Bits: the mute conquerers of thought. (#266)

It must have been last year’s late months when while strolling through my li­brary’s isles I glimpsed at one un­ex­pect­ed cover which earnestly pulled me in: with bold, dark cyan letters on a once white background which by now radiated its decades shelved away it read UNIX. One of the original works [KP84⁠¹] on the ap­proach to conducted com­put­ing now ever so dear to my heart: Its authors instrumentally involved in its creation, I felt compelled to read an ad fontes account of the dig­i­tal landscape of forty yesteryears.

For by now nearly a year I flipped through the yellowed pages of gorgeously typeset hard­ware de­scrip­tions, shell doc­u­men­ta­tion, de­sign rationale, operating system his­to­ry, C listings and DSL showcases. This book accompanied me an en­tire year and de­spite hiatuses of several weeks at a time, when I did pick it up, it pulled me into a magical world of optimism and dare I say naïf exploration of live symbol shifters, their capabilities and aesthetical merits. I wistfully bethink; read­ing a story of thought, interleaved with prose of C. Slightly smirking at the supposed limitations of terse call stacks notwithstanding true marvel for what had then been achieved.

I seem to have lost this spark. The raw awe of feel­ing text come alive on its own. The artful contention with the impossibility of an oracle but the dullness of an echo. The joy of playing this game: talking to a single dollar sign on a black void and therein watching my thought act, be, talking back.
Nowadays, the air of digitality becomes further and further intertwined with a fright­ened, un­smoth­er­able and ever-pre­sent anticipation of existential demise. [F22⁠²]

I have fur­ther­more come to the realisation that all I do is long for the origins of our stagnant over-technologized world. When at a rasterized photon spewer, I do everything to make it be a terminal. If I want my letters to have non-in­for­ma­tion­al entropy attached to them, I incorporate caligraphy into my hand writ­ing and enjoy the flown ink. I see nothing more than byte transformers in these ma­chines and for that the simple read and write syscalls are suf­fi­cient. All advances made in the field of hard­ware are about dubiously motivated re­al­i­ty approximation unit density and time warping, yet can still be described by ps. I don’t care for the web, for the obsessive skeuomorphic recontextualization of re­al­i­ty GUIs make one believe in. [S99⁠³, pp. 46—60: “The interface culture”]
I even wonder if Stallman’s legacy is indeed a cult with on­ly those wise enough to abstain from befouling their mouths with ignorance the likes of “FOSS” members. A cult which has failed, their one and on­ly message through conformance kneaded into obscurity.

But where to then? With churches crumbling and analogue life waning? With every last cranny infested by fakery? — Maybe the right choice is to hide in local woodland; all efforts to think the contrary seem that unbearably inane.