Monomorphic

After 13 months and 51 posts, my experiments in blogging continue, although they are perhaps better described as polymorphic than monomorphic. Maybe it’s time for some reflections.

On the whole blogging in this format and at this frequency has been a pretty fun and fulfilling process. I get to practice writing free-form, nonscientific texts, and even if many of them might not be read by so many people, the idea that they might be turns it into a useful exercise.

Recently Flattr buttons were added to this blog, which allows users who use the service to donate money and show appreciation for my texts (some such people indeed exist – thanks a lot, all two of you!). Initially I had a single button for the entire blog, but now I am trying out a format where I have one button per post.

I’ve noticed, on this blog and elsewhere, that I can’t quite decide if I should write with British or American English. I feel culturally uncertain as a writer of this language. But recently I’ve come to think that I should embrace my European background, so more of the British variety in the future is a likely prospect.

Topics have been varied. The tag and category systems have been used in an attempt to bring some order to the table, but they’ve become too chaotic to be useful. A restructuring is perhaps in order during the next 13 months.

One of the most popular topics I’ve written about has been the Scala language. People tend to google Scala a lot, and it’s actually really uplifting to see the interest in it (since I hold it to be a way forward). If you are a blogger who wants to get a billion page views, write about Scala. I don’t want to consciously pander to the readers too much, so in itself it is not a reason for me to write about the topic. I will write about Scala when I want to say something about it. (A difficult principle to really practice.)

I’ve tried out some different WordPress themes occasionally, but so far I haven’t found anything I like better than this “Infinimum” theme. It feels very clean, functional and modern.

That will be enough of the reflections for now.

The architecture of the Internet is fundamentally decentralized, a fact that continues to impress to this day. The breadth and depth of the sea of applications and uses we have made of it, and its resilience, impress perhaps all the more, because many of our experiences from everyday life tell us that some of the strongest things in society are singular and centralized — huge companies and governments, for instance. I’m actually not an expert on internet architecture, but my understanding is that the only thing that is fixed in it is the DNS system, which relies on some top level hardcoded IP addresses and coordination.

But even though the Internet is built on a decentralized architecture, it also supports applications/services that are highly centralized in their architecture and in their intended use. Google and Facebook are two very famous such applications. On the other extreme are applications that might be called P2P, including notorious file sharing systems such as Bittorrent, and also simple email (which was designed for decentralized use but is becoming heavily centralized with services like Gmail).

In recent days there’s been much discussion about Facebook’s role, particularly since it has been taking more and more liberties with the vast amounts of data about it users that it holds, scaling back the notions of privacy and integrity as they see fit. Many people are calling for decentralized alternatives to Facebook to rear their heads, and I suppose people have been calling for decentralized search engines as well for some time.

Much seems to be at stake here. What’s the future direction of the internet? A few giants holding all the data, monopolising certain functions, or a distributed network of peers, creating functionality together? The debate is ideologically charged and could be mapped into a big government/small government discussion, although I think it would be fruitless to do so. What is certain is that radically different applications can be created using the centralized/decentralized models and that it is rarely a case of merely “porting” an app from one architecture to another, the way you port an application from C to Java. On an abstract level, the two models could serve as substrates for the same functionalities (such as social network services), but the concrete implementations would have very different characteristics.

Do we create centralized applications because our legal systems, property rights systems, and so on, have not evolved at the same pace as our infrastructure, so that our tendencies, habits and ideals from a brick-and-mortar world are preserved in the world of fiber and switches, appearing ever more outdated?

In Sweden this debate has been especially pronounced recently with companies like Flattr being firmly on the side of decentralized models. Flattr is trying to be a universal donation system for content on the internet, and the vision behind it is a large number of decentralized creators of “content” (which are themselves consumers).

I’m not sure which model will win in the long run. I prefer to think that both models have a role to play and that they can coexist nicely. But lately it seems as if the centralized model has had a bit too much momentum. Let’s dig deeper into the decentralizing potential of the internet!

Here’s a general method for synthesising solutions to complex problems, intended for use by people.

1. Enumerate the constraints

2. Find an initial solution that feels right but doesn’t quite work, based on previous knowledge of the domain

3. Use the information contained in the constraints to adjust the solution, so that it works

4. Either you have succeeded, or new constraints came out of the process => go to step 1 and repeat

Different technologies have different kinds of aesthetics, and they affect us in various ways, whether we are particularly fascinated with technology or not.

The easiest technologies to understand on an intuitive-emotional basis seem to be those that involve physical processes. Objects rotating, moving, being lifted and displaced, compressed, crushed. Gases and liquids being sent around in conduits, mediating force and energy. In short, the technology that has its foundation in classical mechanics.

If these are easy to get a feel for, it would probably be in part because an understanding of mechanical processes has been of use to us throughout history, and also before the advent of civilisation. An intuitive understanding of things such as momentum, acceleration, gravity has no doubt benefited mankind and its ancestors for a very long time.

It gets trickier when we get to the more recent technologies. Take electricity to be an arbitrary watershed. We have no intuitive idea of what electricity is, apart from the fact we might be afraid of thunder. Electricity has to be taught through the abstract idea of electrons flowing in conduits, a bit like water in pipes (to name one of many images being used).

And then there’s analog and digital electronics, integrated circuits, semiconductors and so on, where intuition has long ago been left behind. We are forced to approach these things in a purely abstract domain.

Yet, when our Mp3 players, game consoles, mobile phones and computers do things for us, we are left with a sense of wonder. Our minds, always looking for stories and explanations, want to associate the impressive effects produced by these devices with some stimuli. With a steam engine, it’s easy to associate the energy with pressure, heat and motion, all of which are well understood on a low level. With a mobile phone, not so much. A lot of very abstract stories have to be used in order to reach anything that resembles an explanation, and still it doesn’t reach the essence of the device, which might be in its interplay between radio transceivers, sound codec chips, a display with a user interface and software to drive it, a central CPU, and so on, together with, of course, the network of physical antennas and their connectivity with other such networks. Is it too much to suppose that the human mind often stops short of the true explanation here? That we associate the effects produced by the device with what we can touch, smell, see and hear?

This is of course the point where many computer geeks worldwide start to feel a certain affection for the materials that make up the machines. Suppose that we are in the 1980′s. Green text on a black terminal background. A particular kind of fixed width font. The clicking of the keyboard. The dull grey plastic used to make the case. All of these things can acquire a lot of meaning that they don’t really have, because the users lack a window (physical and emotional) into the essence of the machine. The ultimate “disconnected machine”, to relate to my field, is software.

This brings up questions such as: how far can we as a species proceed with technology that we cannot understand instinctively, how can we teach such technology meaningfully and include it in democratic debate, and how can we use people’s tendencies to associate sensory stimuli with meaning and effects in a more meaningful way? – for instance, when we design hardware and software interfaces.