Studying computer science in a world of infinite possibility

Previously, on njms.ca:

At midnight on June 13th, 2009, analog TV broadcasts were suddenly terminated across the United States. By this point, most people had switched to digital, but the moment still represented the end of an era. A moment captured in this absolute relic of a video:

A number of stations in the United States stuck around for longer under exemptions. In Canada the switch-over happened in 2012. But still, there was something special about analog television, wasn't there?

Analog video has been an incipient special interest of mine over the last year. This morning I watched a video by Moondream, which I'd encourage you to take a look at if you're also into this sort of thing:

He and his roommates bought a bunch of old TVs to set up around their house so that they could broadcast a pirate analog TV station during house parties. But… why? It probably would have been easier to stream their videos over WiFi. They could have piped them into ntsc-rs to simulate the analog TV feeling.

But that wouldn't have been as special. There's something ineffably magical about doing the real thing. What I think makes analog video interesting at all is that it's shaped by the limitations of its time. We aren't in the analog video era anymore, but it still exists. It still bears the imprints of those limitations, and that's interesting. When people talk about how modern technology feels "soulless," "sterile," I have to imagine that's an artifact of our current era of everything, unlimited, all the time. Nowadays you can do whatever you want. There are endless possibilities for how we can make things, but rather than explore that possibility space, most of our media seems to fall into one of two categories: either simulating old technological limitations to capture a feeling of nostalgia, or embracing the limitlessness of modern digital technology to converge on an aesthetic point, the point I believe underpins this soullessness people are trying to escape.

Recently, Arlon de Serra Grande (blog.ayom.media) and Lionel Dricot (ploum.net) co-signed the Offpunk Manifesto, which I agree with:

In it they describe Internet connection as a weapon of class warfare.

Digital technology has ceased to be a tool and has become an environment — an environment from which one cannot escape. That is, a prison.

I do believe that any collective struggle that's serious about the conditions of the modern world ought to grapple with forced digitization, at least in its current manifestation. But beyond that, it's worth noting how digitization didn't have to be this way. The Internet could have been a beautiful place, and in many ways it still is. Like a parent who never went to therapy, we took something with revolutionary potential and downloaded all our old traumas into its brain. What's left is to learn from our mistakes and break the cycle.

I do not believe the institutions who would wield digital technology against people will live forever. At this rate, they might not even outlive us. That being said, their metallic artifacts likely will, and with enough love and care could persist well into the future. This will be a future draped in curtains of fibre optic cables divorced from their once oppressive context—/tools of infinite possibility that will be used however future peoples choose to use them. Perhaps now is the time to create the ideas lying around those people will feel nostalgic for.

With practically unlimited compute in a fifteen year old laptop, you could do pretty much anything. Or, you could do the one obvious thing. You could take the low road every time, creating this soulless software everyone hates. Even if there are no limits, there may still be principles. Things we choose, that bound our behaviour. Things that spark creative solutions to interesting problems. Things that give our creations character and make them feel inspired.

NTSC analog television is pretty much gone, and its limitations aren't specifically relevant in modern communication infrastructure. But NTSC isn't just a nostalgia piece. There are things that made it special, things that have been lost in modern formats. NTSC was DRM-free. It was in your community. It wasn't following you around everywhere you went. What would a new video transmission protocol look like, using modern communication infrastructure, if it captured this spirit? What limitations are worth self-imposing?

It would be to television what Gemini is to the web. I think this is why I still care about Gemini, and a big part of why I find it sad that one of the most common reasons people leave is that it doesn't offer any real "advantages" over how the average tech literate person interacts with the web. I think this attitude mirrors the distinction the Offpunk Manifesto makes between digital minimalism and "offpunk" as a philosophy. To use the web with NoScript or UBlock Origin is to solve the collective problem of forced digitization with individual patches. Gemini is an attempt to radically reimagine how the web works, with its own selection of deliberate constraints that make it special. It will not on its own "beat" the web, but unlike NoScript, it offers an alternate vision of the future where the web serves the interests of the people rather than Capital.

I've long felt uncomfortable with how computers, these things I care about, are more often tools of oppression than they are tools of liberation. But this isn't a paradox. I think it's clear now the reason I care about computers is not for what they do in practice but what they could do in theory. If you also grapple with this discomfort, I'd encourage you to think about something you take for granted, and try to imagine how it could work differently. Throw out your assumptions about how computers work, how they ought to work.

Throw out the application layer: what would the web look like if it was designed to preclude the emergence of surveillance capitalism? Throw out the transport layer: what would the Internet look like if connections had a way to encode consent? Throw out the processor: what would software look like if programs weren't a list of imperative "commands", but rather a description of memory stewardship practices? Maybe nothing, but we won't know until you try.

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