Hi, I'm Ted Nelson.
Introducing Computers for Cynics.
Part 0: The Myth of Technology
But first, are you a dummy ?
If so, get out of here, there's 
thousands of books for the likes of you.
But if you're a clever and sophisticated
person
who'd like to know where
the bodies are buried
and how the computer world
really works,
perhaps some of the insights I'm
trying to present will be of interest.
The computer world deals with
imaginary, arbitrary, made-up stuff
that was all made up by somebody.
Everything you see was designed
and put there by someone
but so often we have to deal with
junk, and not knowing who to blame,
we blame technology.
That's the main thing I want 
you to understand,
as you consider the thousands of
methods, thousands of products,
the fanaticisms, the hopes and
dreams, the apparent possibilities,
the grim reality.
This will draw in part on my books
Computer Lib (1974), often called
a classic.
Geeks Bearing Gifts [chuckles],
which Brewster Kahle, the founder
of the Internet Archive calls the best
computer history book ever written.
And my memoir,
Possiplex, which tells off the years
of misadventures of the computer
I call myself a software designer.
Now what, you may ask, what software
have I designed ? Well, there's only
one thing that I designed, that
you're familiar with,
and that is called:
the back button
"What's that you say ? It's obvious !"
Yeah, it's completely obvious.
But in 1967, it was obvious to only one
person in the world
and I had to fight for it.
So that's what this series is about:
the ideas and fights behind what
laymen call technology.
Technology exists, but it's like
marital fidelity.
There's a lot of it, but a lot 
less of it than people think.
And often what people call
technology isn't.
"I don't understand technology" often
means something like
"I don't understand the crappy
menus of this stupid camera"
People often say: "You can't argue
with technology". Of course, you can !
All kinds of junk is foisted on the
public in the name of technology
but you have to know what else
is possible.
And don't be misled
by packaging.
Part of the myth: thinking that
packaging is technology.
Here is an iPhone.
An iPhone is not technology,
it's packaging.
Microsoft Windows is packaging
and conventions.
Microsoft Windows is packaging
and conventions.
The Macintosh is packaging
and conventions.
The World Wide Web is packaging
and conventions
Underneath is wrappers of real
technology: TCP/IP,
and DNS, graphical display
and bit blit,
audio digitization and compression,
payment mechanisms and encryption,
and on and on and on...
But the wrapper is what
people see.
As with pretty girls and dashing men,
barely guessing what lies beneath.
And the greatest myth of technology
is the myth of determinism.
The belief that technology is
determinate, objective, inevitable,
and that the nature of 
computers is given.
It ain't so, it's all been
imagined up.
Now, many people think God
created the real world,
but no one that I know of
believes that he, she or it
created the computer world,
though many act as if they think so.
Key example: why can't you put
marginal notes on a Microsoft Word
file, or a PDF, or a web page ?
Why can't you put marginal notes on a
Word file, or a PDF, or a web page ?
The naive answer is: because
computers don't allow it.
And the real answer is: because...
[chuckles] because Chuck Simonyi,
and John Warnock,
and Tim Berners-Lee didn't
think you needed it.
Yes, it comes down to individuals.
If computers were determinate,
you could get the same answer
to a thousand... Pardon me. If
computers were determinate and
 you gave the same assignment to
a hundred programmers
You'd get the same result every time.
[chuckles] On the contrary, no way.
If you gave the same assignment
to 100 different programmers,
you'd get at least 75
different methods.
It's all very personal.
Everyone has passionate ideas and
ideals, and wants to create software
to fulfill those ideas and ideals.
Passionate people like Ken
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
when they created UNIX.
Passionate people like
Richard Stallman when he copied
UNIX to make GNU,
the free version of UNIX.
Passionate people like Linus
Torvalds when he put the
maraschino cherry in the middle
of GNU and created Linux.
Unfortunately, Torvalds gets all
the credits for Linux whereas
most of it was Richard
Stallman's GNU.
Anyway...
While the great doers have been
mostly men, let me also mention
Ada Lovelace, the first
theorist of software,
and in our time, Kate Compton,
the creator of a crown to hold your
iPhone above your forehead, giving
you an augmented reality headset.
Brilliantly minimalistic.
There are so many ideas to care about,
and with ideas come the politics of ideas.
There are thousands of computer ideas,
and so there are thousands of
computer religions that these ideas
people care very much about.
Every faction wants to pull you in...
Word, PDF, Mac, web...
Every faction wants you to think
they're the wave of the future, and
because there are no objective criteria,
as in religion, there are no objective
criteria, there are thousands of sects
and splinter groups.
Like dog breeds, there are thousands
of different computer ideas,
and like dog breeds they can be
endlessly combined,
making millions of computer ideas.
The concepts go on and on and
many of them have fanatical followers.
What are the principal computer
religions ? Oh !
Microsoft, Apple, Linux,
open source, venture capital,
program provability, God knows
what else.
Specific languages ! Everyone
has a favorite language
and they're fanatical about...
C++, Perl, Python,
Ruby, PCP, C#, Lisp (which Lisp ?),
east coast UNIX vs. west coast UNIX,
C shell vs. Bourne shell vs. Korn
shell...
Particular conventions of punctuations
have fanatical adherents
like, "I refer to the true brace
style in C".
Object-oriented programming has
many fanatical adherents, and then
so do specific methods of object-
oriented programming, like
down to the Booch method of 
decomposition for OO programming...
All these have their believers.
So who gets to decide ?
Who gets to decide what methods will
be used, what ideas will be followed
in creating software ? Ah... That's 
the politics of the computer world.
Politics of the computer world are
about:
who gets to design, that is, decide
what the proper product will feel and
what's in it, make up the constructs
and the mechanisms, decide and
polish the presentation
and the interface.
Everybody thinks they can design
great interfaces and almost no one can.
These decisions are determined how ?
By some objective mechanism ? Hahaha.
That's politics. They're determined
by fighting and jockeying an internal
politics and maneuvering 
in projects and in companies,
trying to get leverage, and everyone's
trying to get leverage and creative control.
Now, in Hollywood they have it
down to a system
They determine who directs, but
everybody understands that
everybody wants to direct, and it's an
issue they call creative control.
In the computer world, everyone wants
to design software, but they don't call it
creative control, but it's
exactly the same.
In software, it's the same issue as in 
Hollywood but nobody recognizes it.
And that's partly because interactive
software is really a kind of movie.
What is a movie ?
A movie is events on the screen, that 
affect the heart and mind of the viewer.
What is interactive software ?
Events on the screen that affect the
heart and mind of the user,
and interact, and have consequences.
So what's the difference ?
Interactive software is a "movie plus".
That means, there's a director who can
fine-tune all of the effects,
but for political reasons this almost
never happens. I can think of only one
director who fine tuned all the effects
in software, and that was Steve Jobs,
because he had the political plow to do it,
and the taste and judgement as well.
But as long as the industry thinks
that software is technology,
the process will not improve.
Google only hires "software
engineers", so do not expect
their interfaces to get better.
Behind most of the
designs there were fights.
And the more you care,
the bigger the fight.
Consider the history of
computer out of that.
First let's start in the 50's, first
it was BCD in the 50's.
So BCD (Binary Coded Decimal)
had eight bits for two characters,
and the two characters were... wait a 
minute, six... I'm screwing all up.
When they got to extended binary-coded
decimal (EBCDIC), you had two numbers,
which were 4 bits each, or one
seven-bit character.
So that way they pack either 2 decimal
digits or one 7-bit character in 8 bits,
a byte. Now, that's pretty stupid, ain't it ?
So along comes... many proposals
but along comes especially Bob Bemer
with the ASCII commitee and creates
the ASCII code, which is much more
sensible: every numeral gets its own
8 bits, and every character gets its
own 8 bits, so they have 256 of them,
it gets accepted after a great
deal of political fight.
And that was passionate. Bob
Bemer, he fought and fought
to give us ASCII, for which
we were all grateful.
But then what happens ? Well, in
Europe they said: "Hey !
Our characters don't fit in there,
we have all these doodads
on our alphabet, that don't fit in your 256
characters. What are we gonna do ?"
So ASCII was kicked over the Europe
and called ANSI, and became
the european standard with all the
doodads on the characters.
So that was another political trip.
And then in Asia, they said: "Hey,
what about us ?
We've got thousands of characters."
Hey, how many characters are there
in the japanese alphabet ?
No one knows !
But certainly tens of thousands.
The commitees got together and
they allocated a certain number of
[blah blah] characters to each language
in the world.
And then the bloodletting began because 
there weren't enough characters
for the cultural history, for all the writings
of Japan, Korea, Thailand, Vietnam.
They all lost characters, smashing the
history and literature of all these
different cultures.
So was the Unicode mask
technology ? No !
It's culture politics masquerading
as technology.
So technology is a mask worn by all
kinds of political parties and all kinds of
fights and situations.
So-called technology is also about
capture, getting permanent customers
chained into their seats.
Everybody wants to capture you,
either for money or to get you into
their computer religion. So the babble
of conflicting methods, techniques,
enthusiasms and conventions is
also designed to entrap, entangle
and entice, for either religious or
commercial reasons.
Capture worlds, I think that's the
term I prefer right now.
but we got also to call them platforms
or monopolies, or prisons,
or Venus flytraps, or there's that nice
term from espionage, honeytraps.
Anyway, your software choices are
like any addiction or religion.
They want your loyalty and they
want your money,
and they want you to think
like them.
Or even if they're idealists at no charge,
like Richard Stallman.
They want believers who will swell
the ranks.
The computer world is composed of
techies, schemers and sheep.
Also a few humanists, of which
I try to come myself.
The techies see more possiblities,
The schemers try to build and
combine, often not knowing
the possibilites, and the sheep
just choose one from what they see
The ones who get the farthest, of
course, are the techie-schemers,
like Larry Page, and Sergey Brin,
and John Warnock
But the media don't quite get these
distinctions. My favorite example is
the movie The Social Network, which
presented Mark Zuckerberg, the
founder of Facebook, as an ironic but
semi-artistic nerd.
In fact Mark Zuckerberg is a
fencing champion who speaks
fluent Latin and Greek.
So much for your stereotypes.
Nobody knows where the world is going !
The future is just starting, as always,
and now is the knife edge between
past and future.
Which way the knife will twist into
the oncoming universe of possibility ?
The media are now encouraging a new
faddest world of iPhones and Twitter
and YouTube, with all this great
great stuff that's free for everybody.
But ancient Rome, they say, went
down here when the illiterate masses
expected everything to be free:
Bread and Circuses, panem et
circences,
will today's freebies take away
our freedoms ?
What would it be ? Would it all
be more and more sweetness online ?
Thank you.
Subtitles courtesy of 
the Sainte-Force team
http://steforce.oin.name
Original videos:
youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson
