DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
Here's a disgustingly laid out article that contains a nice (edited) conversation with Alan Kay last year about how he feels about the state of mobile computing and education.
https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now
fool! seeking jort dorado
from the text i get the feeling he is good speaker who has a gift for making others believe him and want to give him what he's asking for - similar to a good preacher
but...
a bit through the article he gets to talking about greeks doing roman thinking and then talks about there being 10,000 years of no advancement --
----begin quote
"There are a couple of doomsday scenarios. There’s like, what happened after a few hundred years of the Romans importing Greeks to do their thinking for them. It’s like a thousand years of nothing. So, our thousand years of nothing could be more in the ten thousand-year range, because of the amount of action and consensus that’s required on the climate."
----end quote
and this is what got stuck in my craw and is the same issue i have with nearly every other "wise pioneer" or "started a genre/school/etc" type of person.
they view "just" living as bad.
imagine if you will that the human race has 10,000 years to live, to care, to dream, to create, is that bad?
or is it bad, because nothing "cool" will happen?
it has often been my thought that there have been too many people who want to live in "interesting times"
----begin quote
"World history is not the ground of happiness. The periods of happiness are empty pages in her."
— Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
----end quote
it has long been my belief that it will take a long time for humanity to grow into what it has.
it has been a crazy five hundred years, where anyone from a time before could be shifted backwards up to 500 years and (barring language issues) be able to survive without much difficulty in the new era.
But, in the last half millennium [and especially the last 200 years] even a 10 year shift in time yields a world which is different than what came before and hard for one to adapt to [and it just gets worse the wider the time frame]
Right now, we are teen-agers with their first car trying to see how fast it can go, what it can do, how much hooting and hollering we can get away with before we have an accident.
There is only so much a teen-ager can do, mentally, physically, emotionally. They don't have the experiences of an adult.
The human race has just graduated from high school, it now needs to get past it's college years, settle down, figure out how the work/life/family balance can happen.
We have done amazing things, you all have done amazing things, but our species is barely ready for college.
Imagine what we'll be in later ages, when we've learned how to adult as a species, how to raise a family as a species, how to keep the house clean and enjoy the vacations. What kind of world would that be? Probably pretty boring to Alan Kay and his compatriots.
The great thinkers of the 20th century wanted us to grow up too fast, we need to take that high school growth spurt and apply it now to real learning as we see it isn't all about us for the first time.
[Sorry to go on so long, the idea got stuck and i needed it to go somewhere]
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@c1t7 that's a solid reasoned response to the topic imo! I have a more thorough response to this already burbling up through my headspace but it will require more :cofepats: to extract it without damage ;)
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
so, here in my head.
I have been re-exploring old pathways through various ideaspaces a lot lately. I make token attempts to explain a why for the exploration, a goal I am trying to achieve by examining things I've already examined at length, and I think I generally make a hash of things by trying to tie the subject of one particular examination to the overall root of the line of questioning so this post is a near at-the-speed-of-thought attempt at bypassing the conscious supervisor a bit.
My current fixation with the writings, ramblings, and rants of Alan Kay end up coming out of my face/fingers as extreme rampant fanboyism because I love the concepts and ideas expressed, but my soul has one simple-sounding question it's really trying to answer:
If Alan Kay (or any other exemplar) is as smart as I believe, and is as conceptually correct as I believe, then why has he failed to effect the change he wishes to see in the world, and why isn't it easier for me to see?
If they've been on the right track (and I seem to believe that pretty firmly) what is it about the wrong track that makes it seem right, and can the right bits be separated from the wrong bits without damaging their rightness?
It's the same pseudo-paradox I face when I think about Emmett Chapman and the Chapman Stick. The advantages of the Stick over the classically designed guitar are obvious to me, yet it is still the wrong tool for most people looking for a music-making tool.
I feel like I fall in love with old elegant ideas more easily than I fall out of love with old failings of elegant ideas. I start to wonder how many old things I ignore the failings of as a matter of course, the broken systems that feel A-OK.
So then I start consuming more data, sure that if I can just manage to catch a few different corners of the concepts this time through, maybe I'll see a way to extricate the good from the flawed, refine what already feels fine.
This is where I start to second-guess my second-guesses. I am no Alan Kay, no Marissa Montessori, no Marshall McLuhan, no Buckminster Fuller. Fuck, I'm not even a Pauly Shore. These people invested lifetimes in exploring the corners and edges of these conceptual spaces and I'm a cad for assuming that I could find what they've not found.
But I feel more like I am succeeding when I am looking. I feel more like I am failing when I stop.
So around and around I go, always making a slightly different grab for the same brass rings, which are probably all the same ring anyway, and which acquisition probably just stops the ride anyway, which isn't anywhere near something that feels like a goal state anyway and I should probably be spending a lot more time figuring out how to expose more brass rings to more people.
Or something approximating that stream of thought.
Thanks for the nudge that led me here, today, friend. :blobpats: and :cofepats: to thee and me.
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@c1t7 now Imma read all that I just spewed and see if it makes any sense
DJ Sundog - from the toot-lab
@c1t7 that was a really long way around to get to "I think you're generally right" huh
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