With some sadness I learned of the passing of Tracy Kidder over the weekend past. He won the Pulitzer in 1981 for The Soul of a New Machine, a foundational work on early computing that captured what it was like developing the hardware in the days before everyone had a supercomputer in their pocket.
I was introduced to Soul during the process of working on my PhD, with one of the members of my candidacy committee sneaking it onto my reading list, to not only break up the technical reading, but to demonstrate how it was possible to humanize the writing on even the most dry technical subject.
Reading The Soul of a New Machine felt in some ways like watching the TV series Halt and Catch Fire, the AMC drama from the mid-twenty-teens that covered a similar period in the devlopment of computing hardware, though Kidder’s work didn’t have quite the same level of drama.
Not that his work was without it, however. Kidder wrote on a wide range of subjects, as can be seen here at his website, and many of them have that close, nearly anthropological study of people and their environments that often go beneath our notice. If Kidder is writing on a subject that is of interest to you, it would be worth your while to track down one of his works.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t share Zizek’s astute bit on it:
The image at the top feels right, but does the analysis work? It’s not like the pro-AI messages are subtext, hidden behind a screen: they’re right there on the billboards in front of you.
The ideology hidden behind those Pro-AI ads is something different entirely. (And don’t forget that the glasses are “ideology” too.)
We’ve talked a little bit about these ideologies before, both the Pro-AI camp in our California episode, and the anti-camp that intersects with the Mauve Pill. Looks like we might need to revisit those soon; and bring that episode to you.
Both literally and figuratively, in case there was any confusion.1
While checking out a wikipedia entry on a book title, I witnessed a CEME2.
A Canon Event Mandela Effect.
Though perhaps “experienced” is more accurate than “witnessed”, because like I said, I’m shook.
Let me explain. No, too much, let me sum up.
I was shared a link to Vilem Flusser’s Thinking Further: Fragments in Communicology, which looked interesting enough. I had never heard of either the author or the term “communicology” before, but had read a couple pieces by Kittler, who wrote the introduction to this, so I was intrigued, and being the studious sort I did the old “right-click, search on Duck-Duck Go”3 on that new term.
Which is when I fell through the CEME.
You see, a couple of my degrees are in the field of Communication Studies, so I’ve been exposed to a fair bit of it, but I’ve never heard of a branch of the field referred to as Communicology before. Which, fair, it’s a pretty big tent, and there’s a lot of sub-disciplines, and we can always learn a little more.
But this Mandela Effect-like experience I was having as I scrolled through the Wikipedia page (linked above) felt like someone was rewriting the history of the field in new terms that I had never heard of, with authors I was only vaguely aware. Maybe, kinda sorta?
Was this some hallucination in the post-truth Age of AI? No, I didn’t think so, as I had no reason to believe both the University of Minnesota Press and the Friedrich Kittler, mentioned on the book cover shown above, were artifacts of a hallucinating AI. My trust still existed.
But the evidence before me on the Wikipedia page was shaking the foundations of that trust.
The page in question, just in case someone quilts the CEME later and the evidence vanishes.
And by dint of it shaking my foundations4, this is why this particular Mandela Effect is a Canon Event, the CE to the ME I was experiencing.
CEME, pronounced seam, even though it kinda looks like meme, stitching together the cracks between two scraps of the fabric of reality, where things are not as they seem. The light shining through the fragments, the sintering not quite complete, still visible as the world is re-woven, an antonym to those Lacanian quilting points that bind the scraps together.
Observers close to the subject can still see the patches, that the scraps of fabric don’t quite match, and can spot where they were joined if they were present to see the weavers of the CEME in action.
Ya gotta know where to look.
After a while, evidence of the seam fades, as it looks like it was always there. You need to experience it, the rending, the tear, to know what took place.
Will I buy the book? Hmm. Do I dare?
Perhaps, I always was the curious sort.
But let this post be my stitch in the weave, so I can find my way back.
