> Hacker culture sees programming as a conversation with a machine as it runs.
I wrote about this a fair bit as a party of my master's thesis, about tinkering as being a "conversation" with materials. Hacking can absolutely be looked at in this framework.
The philosopher Donald Schön I think was the first person to formulate tinkering in that way. The process of engaging with materials -- whether it's a broken motor you're curious about or a tune you're plucking out as a complete novice or some code on Scratch -- involves asking questions of the materials, learning to hear answers, and noticing when the materials themselves pose questions. It's a really nice way of looking at things.
I've noted the value of a creative work depends inversely on how easy it is to create more like it. Any individual Candy Crush clone may be irreplaceable, but so similar to other Candy Crush clones that they have little value. If I had a chat box that could make Candy Crush clones at will, I wouldn't value any of them. That is, when you can make something, you relate to it less.
I wonder about that. Everyone has a word processor, or a pen and paper, or a voice—everyone can make stories at will. But that doesn’t diminish the value of a good story, as opposed to dreck.
Maybe the chatbot can reproduce variations on technical artifacts with similar formal characteristics as the Candy Crush game. But the reproductions don’t come with the essence of what made it important: its cultural novelty, the whimsy of its graphics, the freshness of its addictive mechanism, its arrival when people had smartphones and were fishing around for what to do with them, its timing before its competitors dialed in even more potent attention sinks…
“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
I can make a photo or video with my phone camera anywhere, anytime, and I can do so essentially for free, in essentially unlimited quantity. Then Sean Baker turns around and makes Tangerine with his iPhone 5S… and if anything, I’m even more sensitized to the way good photography has something above and beyond what I’m doing.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [0] comes to mind.
I wrote about this a fair bit as a party of my master's thesis, about tinkering as being a "conversation" with materials. Hacking can absolutely be looked at in this framework.
The philosopher Donald Schön I think was the first person to formulate tinkering in that way. The process of engaging with materials -- whether it's a broken motor you're curious about or a tune you're plucking out as a complete novice or some code on Scratch -- involves asking questions of the materials, learning to hear answers, and noticing when the materials themselves pose questions. It's a really nice way of looking at things.
Maybe the chatbot can reproduce variations on technical artifacts with similar formal characteristics as the Candy Crush game. But the reproductions don’t come with the essence of what made it important: its cultural novelty, the whimsy of its graphics, the freshness of its addictive mechanism, its arrival when people had smartphones and were fishing around for what to do with them, its timing before its competitors dialed in even more potent attention sinks…
“Voici mon secret. Il est très simple: On ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”
I can make a photo or video with my phone camera anywhere, anytime, and I can do so essentially for free, in essentially unlimited quantity. Then Sean Baker turns around and makes Tangerine with his iPhone 5S… and if anything, I’m even more sensitized to the way good photography has something above and beyond what I’m doing.
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction [0] comes to mind.
[0] [PDF] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf