How technology thinks

Matter and thinking

“Yet another one who, instead of working, wastes his time playing with LaTeX”.

In response to a blog post where Marcello tried to explain the importance of formats and writing tools, a colleague tweeted: “Yet another one who, instead of working, wastes his time playing with LaTeX”.

It is interesting to analyze the point of view behind such a reaction, as it represents a way of thinking strongly rooted in our culture. One could say that such an idea is in continuity with a certain interpretation of the famous Platonic criticism of writing, developed in the Phaedrus. Plato’s position on this subject has been the focus of several debates - the most famous of which is Derrida’s La pharmacie de Platon. If we read Plato in the first degree, we identify an opposition between the ideality of thought and the impurity of its material inscription: on the one hand there is what really counts, the content, the ideas, whose purest expression is the logos (as if voice was not an inscription…); on the other hand the material inscription of these ideas which represents a form of decay. The superior purity of thought is transformed into a by-product, a bastard, imperfect product because it is embodied: writing. It is the traditional opposition between form and matter where the latter is always a limited and imperfect manifestation of the former. This opposition is also revealed in a strong way in the masculine and feminine genders and is also found in Aristotle: a masculine form and a feminine matter. It is the sperm - the formal principle of life - that “feeds” on female matter in order to be embodied - in the theory of the Aristotelian generation, in particular.

Plotinus and Porphiry

I myself, Porphyry of Tyre, was one of Plotinus’ very closest friends, and it was to me he entrusted the task of revising his writings. Such revision was necessary: Plotinus could not bear to go back on his work even for one re-reading; and indeed the condition of his sight would scarcely allow it: his handwriting was slovenly; he misjoined his words; he cared nothing about spelling; his one concern was for the idea: in these habits, to our general surprise, he remained unchanged to the very end. He used to work out his design mentally from first to last: when he came to set down his ideas, he wrote out at one jet all he had stored in mind as though he were copying from a book. Interrupted, perhaps, by someone entering on business, he never lost hold of his plan; he was able to meet all the demands of the conversation and still keep his own train of thought clearly before him; when he was fee again, he never looked over what he had previously written–his sight, it has been mentioned, did not allow of such re-reading–but he linked on what was to follow as if no distraction had occurred.

A Porphyrian anecdote clearly manifests this ideology: in the Life of Plotinus, Porphyry tells how Plotinus wrote his Enneads while he was doing something else: he was talking, he was busy with other matters and at the same time he was writing down the complex thought that he had already developed. The act of inscribing his thought on a medium was considered trivial, it had no importance in itself and therefore no particular dignity. It is manual work, which could eventually be delegated to an individual without any competence, who just mechanically transcribe what has already been developed. To quote other conversations that took place around Marcello’s blog post, several colleagues - always men - stressed that the work of formatting and tagging the contents should be left to “a secretary” (feminine in French). The superior man thinks and creates the content. The woman, mechanically, inscribes this content in a “delivery channel”, thus carrying out a trivial, neutral and uninteresting work.

Women and computers

Deconstructing Plato?

Jacques Derrida, « La pharmacie de Platon », Tel Quel, nᵒ 32,33 (1968).

New materialisms and Karen Barad

Christopher N. Gamble, Joshua S. Hanan, et Thomas Nail, « What Is New Materialism? », Angelaki 24, nᵒ 6 (2 novembre 2019): 111‑34
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2007).

Double slit

Thomas Young, 1801: is the light a wave or a set of particles?

The experiment is used to determine whether the phenomenon being analyzed is a wave or a particle and was first performed by Thomas Young in 1801. Young used it to demonstrate that light behaves like a wave. The experiment consists in sending a beam of light to a support with two slits and then watch its behavior. In classical physics we consider that a phenomenon is either made up of a series of particles or it is a wave. Now, if we throw field hockey pucks against this support, for example, and then look behind where the pucks arrived, we expect to find two concentrations of pucks, one behind each slit. In effect, some of the pucks will be blocked by the bracket, some will go through one of the slots, and some will go through the other slot. The washers thus behave like particles. If they are waves that pass through the two slits, they will produce interference. If we position a screen behind the support and look at the places with a greater density, we will see not, as in the case of the washers, two lines, but a series of lines of different thickness. This is called an interference pattern.

However, if we carry out the experiment by throwing electrons against the two slits, the result is surprising: the electrons - which would seem to be similar to small balls - do not behave like particles, but like waves and they produce an interference pattern. It seems that electrons “interfere” with each other.

To try to understand the phenomenon we can find a trick: we can throw the electrons one by one, thus preventing them from interacting with each other. But, again, the results are surprising: each electron arrives in fact at a precise point of the screen, but if we look at the pattern produced at the end, after having launched separately all the electrons, we find an interference pattern. Since the electrons are thrown one by one they cannot interfere with each other: it seems that they interfere with themselves. It seems that each electron passes through both slits and interferes with itself.

To verify this strange idea, we can modify the device in such a way that we are able to observe through which slit an electron passes. We send one electron at a time and for each electron we note through which slit it passes. The experiment is identical to the previous one except for one detail: our device has been modified to allow us to know through which slit the electron passes. And still a surprising result awaits us: the interference pattern disappears!

Bohr argued that if we were to perform a two-slit experiment with a which-path device (which can be used to determine which slit each electron goes through on its way to the detecting screen), we would find that the interference pattern is destroyed. That is, if a measurement is made that identifies the electron as a particle, as is the case when we use a which-path detector, then the result will be a particle pattern, not the wave pattern that results when the original unmodified two-slit apparatus is used. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe halfway, p. 103

Concepts are specific physical arrangements

Bohr’s argument for the indeterminable nature of measurement interactions is based on his insight that concepts are defined by the circumstances required for their measurement. That is, theoretical concepts are not ideational in character; they are specific physical arrangements. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe halfway, p. 109

Matter matters

Writing…

Tools, protocols, algorithms, formats… think.
How do they think? What do they think?

https://intelligibilite-numerique.numerev.com/numeros/n-1-2020/18-ecrire-les-shs-en-environnement-numerique-l-editeur-de-texte-stylo

http://vitalirosati.net/slides/2019/cours-2020-fra6730.html#/section-8

Now: the same thing caracterises the relationship between writing and thinking. It is not possible to separate them. Particular material forms of writing determine thinking. Or, to be more accurate: particular material forms of writing are thinking.

Whether it is this pad - and the different collective work protocols that can emerge from it - or a git repository with its versioning device, or rather a complex set of communication protocols (TCP/IP, HTTP etc.), formats (md, HTML, txt…), syntax rules in different languages, tools and algorithms - this text is partly produced by deepl - … what thinks here is the incription.

Word

Dehut, J. (2018). « En finir avec Word ! Pour une analyse des enjeux relatifs aux traitements de texte et à leur utilisation ». Carnet de recherche.
Kirschenbaum, M. G. (2016). Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. Cambridge, États-Unis d’Amérique: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

A computer for writing??

Writing code and documentation, saving and printing it.

1976 Electric Pencil - Michael Shrayer
1979 Easy Writer - John Thomas Draper
1979 WordStar: WYSYWYG - for the concept of page
Home computers - 1984
1983 Word

The principles

graphic interface
printing is the goal!
office!
format=software

The effects

WYSIWYG and “disintermediation”
- loss of skills
loss of control
poor information
loss of utility (using a computer as a typewriter)
sustainability issues
a formatted way of thinking

The principle of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) determines a confusion between structuring and formatting: to facilitate the reading and processing of an article or a book, it is necessary to dissociate the semantic value of the fragments from their graphic rendering, for example: a level 2 title and its graphic rendering in a large font size,
The syntax is hidden: it is thus impossible to know what is going on. The software decides about the meaning!
The docx format does not allow a scientific structuring of the contents. The contents produced in docx are poorly marked up and difficult to access, as they are poorly indexed. At a time when there is a huge production of texts, it becomes crucial that documents are correctly structured to improve their indexing anda allow their query by advanced search tools.
Editors are obliged to do a long and tedious work of reworking texts in order to reintroduce texts in order to reintroduce a semantic layer and to correct the numerous and correct the numerous errors introduced by these word processors.
The durability of documents in docx format depends on Microsoft’s willingness to maintain this Microsoft to maintain this proprietary format. However, durability is not the mission and priority of a company. mission and priority of a commercial enterprise. There is no guarantee that content in docx format will be accessible in the future
**But the most serious thing is that writing and thinking become a single, homogeneous activity. We all think the same way. And in all our activities we think in the same way: whether we are writing a love letter, a shopping list, a scientific article in physics or literature, a novel, lecture notes…

The only way to write seems to be the one used to write internal documents for a small company.**

Creating one’s own writing environment

Each particular project must be accompanied by the conception and design of a writing environment, because the writing environment is the factory of thinking. Putting together tools, organizing protocols, formats etc. means enabling thinking.

In the Metaontology project that I am showing you on the screen, the idea is to make the text I write interact with a series of sources. I tried to imagine a data structure to allow this dialogue. Each source, each quotation is written in yaml and it is accompanied by a series of metadata like the author’s date of birth, the title etc. This then allows me to see what I’m quoting - I used a jupyter-notebook for example to visualize my sources on a map and this allowed me to see how eurocentric my references were. This visualization pushed me to broaden my reading. It changed the direction and orientation of my thinking.