I’m afraid if 1285 and my work are literally becoming cloning me in my own head.
I hate everything about this crap that is called ████’s music.
Zea has introduced me to the Beach House and the music had this beautiful modulation. When this happens I get bored. I can comprehend the music much better now that I have the vocabulary for it; but it is also very boring. A very not-nice figure had a writing in our school books that used to say how when he was a child, “Moon” was something magical and used to produce my thoughts aloft. Then I grew up and realized this was only a rock. He was angry of science for killing the magic of his wandering for him.
It took me two decades to fully grasp these words. Back then it was a guilty thing giving a shit about his work. Today I see the spark that essay gave me. After decades of wandering now I have the physics and mechanics to fully see how we thrive of the Gutter space; how the free space of integrating the needs is everything we have and how when there is nothing new we become bored.
While I love understanding systems; when the picture is vague and when I have no understanding; no way to digest the concepts and reduce them to atoms I’m way way more content. Knowing this understanding came from my own theories is a very magical feeling.
Today started very badly. I arrived late (8:8 am) and A. █████████ arrived as I did. A few minutes of awkward silence made me explain to her that A. ██████ and R. █████ are gone. K. ███████ arrived late, and understanding I have told A. █████████ , it made K. ███████ a lot nervous. A. █████████ didn’t like the idea as well. It made her nervous too. For the mitigation of that problem, we agreed to help her today. It was assumed that we are going to have ه
It starts with Alan Kay at Xerox PARC in the 1970s, asking what computing would look like as a medium for thought rather than a machine for calculation, and inventing, along the way, most of what you are using to read this. Kay spent the rest of his career trying to rebuild the conditions that made PARC possible: total freedom, long time horizons, no product pressure. In 2013 he tried again. He recruited Bret Victor, Vi Hart, and Dan Ingalls as principal investigators of a new lab in San Francisco called CDG, the Communications Design Group.
CDG was funded by SAP, and by Vishal Sikka in particular, SAP’s CTO at the time, who believed in Kay’s vision and had the resources to back it. I joined SAP in Germany as a working student during my Masters and stayed seven years, in the CTO’s own organization. In all that time I never heard the name CDG once, even though being part of it would have made my years there far richer. The lab was invisible on purpose. The name was chosen because it was generic enough to be forgotten; the researchers had watched what attention does to this kind of work, and they wanted none of it.
Inside, they practiced what they called deep work with an intensity that reorganized even their manners. Nobody said hello in the morning. Nobody said goodbye at night. The silence was a form of trust, an agreement never to interrupt each other’s decades-long thoughts. Their prototypes were built, in their own words, against usefulness. Usefulness, they had learned, is a trap: the moment a prototype becomes useful, its makers start answering to present users and stop pointing at the future. And Victor himself, in the talk that made him famous, described his motivation in words you never hear in a technical field. When he sees creators constrained by their tools, he sees an injustice. “Not opportunity, but responsibility.”
Dynamicland ran as a nonprofit on donations, and Omar told me something that stuck: the early patrons of this work tended to come from odd backgrounds, art, music, family money, because the tech people were all too busy being excited about their own thing.
