a common idea that really annoys me:

a common idea that really annoys me:

that if something was developed with defense funding, then even if it has no obvious military application, it must have a non-obvious one

it’s sort of the same kind of mistake as “facebook is mind control”

here’s the thing:

to do anything new and interesting, you must have the freedom to fail. really interesting things don’t even map onto known categories of success or failure until they are digested by popular culture.

how do you get the resources to do interesting work, since interesting work can, by its very nature, never be effective along any existing metrics (including “delivering value” or “making money”)? you get resources from institutions so large that they are insulated from markets.

for instance, people sometimes do interesting work at google or facebook because those companies are almost entirely non-capitalized busywork infrastructures hanging off the side of an ad division that makes money — and even the ad divisions are insulated from the need to provide actual value (and can therefore do anything, so long as they are doing something) because ad targeting has no reliable measures of effectiveness.

the only thing that determines the income of an ad-driven tech company is the degree to which other businesses can be convinced that the ad-tech in question boosts sales — and since this can not be measured, nobody on either side of the transaction has any evidence at all.

but even google and facebook need to keep face by pretending to be governed by market pressures, and can’t blow too much money on obviously-wasteful obviously-dumb ideas. if you want big-league money, you go to the military, which is protected by taboos against any kind of cut.

naturally, every genuinely interesting technical advance is going to come out of military funding, because the military is the only organization so bloated that an expensive project doesn’t even need to pretend to serve their goals to be supported.

the big advances of the past (basically everything that separates your smartphone from a first-gen univac) comes out of a period between the sputnik launch and the mid-70s when the military would fund anything that promised to use computers even tangentially related to STEM.

(a lot of the most interesting things here were filed under the category of “using computers to teach science and mathematics” or “using computers to help scientists work more efficiently”: PLATO, BASIC, the internet, NLS, MESA, Smalltalk, formal methods, CAS)

the tech developed under such loose guidelines was useful for a wide variety of things. turns out tech used to teach STEM can teach anything, and tech used to help scientists work more efficiently also helps artists work more efficiently.

some r&d people of this era correctly recognized that it was praxis to take military funding to create not just non-weapons but anti-weapons & use them to benefit all of mankind instead of just the military-industrial complex. engelbart comes to mind.

when you think that institutions are efficient and effective in proportion to their scale instead of in inverse proportion, you treat them more monolithically, and you ascribe functions to their actions that don’t actually follow.

in a large organization, most activity is always going to be subversive antiproduction.

as an anarchist, i applaud this, but as a critical thinker, i am disappointed that it is clearly not enough!

most of the antiproduction is not individual but structural

as an individual worker, as boots on the ground, the most i can do is slack off. but luckily, even the ostensibly-productive work i am assigned is actually antiproduction — it cannot support its ostensible goal

as a knowledge worker, i’m fully aware that i am being assigned impossible tasks in service of undesirable or pointless goals.

i write code to waste endless cycles on a calculation that always evaluates to zero, & that is therefore also pointless to the ‘customer’, some business who is employing workers of my level to perform equally pointless manipulations of these pointless analytics.

what does it matter that it costs us $100 in server fees every time a user loads this page? they are paying us $200 per page load in the end.

(only, of course, that we’re releasing rainforests worth of carbon to calculate… a constant)

occasionally (too occasionally, tbh) somebody will subvert an entire section of a company to do something useful. this does not make them money, of course: the methods of making money through uselessness are more foolproof since you don’t need to succeed.

but occasionally it happens, and you get something like smalltalk-78 — a deeply humanistic project. “teach kids to code” is the cynical neoliberalization of it, but this was “allow kids to coevolve with radical tools of thought and exploration that they control fully”