agile coa­les­cence”, when Design Pat­terns started pop­ping up, there has been an accel­er­at­ing shift from for­mal­ism and the­o­ret­i­cal abstrac­tion to what I can only call a more con­tin­gent and social view of pro­gram­ming. Look at the tools of the agile pro­fes­sional: they’re social (includ­ing those for self-​​control, and for man­ag­ing the inter­face between you-​​the-​​typist and you-​​the-​​reader-​​of-​​typed-​​code), not any­thing to do with mak­ing code run faster or use less CPU time. They re-​​draw the bound­ary around “writ­ing com­puter pro­grams” to include “how peo­ple write” and “com­puter pro­grams for peo­ple to use”. In doing so, they step away—ready for this?—from the very sort of soci­o­log­i­cal model John Levi Mar­tin glee­fully punc­tures, the one with Gauss­ian dis­tri­b­u­tions of “pro­duc­tion”, and some mag­i­cal exter­nally cre­ated “design” and Pla­tonic “archi­tec­ture”, and lin­early decom­pos­able require­ments (“rules”) that must be com­plete enough to include every­thing that might pos­si­bly hap­pen before any­body actu­ally does any­thing.

All that stuff is, not to put too fine a point on it (and again elid­ing and rephras­ing much of Martin’s excel­lent book), a load of bull­shit as soon as you deign to include human beings in the sto­ries you tell about what human beings actu­ally do.

Sto­ries of how soft­ware gets writ­ten by agile folks, whether instruc­tional or anec­do­tal, are about peo­ple talk­ing. About sto­ries, and plans that change, and forehead-​​slapping real­iza­tions of what they’ve been miss­ing. About involv­ing the cus­tomer and the man­ager as part of the team.

Sto­ries of how soft­ware gets writ­ten by inag­ile folks are about stocks and flows and feed­back loops, and pre­dict­ing the num­ber of days until dis­crete large-​​scale events hap­pen, and clean divi­sions of “human resources” into nonover­lap­ping abstract cat­e­gories (Qual­ity Assur­ance, Data­base Admin­is­tra­tion, Archi­tec­ture, Pro­gram­mer).3

The tools and design pat­terns offered up by agile folks are about sit­u­a­tions defined as rela­tions between peo­ple and objects. They aim to con­trol the flow of infor­ma­tion and knowl­edge, to min­i­mize risks of mis­com­mu­ni­ca­tion and faulty plan­ning and bad cod­ing, to help steer a course rather than fol­low a plan. The tools of inag­ile folks are about ways to bring the observed behav­ior of a project back in line with its foun­da­tional expec­ta­tions: back on sched­ule, back under con­trol, min­i­mize “change orders”, how to stay on bud­get, how to expect it to scale with “resources”.

I don’t think there are any seri­ous (and thought­ful) books on the gen­eral sub­ject of “How to Write a Com­puter Pro­gram”. If there were, I imag­ine the two groups would approach the sub­ject very dif­fer­ently. I can look at screen­casts and blogs and think back to the ridicu­lous classes I’ve moaned my way through, and I sense a dif­fer­ence. The more “agile” ones involve prac­tices, stances for the pro­gram­mer to take in rela­tion to other peo­ple and her own sen­si­bil­i­ties and skills. The “inag­ile” ones involve some kind of cat­a­log of tools—the the­o­ret­i­cal and poten­tial kind, like iter­a­tion and recur­sion, object-​​oriented and func­tional lan­guage struc­tures, com­pu­ta­tional com­plex­ity and parallelization.

When you show the agile ones (inso­far as they exist) to inag­ile folks, they will point out how it sounds more like a frickin’ eti­quette book or some sort of mar­tial arts man­ual, all about puri­fy­ing your mind and show­ing the proper respect to some imag­i­nary “user” or “cus­tomer” instead of learn­ing the really cool fast way to make your pro­gram cool and fast; and by the way, it doesn’t even say how to write pro­grams, it says how to write tests for pro­grams. When you show the inag­ile ones (inso­far as they exist) to agile folks, they will point out how every lit­tle cun­ning tool smacks of pre­ma­ture opti­miza­tion, and how there is no state­ment any­where of why you would want to “unroll the loop” instead of just using a human-​​readable loop instead, or that if there is such an argu­ment it invokes some weird-​​ass abstrac­tion like “effi­ciency” as though every pro­gram had to be carved out of a block of wood one punch-​​card at a time.

The one describes the world as a field cre­ated by and among peo­ple. The other describes the world as dri­ven by the­o­ret­i­cal objec­tives fully exter­nal to people.

Which sounds kind of famil­iar, if you think about it.

And so?

I have no use­ful idea about “and so—”.

There’s some­thing in there, and it revolves around how we tell sto­ries to one another about how to suc­ceed. It involves the dynam­ics of pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion, the unrest and rebel­lion and messy frowny mad-​​making mut­ter­ing that goes on when peo­ple don’t talk about the “same stuff” using the “same mod­els”. It involves the trou­ble artists I know have had with “art fund­ing” in our lit­tle dumb town, and the trou­ble train­ers I know have had with stu­dents who have been sent to their “how to pro­gram” classes (both agile and inag­ile), and ulti­mately about the effec­tive agen­das of “sta­tis­tics” and “bioin­for­mat­ics” and “arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence” and some of the other junk that I do.

What I sense, and the noise I’ve been mak­ing for some time now, is that “my” “field” (Genetic Pro­gram­ming) is com­ing quickly up to that tran­si­tion in its life, where it will start to fly apart into a vari­ety of pro­fes­sions, either sub­verted and con­sumed or divided from within.

And maybe this is just me say­ing “This might sting a lit­tle bit” before I start cut­ting. I am sharp­en­ing the saw even now, and eye­ing sta­tis­tics, dis­crete math­e­mat­ics, genet­ics and bioin­for­mat­ics, finance and pub­lic pol­icy all with a keen glint in my eye.

Because it’s time for those to start being seen as social struc­tures that include the prac­ti­tioner in addi­tion to the “sub­jects”. Not because that approach is inher­ently “bet­ter” by some abstract exter­nal scale, of course. But because inso­far as peo­ple want to use them to do things, pur­po­sive things, then they are social struc­tures. The model of Genetic Pro­gram­ming as a sort of mag­i­cal black box in which one pours “gen­eral problem-​​solving abil­ity” pre­sup­poses that any­body knows what “problem-​​solving abil­ity” is.

I have good friends and old col­leagues (some are the same peo­ple!) in the field of Genetic Pro­gram­ming, and they can­not teach peo­ple what works—only some things to do. Their books are lists of things peo­ple did, with­out much expla­na­tion of why (even in a tech­ni­cal sense). They’ve eaten all the low-​​hanging fruit you can get with­out mak­ing the work a social con­struct, in the abstracted inag­ile stock-​​and-​​flow Cold War way that made com­puter pro­gram­ming degen­er­ate into con­trol chart man­age­ment in the 1980s and 90s.

Some­body has to start teach­ing peo­ple how to stand in rela­tion to one another. Yet I have no idea about “and so—” Just some­thing some­thing. Nonethe­less, at least “some­thing some­thing” makes the line read cor­rectly, in terms of meter…. Some­times you have to fill in the words later.

The Prob­lem of Genetic Pro­gram­ming that’s most press­ing, as I see it, is the one that goes some­thing like, “Why can’t we use the same sys­tems we’ve had suc­cess with so far, which have auto­mat­i­cally dis­cov­ered such amaz­ingly cool stuff (as reported in The Press!), and just scale it up a bit until it auto­mat­i­cally invents com­pli­cated soft­ware like a word proces­sor or even a lit­tle cal­cu­la­tor? Per­haps if we estab­lish bench­marks, more dif­fi­cult test cases for researchers in the field to approach, then that will spark the tech­ni­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal inno­va­tions that are needed to over­come this qual­i­ta­tive barrier?”

And so—

  1. I “hang out” with myself a lot of the time… you know, typ­ing and stuff. What? ↩

  2. I’d like to know what the social dynam­ics of cathe­dral stone­ma­sons was like. Were there “cow­boy cut­ters” who made lovely lit­tle key­stones nobody could use because they weren’t made to match their neigh­bors? ↩

  3. I think there are per­fectly rea­son­able his­tor­i­cal rea­sons for this; they involve the Cold War, and the resource lim­i­ta­tions of the period when com­put­ing as such was invented, and how hard it has always been to do long divi­sion and square roots and junk by hand. But that’s all another rant, with a lot more foot­notes. ↩

Against Originality

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Surely I can’t be the first per­son to say it: Our culture’s demand that every great mind be orig­i­nal has become a sti­fling horror.

First, because the sup­posed traits of “orig­i­nal­ity” are a sham, except among the insane. You’re rid­ing the yel­low line next to “schiz­o­phrenic” if you’ve writ­ten an unin­tel­li­gi­ble con­text­less ram­ble in a pri­vate lan­guage. You may already be a sociopath if you con­sis­tently dis­avow the con­ver­sa­tions and train­ing and cul­tural embed­ded­ness of your work’s greater con­text. You’re prob­a­bly delusional—even though we’re all out to under­mine you—if you keep ignor­ing the fre­quent simul­ta­ne­ous appear­ance of sim­i­lar works in diverse set­tings around the world.

And as any decent crazy per­son should, you will get upset when you see “your” idea pop­ping up all over the world as if other peo­ple had stolen it.

Sec­ond, because orig­i­nal­ity is an arti­fi­cial lim­i­ta­tion on a con­tex­tual but intrin­si­cally unlim­ited resource. Cre­ative problem-​​solving. Could you build me a house for this land­scape unlike other people’s? Could you make me think about the mono­lithic raw fact of the world, at least one facet which con­cerns me today, in a way nobody else ever has? Could you design me a drug for my dis­ease, or a valve for my plumb­ing, or a rocket for my war, or a chair which inspires my aes­thete crowd in a way oth­ers in my salient cul­tural net­work will not have expe­ri­enced? Could you please write a book for me, refer­ring to the touch­stones of my cul­tural iden­tity, but which at the same time takes an eye-​​opening new stance?

But don’t use any weird mate­ri­als or tech­niques or too much other funny stuff, of course. Make it just dif­fer­ent enough.

Third, because the illu­sion that con­tin­gent cre­ativ­ity is lim­ited fos­ters rent-​​seeking behav­ior where no rea­son­able claim exists. Of course I will cite you when I explain to my stu­dents about your evoca­tive imagery of rain­drops on cer­tain vari­eties of flower petals, and also your view on the whiskers on kit­tens. I agree to pay that license fee when­ever I drink from a cup with the open­ing cun­ningly placed at the top, rather than the bot­tom. I will hap­pily relin­quish this thing my peo­ple have known since before the mis­sion­ar­ies came, hav­ing heard of your recent patent of the active com­pounds therein. All I have are these cites, whuffie, money, jail time and pub­lic apolo­gies: please take whichever you feel best ame­lio­rates my mis­take.

Not because yours is sub­stan­tially bet­ter than this other one, but because it has been duly recorded in the Big Book of One Law that you used up the entire fuck­ing idea when you staked your claim.

Fourth, because the rent-​​seeking infra­struc­ture sup­ports leeches. Not much more to say on this, right? We will pur­sue your claim. We will root out the inter­lop­ers. We will cre­ate and main­tain a cen­tral cat­a­log that includes your work. We will mon­i­tor the medium itself so that your priv­i­lege is not under­mined. We will strive cease­lessly to extend your priv­i­lege, indeed until well after you are dead.

For a nom­i­nal frac­tion of the fees you are owed.

These can­not be new sto­ries. And I can’t be both­ered to look up who’s been writ­ing about them.

Except every­body since for­ever.

I’m not rant­ing because I’m tired of the easily-​​ridiculed but oner­ous legal restric­tions, the grow­ing tis­sue of lies cen­tered around “cre­ativ­ity” and “exclu­siv­ity” in our legal frame­work, or any of that old crap. Those are easy. Every­body is mad about them.

Hell, we were mad about all that crap before the rest of you started jump­ing on the band­wagon.

No, I’m upset because I got mad the other day when an ass­hole Ger­man engi­neer I know from a con­fer­ence pub­lished a preprint where he posed an “orig­i­nal” the­ory essen­tially iden­ti­cal to stuff we talked about years ago—and he didn’t cite any­body I think he should have, imply­ing that he is map­ping out some New Fron­tier of Thought.

And because Stephen Wol­fram, the man per­son­ally, pisses me off—because his doorstop rel­e­gates the life’s work of smart peo­ple I know to occa­sional men­tions in the tiny appen­dix, imply­ing to most peo­ple that he invented Sci­ence Itself.

I’m upset because when I look at some­thing in some ran­dom book or web­site, or hear some­thing, or some­body men­tions it to me, and it’s a thing I once felt pride in doing or even know­ing, but now every­body does or knows it —I am dri­ven to feel that they’re doing it wrong.

I know because it was some­thing I invested actual think­ing time in back when. And here it is now, much later, being pop­u­lar­ized! And if you look, none of the “orig­i­nal” cre­ative peo­ple who made it a thing to me are men­tioned. It’s all these new main­stream immigrants.

What right have they to it, with­out giv­ing credit where it’s due? Worse, what right have they to use our words to mis­lead their naive fol­low­ers now?

This has hap­pened through the years with “Chaos the­ory”, “com­plex­ity” research, “bio­com­put­ing” research, “agile” soft­ware devel­op­ment and man­age­ment, “cowork­ing”, the “social Web”, “social net­works”, “Prag­ma­tism”… that’s just a quick off-​​the-​​cuff list for me. I did early work with a thing, and nobody much cared, and then much later some­body else did slightly over­lap­ping work, and now it’s all the fuck­ing rage.

And I think Dammit, in my day we were try­ing to save the world, not just sell wid­gets like this ass­hole. Why are they all lis­ten­ing to him? Doesn’t any­body ever read what we said back then when this was really new?

Your mileage may vary, but I will make you eat your hat if you haven’t expe­ri­enced this same emo­tion when faced with inter­lop­ers and other late­com­ers announc­ing their dis­cov­ery of cer­tain styles and gen­res of “sci­ence fic­tion”, “paint­ing”, “pho­tog­ra­phy”, “local food”, “book arts”, “user expe­ri­ence”, “func­tional pro­gram­ming”, “punk”, “con­ser­vatism”, “pro­gres­sivism”, “min­i­mal­ism”, “sus­tain­abil­ity”, “blog­ging”, “anar­chism”, “free verse”, “that crap they call ‘role­play­ing’ these days”, “that crap they call ‘news’ and ‘jour­nal­ism’ these days”, “eco­nomic devel­op­ment”, “genet­ics”, “peren­nial gar­den­ing”, “aero­nau­tics”, “com­pas­sion”, “Chris­t­ian faith”, “Bud­dhism” and so on.

Some folks might think I’m describ­ing envy; that one has a sense of vio­la­tion because these new­fan­gled pop­u­lar­iz­ers are get­ting all the rents one feels are owed to the “real” inven­tors. But it’s not.

I admit it might be a bit like pride. But a strange sort of pride, where you didn’t real­ize you had any until a plug was pulled and it all drained out.

No. I think not.

I think it’s a lot more like the feel­ing you get—as my wife Bar­bara pointed out a cou­ple of days back (see what I did there?)—when you first real­ize your child is her own per­son, and that she’s made her own deci­sion, and that despite all your early work to bring her up right, she’s going to hare off in her own direction.

Because you know what’s over in that direc­tion. You know the has­sle and dan­ger, the illu­sions and pain, the inef­fi­cien­cies and unsat­is­fy­ing expe­ri­ences she’s head­ing for, because you expe­ri­enced them all years ago. You tried to keep her from doing that stu­pid stuff, and tried to get her to see the cool stuff, the life-​​saving and sim­ple stuff, the right stuff, but she’s thought­lessly skep­ti­cal about any­thing she actu­ally heard. And worse, some­day she will come back and announce as “new” some­thing you knew all along.

I think I’m upset because “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” makes me feel that all the time now. Not con­tent to be a mere hip­ster claim­ing to have prior knowl­edge of every cul­tural and intel­lec­tual phe­nom­e­non, I am reduced to some hor­rific recur­sive hip­ster, who feels that sad­ness when­ever I am shown some­body is explor­ing a known thing with their own per­spec­tive.

Because of course it’s “orig­i­nal­ity cul­ture” that makes me imag­ine that my expe­ri­ence of that thing, long ago, which I failed to com­mu­ni­cate to these new­com­ers, is in any way salient to what they have going on in their lives. When I did it, it was new, and we expended valu­able resources and took per­sonal risks to do all that, and coined all these new terms to describe the amaz­ingly insight­ful stuff nobody had ever talked about before.

I like to call this the Tozier Effect.

Of course the ass­hole Ger­man can talk about stuff we both have done, for the same rea­son I can: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I am also an ass­hole Ger­man to somebody.

Of course Wol­fram can be the Edi­son of the Sym­bolic World, for the same rea­son Edi­son could: it’s cool and it will help the world to know more about it. And because I have also played Edi­son in my time.

And the nou­veau “agilists” and “com­plex­ol­o­gists” and “Web 3.0 gurus” and the lat­est Busi­ness Rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies and TED-​​talking Inspi­ra­tional Crowd are wel­come to carry on.

There’s enough rea­son for me to ques­tion the very notion of orig­i­nal­ity just in the fact that we so rarely ques­tion the vocab­u­lary we use to dis­cuss it.

I don’t care if you keep using those terms and notions… mostly. Why should I waste time striv­ing to under­mine your claims about how “orig­i­nal­ity” works? Espe­cially by fram­ing my argu­ments in that same ques­tion­able lan­guage of uni­ver­sal­ity, exclu­siv­ity and rights? That’s a sucker’s bet.

I have evi­dence that I’m going to turn out being right when I stop think­ing and talk­ing about “orig­i­nal­ity” in your terms. But I also have evi­dence that you do real good by using those terms. And I have evi­dence that we’re both wrong and should use some other words and ideas instead.

’Tis but the nature of the world.

That said, I’m just decid­ing to stop using those words, even around you. Even when you talk about “your” “cul­ture” “need­ing” to “pro­mote” “inno­va­tion”, even when you talk about “eco­nomic” “growth” and your cul­tural “oblig­a­tion” to be “cited”, or how “artists” will “starve” with­out your “support”.

We’re not going to have those con­ver­sa­tions with those ideas any more, you and me, is all I’m saying.

And I will be a bit hap­pier, and you will be sad and confused.

And that’s an improve­ment, in my book.

Well, OK. Except for one thing.

When it becomes clear that your vocab­u­lary about own­er­ship and rights and pri­or­ity and value is clearly hurt­ing peo­ple? That’s when we will inter­vene. Your wounded ego, your claims that imag­i­na­tion is a zero-​​sum game, your rent-​​seeking, your leech squad—they will become our tar­gets when you cross that line.

Not you. We’re not going to tar­get you. But when you sharpen your final vocab­u­lary into a harm­ful tool, or a cage, or a wall—that’s when we are sup­posed to come along with the breaker bars.

It’s OK. There are other ideas and words in the world. There are always other ones. And you’d be sur­prised how help­ful and good it can be, some­times, to just start with a new batch.

Well, not new as such. You know what I mean.