I’m trying out something new this year, where I maintain a log of cool things I read (or watch, or listen to) around my work or academic interests. I think logging and describing these things can be good for my sense-making process in the long term, or generally help me feel sane when I look at the calendar on a Friday and exclaim “Where did the week go? 🫠”. Now, I will know, where the week went.

The Turing Complete User

This week, I finally read an essay I’d bookmarked approximately a zillion days ago, Turing Complete User, by Olia Lialina. I gathered that the author is a professor and researcher, but also (and this is incredibly cool) runs the One Terabyte of the Kilobyte Age project, which archives and restores old Geocities websites! This is so incredibly cool¹!

This essay tackles a slightly different matter, albeit in a similar vein of understanding the status quo and how it differes from historical ideas. In particular, the essay focuses on modern conceptions of user interfaces, and how are they are increasingly rendered invisible in order to ’to turn our interactions with computers into pre-computer actions or, as interface designers prefer to say, “natural” gestures and movement’. The author argues that rendering interfaces invisible to encourage more “natural” interactions, and starting to refer to “users” as “people” (cf. Don Norman’s ideas) also renders users (or people, or whatever you seek to call them) invisible, and this can be a problem:

We need to take care of this word [“people”] because addressing people and not users hides the existence of two classes of people — developers and users. And if we lose this distinction, users may lose their rights and the opportunity to protect them. These rights are to demand better software, the ability “to choose none of the above”6, to delete your files, to get your files back, to fail epically and, back to the fundamental one, to see the computer.

Diving deeper into ideas from luminaries like V. Bush, D. Norman, J.C.R. Licklider, and T. Nelson, the essay makes the case that instead of centering invisible interfaces, we need to spend more time empowering users, and recognize that users have the capabulity to be “Turing Complete”. We need to educate users in this direction and also design for them to support their intelligence and agency:

But whatever name I chose, what I mean are users who have the ability to achieve their goals regardless of the primary purpose of an application or device. Such users will find a way to their aspiration without an app or utility programmed specifically for it. The Universal user is not a super user, not half a hacker. It is not an exotic type of user.

There can be different examples and levels of autonomy that users can imagine for themselves, but the capacity to be universal is still in all of us. Sometimes it is a conscious choice not to delegate particular jobs to the computer, and sometimes it is just a habit. Most often it is not more than a click or two that uncover your general purpose architecture.

What can this look like?

For instance, you can decide not to use Twitter at all and instead inform the world about your breakfast through your own website. You can use Live Journal as if it is Twitter, you can use Twitter as Twitter, but instead of following people, visit their profiles as you’d visit a homepage. You can have two Twitter accounts and log in to one in Firefox, and the other in Chrome. This is how I do it and it doesn’t matter why I prefer to manage it this way. Maybe I don’t know that an app for managing multiple accounts exists, maybe I knew but didn’t like it, or maybe I’m too lazy to install it. Whatever, I found a way. And you will do as well.

[…]

Does this mean that to deliver this kind of user experience the software industry needs to produce imperfect software or hold itself back from improving existing tools? Of course not! Tools can be perfect.

Though the idea of perfect software could be revised, taking into account that it is used by the General Purpose User, valuing ambiguity and users’ involvement.

[…]

An effort must be made to educate the users about themselves. There should be understanding of what it means to be a user of an “all purpose automatic digital computing system”.

These are some interesting provocations, and honestly this essay gave me a lot to think about. I also really enjoyed how it brought in some foundational ideas from personal computing to make its arguments, I think I have a soft spot for these types of pieces.

Goodbye Pitchfork :(

Condé Nast effectively pulled the plug on Pitchfork this week, laying off a lot of people and announcing that they are merging it into GQ. I spent a lot of time re-reading some recent and old favourites.

Now I’ve experienced my fair share of annoyance at Pitchfork reviews for albums I’ve loved or felt meh about, and I also had a lot to say about their philosophy during the controversial “rescoring” stuff they pulled in 2021. However, Pitchfork is also where I discovered a ton of cool indie/pop/hip-hop/underground artists, and acquired a vocabulary to talk about music and the parts of it that appealed to me and made sense. Their longreads have helped me make sense of shifts in how music is produced, consumed, and collected. I even go tothe Pitchfork Music Festival and its aftershows here in Chicago every year, where I’ve had the chance to watch and discover so many amazing and sonically distinct artists, including Big Thief, Julia Jacklin, and Dry Cleaning. And all this despite the kind of dude-bro-y connotations that the site has historically evoked!

Scott Nover at Slate describes this diversity of sound, genre, and demographic that had increasingly become a hallmark of Pitchfork, and captures why folding ths magazine into GQ feels like such a loss for the quality of media discourse in music (article):

If Condé bought Pitchfork for its audience of white dudes, that’s not really what it ended up with. The site’s writers and editors—perhaps with the newfound resources of a big media company—made sure of that, transforming the tone, tenor, and coverage of the website in a way that was frankly long overdue. […] Now a partly decimated Pitchfork will be folded into GQ, a men’s magazine. GQ has long had poignant music journalism—its profiles, especially—but it’s a publication that celebrates celebrity, something Pitchfork never cared about. If Condé executives still think Pitchfork is a dude blog, it’d make sense that they want those dudes to grow up and become, well, gentlemen. But Pitchfork is not a dude blog anymore, and it hasn’t felt that way in a very long time. They’d have realized that if they read the site.

I’m going to miss Pitchfork, and this has forced me to spend more time thinking about the future of more artistic news beats. I follow so many film critics on Substack/assorted email newsletters at this point. Maybe this is the future of music journalism too?

The Rabbit R1, and Hedonic Treadmills

Rob Horning wrote a really interesting essay on the new Rabbit R1 vistrual assistant, a device that can “use your apps for you”. It’s another product in the pantheon of generative AI stuff. He wonders why we need apps to use our apps in the first place:

I am instead wondering about the nature of the sales pitch, the idea that people want a “gadget that can use your apps for you,” as though we have all been condemned to downloading all sorts of apps we have no interest in using ourselves. Most apps are premised on being either fun to use or capable of making your life easier in some way. If they turn out to be neither, it doesn’t seem as though purchasing a device to run your device will help end the ensuing infinite regress, as you will inevitably need a device to run the device that runs your device, and on and on. You always need a new convenience to make your existing conveniences even more convenient. To get off this hedonic treadmill of laziness would require that we interrogate why we need to use apps we don’t want to engage with and why we mistake them for conveniences in the first place. Or if they aren’t really beneficial to us, how are we compelled to use them anyway? Why and for whose benefit is life being set up so that nuisance apps serve as unavoidable mediators between what we want to do and being able to do it?

In some sense, the affordances of the Rabbit R1 read as the antithesis of the Turing Complete User, with Horning noting how using a device that lives your life instead of you actually living it, is being sold to us as a desirable thing.

Why live life when you can consume it instead, under your delightful intuitive companion’s direction? A perfect life is one devoted entirely to saving time, such that everything that will ever happen to you has already happened in an instant; you undergo no experiences and thus will never die.

The ultra-competent AI assistant appeals to the basically masochistic fantasy that surrendering control is the crux of pleasure, that the secret apex of agency is choosing to give it all away to something that is commanded to command you, that to be an object is to become a pure subject. It’s as though we are presumed to be jealous of our devices: We don’t want to use the phone; we want to be the phone. (After all, it always seems to have everyone else’s attention.)

I also can’t help but draw direct parallels to the oft-touted summarization qualities of LLMs and how this argument enagages with that. With summarization, you are getting the LLM to read something for you instead of reading it. And I think the idea that you could just condense a document into a little paragraph to skim over also assumes that there isn’t a joy in the sensemaking process, of wrestling with difficult information, sitting with it and playing around with it in your head. This is not to say that the summarization has no value, of course, it does. But when is it touted as an aid to your sensemaking, versus as a short-cut for your sensemaking? Or as a way to provide signposts for something you read, versus to just skip over it? I’m not sure. I think it depends a lot on the application and the intended users. But I think it’s a real risk we run up against, and it’s a fine line to toe.