Reality Cracking

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Can open standards suffocate us?
Some unsystematic notes on standardization

by Steve Talbott
9 January 1998

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Courtesy of fravia's pages of reverse engineering

I found great part of the following this morning on my messageboard, unsigned (but I know it has been posted from a Belgian regular contributor), as part of an interesting thread about the utility and/or pointlessness of colours on web pages.
After having read it I immediately searched the web, convinced that I HAD to find such a fine essay published somewhere... and so I found it (on the most recent NETFUTURE newsletter: 5 January 1999, where there are even a couple of paragraphs more, which were missing on my messageboard), and so I discovered the real name of the author as well: Steve Talbott.
He published it and signed it elsewhere therefore there's no point in leaving this anonymous, and I will publish it also on my reality cracking lab since I believe it is jolly well worth reading, and very interesting from a 'reversing' point of view... besides, messageboards are ephemerical web-butterflies, with colourful but very short lives, fravia's r/c selected essays will -on the countrary- last for ever and ever :-)

A taste of it...

Our tendency to call software "user-friendly" (or not) indicates, I think,

an unhealthy confusion.  At least it does if we take user-friendliness to

imply more breathing room for the human being -- more room to grow and

re-vision our shared world.  As we've seen, software and standards *by

themselves* always become something of an oppressive element, something we

must learn how to transcend.  Their very nature -- especially when they

are thought to be intrinsically valuable -- is to constrain us.

Can open standards suffocate us? ~ Some unsystematic notes on standardization



				by Steve Talbott



Amid all the passion and rhetoric about Microsoft's monopoly and the

dangers of dominant, proprietary standards for software, it's worth

pausing to look at some of the underlying issues.  These have to do with

the seemingly inevitable march of standardization as such, whether

proprietary or open.



The virtues of standardization are evident enough to everyone -- so much

so that even the proprietary sort has its defenders.  In a story about

Microsoft, the *New York Times* quotes Mike Campbell, CEO of Campbell

Software in Chicago, about the difficulty of supporting his software on

sixteen different operating systems.  "I hate it!" he says.



   So what's Campbell doing?  Helping the monopoly.  He tries to persuade

   retailers to go with Windows and make it a common platform.  "I'm

   begging for it", he says.  (Mar. 5, 1998)



Of course, truly open standards might further Campbell's cause even more

than a proprietary standard.  But what most needs recognizing today is the

way standardized software in general constrains us.  The most crucial

antagonism is not between monopolistic, proprietary standards and open

standards -- important as that tension may be.  Rather, it is between what

you might call frozen intelligence -- the kind we embed in fixed standards

of any sort -- and the fluid, re-visioning intelligence that is required

in order to avoid being imprisoned by those standards.  Yes, we need

standards, but the more thoroughly standardized our lives, the greater the

re-visioning and standard-escaping powers we require if we are to retain a

degree of expressive freedom.



Incidentally, I see no vivid distinction between software standards and

software itself.  Every piece of software is already a kind of standard,

providing a set of procedures designed to be executed over and over.  More

generally, such standards are continuous with the entire range of

specifiable forms and structures that shape our activity, from

organizational procedures to legal statutes to fixed mental habits.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



Software lends a definite logical structure to our activities, however

finely articulated and multi-layered that structure may be.  The strands

of this logical web, like Lilliputian threads, can bind us equally well

regardless of whether they are spun by proprietary or open committees.

But within a healthy context where imaginative re-visioning is active, the

threads can play their part in liberating us.



When the Renaissance painters discovered the precise, mathematical methods

of linear perspective, there was an unleashing of tremendous creativity.

The rules of perspective were, at first, inseparable from a new way of

seeing the world -- a way that inspired artists like Piero della Francesca

and Leonardo da Vinci to lay the observational foundations for modern

science.



Over time, however, the fixed algorithms of linear perspective began to

feel mechanical and inhibiting, inadequate to the new visions that were

stirring artists.  (This was true of the greatest artists almost from the

start.  Michelangelo scorned the standard, geometric methods, preferring

the "compasses in the eye".)



New structures, new forms into which we can pour our personal expressions,

often do provoke a surge of creative energies.  But these forms *always*

become straitjackets with time.  Such is the essential movement of the

human spirit.  One generation's wildly unexpected expression is the next

generation's staid and stifling form -- until we somehow manage to break

out of the form.  That's why the fame of great poets is so often

posthumous:



   They have, as Shelley said, to create the taste by which they are

   appreciated; and by the time they have done so, the choice of words,

   the new meaning and manner of speech which they have brought in *must*,

   by the nature of things, be itself growing heavier and heavier, hanging

   like a millstone of authority round the neck of free expression.  We

   have but to substitute dogma for literature, and we find the same

   endless antagonism between prophet and priest.  How shall the hard rind

   not hate and detest the unembodied life that is cracking it from

   within?  How shall the mother not feel pain?  (Owen Barfield,

   "Archaism", in *Poetic Diction*)





                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



The worrisome question today is whether the rind of silicon and logic we

are now secreting at such a furious pace will, in the end, allow any life

at all to crack it from within.  The Renaissance artists never became

unalterably dependent upon tools embodying the algorithms of linear

perspective.  As their needs changed, they did not have to layer new

software upon the old, or go in and revise millions of lines of code in

order to pry open a few degrees of freedom for themselves.  They could

simply discard the entire apparatus of perspective and go on to other

things -- such as, eventually, impressionism and abstract art.  At least,

they could do so if their own ability to re-vision the world was strong

enough.



But in many spheres of life today, realizing a new vision of the world is

not so easy.  Even if we have the necessary inner powers, we immediately

find ourselves confronting the entrenched silicon logic that so many

people liken to an external nervous system.  Objective and enduring,

ramifying with remarkable ease, penetrating every corner of society like

the filaments of a fungus in rotting fruit, this global syntax extends

itself automatically.  Not only that, but there is always strong pressure

to keep the extensions consistent with the previously established logic.



"Previously established" -- this conservatism needs reckoning with.  The

more we build upon a standard -- for example, the more software we erect

upon it -- the more entrenched and immovable the standard becomes.  We

enjoy our new efficiency and freedom *above* the standard only by reducing

our freedom in the lower domain embodied by the standard.  So as we layer

one standard vertically upon another, codifying ever higher levels of

human activity, the question arises:  how do we preserve a balance between

form and freedom, between the crystalline clarity and fixity of ice and

the dissolving fires of the imagination?



It is vastly simpler to impress algorithms upon silicon than upon the

living dynamism of human institutions.  But the more the institutions have

already adapted to the silicon, the greater the pressure to yield still

further.  We have already learned how the relatively fixed network of

roads and highways becomes a constraining factor in the evolution of

communities.  But if the highway system becomes a brute given, limiting

future choice, we have hardly begun to reckon with the infinitely more

far-reaching ways computerization can hedge in and close off our

potentials for social expression.



Look at the world of modern finance.  Once the computational structures

have been elaborated to a certain point -- with trillion-dollar money

flows traversing those structures -- it is not so easy to toss them

blithely aside and take up other forms of financial expression.  We are

already finding that as "simple" a matter as changing the New York Stock

Exchange from an "eighths" system to a decimal system can turn out to be a

major headache.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



Or look at the cockpit of a jet airliner.  As the plane becomes more

software-driven and as the standard operating procedures followed by the

pilot and air traffic controller specify the pilot's actions more

minutely, the plane begins to "fly itself".  The pilot becomes more and

more superfluous.



In other words, the plane's flight increasingly becomes a strictly

technical matter.  This is possible because the pilot and passengers are

not engaged in some sort of Lewis and Clark expedition, exploring a new

landscape.  There is no need for conferring, for re-evaluating priorities

and purposes, for assessing the progress and value of the trip to date.

The pilot will not even ask the passengers whether they would like to

swoop down for a closer look at this or that sight.  All of which is just

as well, since most passengers, with their tightly structured lives, would

object to such unscheduled adventures anyway.



Just as well, yes -- although we may occasionally want to ask ourselves

whether too much of our passage through this world is taking on such a

purely technical character.  We may want to ask, that is, whether the

tight structuring of our lives has encouraged us to forget what it means

to *explore*, or to seek those dimensions where exploration is so

essential.



We may be thankful for the rule-based, predictable, and instrument-bound

flight of commercial airliners, but when we see, for example, the

classroom becoming a highly structured, merely technical undertaking --

one that can "fly by itself", without the teacher -- surely we have cause

to worry.  And here I'm referring not just to the growing role of the

computer in the classroom, but also to the close specification of the

curriculum by bureaucrats.



If there's any place where the spirit of exploration and the spirit of

re-visioning should reign, it's in the classroom.  Teacher and students

should encounter what for *both* of them holds something of the unknown --

on the teacher's part because he is engaging the subject matter "live",

right there before the students, rather than presenting what has already

been completely structured by bureaucrats, textbook authors, software, or

his own memory.



Knowledge that we've already given a definite form to -- knowledge that

can be stored and routinely transferred from one place to another --

scarcely matters in education.  Far the most important thing the students

learn from the teacher is the art of re-visioning itself (which happens to

be the one lesson it is most difficult to harness the computer to).  The

most essential act of understanding, scientific or otherwise, is the

metaphoric leap -- the "liquefaction" and unexpected re-crystallization of

the structures of knowledge, rather than the recapitulation of existing

structures.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



Or, again, look at the visual arts.  I suppose most artists are working in

such fields as advertising and marketing, magazine design, and film.  It

is nearly impossible to pursue this work today without using powerful

computer software, and anyone who spends five minutes looking at magazine

ads or the graphics on the evening news can see how the tools have

directed and hemmed in the artist.



This narrowing has to do with the peculiar "vision" of the software:  a

work of art becomes a set of pixels and mathematically defined geometric

constructs, which can then be subjected to various logical

transformations.  The computer is remarkably facile at performing these

transformations, and so the most image-saturated generation in history is

endlessly assaulted by every possible visual distortion, every possible

permutation of pixels, simply because it can be done.  Little thought is

given to the intrinsic lawfulness or meaning of the image in its own

imaginal terms.



Certainly the true artist can still try to live into the qualities, say,

of the color green, and can seek the essential expressive gesture of a

plant or rock or tool.  And certainly schoolchildren can learn something

artistically deeper than the manipulation and weird deformation of clip

art.  But, meanwhile, there's a massive graphics industry, with a huge

investment in computer equipment, software, and professional training, and

there's a popular culture hooked on the ever increasing shock value of the

latest graphic sensations.  How can we gain the inner strength to flee the

torrential output of the entrenched computational algorithms?  Where can

we find the repose that would enable us to rediscover the image as a

source of fresh revelation rather than arbitrary manipulation?



An aside:  the graphic artist's pixel is a close analog of the scientist's

atom.  Both serve in practice as a prison for the imagination,

discouraging us from attending to the irreducible and always non-discrete,

non-atomistic qualities of things.  These qualities are the only possible

basis for a true science and a true art, because they are the only way the

world we explore scientifically and artistically is given to us.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



I mentioned highways as a constraining factor in the evolution of

communities, and then suggested that the constraints of software may prove

still more onerous.  I'd guess many readers immediately reacted with "No,

software gives us much more flexibility.  It is easier to change bits than

to re-shape concrete."



There's a misunderstanding here.  Software does afford us greater

flexibility in the sense that, given a particular vision of some task, we

can reduce the vision with wonderful fineness of detail to a set of formal

structures in software.  But what I've been talking about is how we grow,

how we change, how we re-vision things.  On this score, it is exactly the

thoroughness and fineness of detail that is the problem.



Think of the difference between an extremely crude and bulky set of body

armor, on the one hand, and the most finely wrought, close-fitting suit of

chain mail on the other.  An elegant software package may be more like the

chain mail.  It's certainly nice to have such naturally fitting armament,

and I am in no way arguing against acquiring it.  But then we need to ask

ourselves what happens when the person inside the suit begins to grow?

The crude armor might actually allow more room for growth than the (once)

perfectly fitting mail.



However it may be with an isolated, first-try piece of software (which we

can readily discard in favor of a new try), the steady accumulation of one

software layer upon another, millions of lines upon millions of lines, is

bound to make us think twice before saying, "Gee, maybe our original

analysis wasn't the best and we need to rethink matters."  It may prove

easier to cramp our own growth in order to accommodate the billion-linked

suit of mail we have already forged for ourselves.



In many domains, I realize, it may seem forced to set software and

standard procedures against the possibilities of human growth.  Just think

of that airliner's cockpit.  Who (beside pilots) would complain about the

pilot's life being reduced to boring routine?  But it's well to remember,

at least, that the places where we've reduced something to strict

technique are the places where we've excluded the human being.



I think it's easy to overlook the significance of these ever widening

domains where everything functions mechanically, without any apparent

human implications.  The packet-switching architecture of the Net, for

example, might seem to be another such domain.  And yet, I can hardly

believe that this architecture is wholly disconnected from our increasing

willingness to conceive all human exchange as essentially a matter of

information transfer -- the movement of discrete, objective packets of

data from one place to another.  It stands to reason that the more we

become conscious of a mechanical and meaningless flow of symbols through

the world (as given in our technical visions), the more readily we

conceive our own communication in the same terms.  The influence doubtless

flows both ways:  our habits of mind take on objective form in technical

artifacts, and the artifacts in turn reinforce our habits of mind.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



What is often not realized is that the possibility of genuinely new vision

always hinges upon our ability to let the old logic of our thinking and

seeing "go fluid".  If, having written a sentence, I decide that it

doesn't express quite the right shade of meaning, then -- no matter how

slight the shift of nuance I am after -- I may well end up having to

restructure the entire sentence.  And if my meaning is genuinely new, I

will have to rely in part on metaphor to suggest it.  But metaphor is,

among other things, the employment of words in violation of the previous

rules of use.  The old words and their syntax dissolve, reconstituting

themselves as a new reality.



That's just the way it always is between the living and the frozen --

between my current effort to grasp meaning, and the structures into which

I have previously poured my meanings.  Even if I use many of the same

words in my new phrasing, they will actually be different words, with

their meanings subtly altered by the new context.



This tension between logic and the play of meaning, between the syntax of

our existing vision and our powers of re-visioning, is fundamental to

human activity and thought.  And it is part of the essence of this tension

that every seeing with new eyes puts all existing syntactic structures of

understanding at risk.  We do not just juggle fixed parts on an existing

latticework of logic; rather, the parts themselves are re-imagined along

with the latticework, and reality no longer submits to analysis according

to the old scheme.



One of the symptoms that re-visioning is losing out to frozen intelligence

in the computer age is the widespread attempt to conceive change as the

mere rearrangement of existing elements.  In all true change the elements

themselves are transformed.  Merely to rearrange what already exists -- a

task the computer performs so well -- is to accept an underlying logical

structure as unalterably given.  It is to remain imprisoned within one

particular way of viewing things.  By contrast, re-visioning may well

leave *no* underlying level of form or logic completely as it was.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



A computer program, considered strictly from a technical standpoint --

that is, from the computer's standpoint -- is syntax pure and simple.

There is a bedrock level of logic that just is what it is, without

possibility of re-visioning itself and the world.



To reach a place where you can talk about re-visioning, you have to widen

your view to embrace the human context:  first, there are the programmers

who develop and successively revise the program, based (possibly) on new

ways of seeing the world; second, there's the society of users, who may

(within greater or narrower limits) alter the way they relate to the

program; third, there are the non-users who nevertheless must decide how

to adapt themselves to the various ways the program shapes society.



If there's a single, dramatic fact about this human context, it's that,

within the high-tech corporation, new generations of software get cranked

out with almost no attempt at re-visioning society in any deep sense.

Technical feasibility and the extension of existing technical logic are

the overwhelmingly dominant considerations.  The next generation emerges

automatically -- the fulfillment of the dead imperative laid down by the

previous generation.



The ramification of logical structures and standards can proceed in this

automatic fashion.  Re-visioning cannot.



And, of course, it's easy to understand why re-visioning is de-emphasized.

As we've just seen, to re-vision is to let a standard syntax "go fluid".

But when that standard syntax is as expensive and as intricately

articulated as a major system of software, how can one even think of

"morphing" its bedrock structure?  By the very nature of things, there can

be no algorithm for this.  Often the only realistic alternative would be

to start from scratch.  Far easier to take the existing structure as given

and build on it.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



Our tendency to call software "user-friendly" (or not) indicates, I think,

an unhealthy confusion.  At least it does if we take user-friendliness to

imply more breathing room for the human being -- more room to grow and

re-vision our shared world.  As we've seen, software and standards *by

themselves* always become something of an oppressive element, something we

must learn how to transcend.  Their very nature -- especially when they

are thought to be intrinsically valuable -- is to constrain us.



To discover user-friendliness in any deep sense -- to discover the place

of software and standards in a truly liberating context -- we have to look

at that context.  That is, if we want to see a healthier balance between

frozen intelligence and fluid, re-visioning, expressive intelligence --

then we must find it within the broader field upon which the software is

evolving.  Are we teaching programmers to engage in serious re-visioning

of the world when they modify their programs -- or are they just fixing

bugs and extending the logic of the original in an ever more fine-grained

and broadly reaching way?  Are we teaching users to re-vision the tasks

structured by the software -- or are they just hoping to rid themselves of

the awkwardnesses in the previous versions of the programs?



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



J. William Gurley asks,



   How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure

   that your product operates exactly as your competition?  The bottom

   line is that you don't .... Theoretically, you could have a better

   sales force or better service and support .... Yet these are the assets

   of the larger, entrenched companies.  Open standards allow large

   entrenched companies to mitigate the innovation and market share leads

   of hot young start-ups and easily move into their markets.  (*Above the

   Crowd Dispatch*, May 26, 1998)



The usual response is that companies standardize at one level and

differentiate ("innovate") above it.  This is true.  But if the same logic

drives the successive stages of competition, we will see the level of

standardization continually rise.  Ever higher levels of human functioning

will be frozen in syntax.  Either we will counter this development with

ever higher powers of re-visioning and re-structuring, or else we will

find our creative impulses progressively immobilized.



That Gurley's problem exists -- that entire industries find themselves

struggling to articulate meaningful grounds for competition -- is

profoundly symptomatic.  It suggests that these companies have reduced

their activities to a syntactically perfected meaninglessness.  Their

operations have become like those of the cockpit:  there's less and less

room for human expression.



You can see this in their products.  Look at finance again.  This may be

the field most thoroughly in the grip of software.  It is also a field

where the expression of value is extremely difficult.  Any investor who

wants his investment to *mean* something, anyone who believes that every

financial transaction is an expressive gesture helping to sculpt the kind

of family, community, and society he lives in, and who wants at least some

of his transactions to be part of a responsible and enduring connection to

the party on the other end -- such a person may well conclude that the

only reasonable course is to abandon the current, global network of

millisecond cash flows in favor of the various small, alternative

institutions.  The prevailing structures are too straitening, too reduced

to a pure syntax of number, to become a vehicle for anyone's qualitative,

personal vision of social welfare.



Much the same could be said about the production of goods lacking in

qualitative distinction and artistic quality.  But that's a topic for

another essay.



                      *   *   *   *   *  *  *  *  *



Whether we will allow new visions -- new expressions -- of the human

spirit may be the decisive question as we set chink after chink of our

global information structures in place.  The virtues of open standards are

real -- and I strongly support them.  But with another part of ourselves,

we must fight against all standards, struggling to preserve the potentials

for meaningful change in the future.  This requires us to cultivate the

kind of mental flexibility that allows us, first in our imaginations and

then in reality, to change *everything*, however subtly.



I suspect that only in the impassioned defense of such living, imaginative

powers will we find the resources to limit the siliconification of our

lives and leave a few cracks for whatever tender shoots the next

generation, beyond all prediction, sends toward the light.

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