(2017-10-26) Bachmann Utopian Hacks

Gotz Bachmann on Utopian Hacks: The group, clustered around an engineer named Bret Victor, is part of YC Research’s Human Advancement Research Community (HARC)...

I want to make the case that some of their work practices share similarities with hacking, albeit in a different realm. This article asks: How do engineers hack imaginaries of what technologies are and can be?

I argue this claim by analyzing these engineers as part of a tradition which I call, for lack of a better term, “radical engineering.” Radical Engineers fundamentally challenge existing notions of (here, digital media) technologies: their basic features, purposes, and possible futures.

Their positions are so heterodox that they often stop calling themselves “engineers.” But no other word can take its place. They might experiment with words like “artist” or “designer in the Horst Rittel way,” but neither stabilizes and both are prone to cause misunderstanding.

Illustration (draft) by David Hellman, imagining jointly with Bret Victor’s group “Dynamic Land”, dynamic spatial media’s next iteration in 2017.

The patron saint for this enterprise, both in spirit and as a real person, is Alan Kay.

The group is constructing a series of operating systems for a spatial dynamic medium, each building on the experiences of building the last one, and each taking roughly two years to build. The current OS is named “Realtalk” and its predecessor was called “Hypercard in the World” (both names pay respect to historical, heterodox programming environments: Smalltalk in the 1970s and Hypercard in the 1980s).

Bret Victor’s group tries to build a new medium. To get there is less a question of a sudden eureka, but more a permanent and stubborn process of pushing beyond what is thinkable now.

Kay took heterodox programming techniques like the one pioneered by SIMULA, new visualization techniques like the ones developed by the Sutherland brothers, McCarthy cravings for “private computing” (1962:225) and Wes Clark’s lonely machines, the experiments in augmentation by Douglas Engelbart’s group, and new ideas about distributed networks, to name a few. Such techniques were not common sense in the emerging professions of software engineering and programming, but had started to circulate in the elite engineering circles where Kay worked. Kay combined them with ideas about pedagogy, psychology, and mathematics by Maria Montessori, Seymour Papert, and Jerome Bruner, and added further zest in form of the sassy media theoretical speculations of Marshall McLuhan.

While Engelbart’s and English’s project might sound ambitious, they still believed, at least in the 1960s, that bootstrapping inside a research group would achieve the desired results. Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group extended this setting in the 1970s through pedagogy and McLuhanite media theory. By bringing children in, they aimed to achieve recursive effects beyond the lab, with the long-term goal of involving the whole world in a process akin to bootstrapping

The overall process has by now led to a set of interconnected and evolving ideas and goals: One cluster looks, for example, for new ways of representing and understanding complex systems. A second cluster aims for more access to knowledge by undoing contemporary media’s restrictions (such as the restriction of the screen, which produces, with its peek-a-boo access to complexity, impenetrable forms of knowledge such as the trillions of lines of code, written on screens and then stared at on screens). A third cluster explores new forms of representing time, and a fourth one more effective inclusion of physical properties into the spatial media system. All these clusters would lead, so the goal and the assumption, to more seamless travels up and down the “ladder of abstraction” (Victor 2011.)

a larger goal is to make new thoughts possible, which have until now remained “unthinkable” due to contemporary media’s inadequacies

One way to understand what’s going on here is to frame all this as an alternative form of “hacking.” When you “hack,” you might be said to be hacking apart or hacking together. Hacking apart could then be seen as the practices evolving out of the refusal to accept former acts of black boxing.

If you are lucky, you have the conditions and abilities to work all this through in a long, non-linear process also known as bootstrapping, where you go through many iterations of hacking apart and hacking together, all the while creating fundamentally different ideas about what technologies should do, and could do, matched by a succession of devices and practices that help shape these ideas, and “demo” to yourself and others that some utopias might not be out of reach. This is what radical engineers do.

The radical engineers would also be the first to state that the same interim solutions, if stopped in their development and reified too early, are potential sources of hacks in the derogatory sense. The latter is, according to their stories, exactly what happened when, 40 years ago, the prototypes left the labs too soon, and entered the world of Apple, IBM, and Microsoft, producing the accumulation of bad decisions that led to a world where people stare at smartphones.