On tools

“When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us” - McLuhan

I find these quotes appealing. It makes me reflect on how I have been shaped by my environment and what I can do to shape the future.

So much of software engineering is problem solving— coming up with an airtight solution to a problem. When you’re constantly doing this, it begins to shape how you think about other things. It becomes impossible to plan for anything without thinking about every possible thing that could go wrong. The way you spend your time thinking will shape you.

I’ve heard a lot of people go into law school for altruistic reasons— because they care about justice, but by the time they exit school, they’re completely different people. They’ve been shaped by an environment that views the world through cold precedent. Or police officers and service workers who constantly see the worst in people. It can lead them to mistrusting others, always assuming the worst.

Part of the appeal of programming computers is that they are flexible. You can use a computer to build tools. But when you’re given that power, how do you use it? What’s worth building a tool for? ie. What’s worth doing?

It’s worth noting that computers are not completely flexible. You can still only build what can be computed. It is military technology. It had a purpose when it was built and we’re trying to retcon egalitarian ideas into it. It may not work.

Still, you can build a lot with computers. Deciding what’s ‘worth it’ is a personal decision. I can’t figure out what your answer would be, but I do want to spend some time teasing apart what mine are.

One thing that matters is where we are presently. What are the problems we are currently facing?

For a long time we’ve been building tools to do everything faster and more efficiently, to get everything at our fingertips. Maybe pushing in this direction is still the most important thing to do. Who knows what would come of it? But I don’t find it very appealing.

I feel like our problems are more spiritual. We are losing our connection to each other. We don’t care about our environment, the Earth. We don’t trust each other, can’t agree on anything. We forget how to be kind, what it means to be graceful (and grateful). We consume too much, are rarely (maybe never?) satisfied.

There are spiritual tools. They’re often called spiritual disciplines: prayer, meditation, fasting, ritual, etc. They, mostly, don’t require tools outside of your self/mind, which, in some ways, makes it hard to make a spiritual tool. It means it’s more about coming up with process— deciding how or where to practice and shaping your environment so it leads to these activities.

We still need to be pointed towards them and I think this is how computers can be used. Software is eating the world and we’re spending more and more time on our devices. A lot of software can be addicting. It is trying to maximize how much you engage with it, but software can be built for other purposes too.

There’s a few examples of software being used in spiritual-adjacent ways. Some are about instruction like the mediation apps (which are very popular! There is demand for software in this vein). There are also games that intend to inspire awe. Journey is an example of that. Here’s their designer talking about his approach to designing for awe. There’s also another talk I found interesting about building a religious game through a world in Minecraft with some special rules (only the first speaker).

Games or game-like experiences are probably the best bet for me to try and build in this direction. Even if it is not a game having playful, inefficient mechanics probably help get in the right mindset for the experiences I’d like to make. I’d like to explore making game like things that are slow and about sharing and cooperation and trust.

🤔

PS: Some random thoughts. After I finished this I noticed it was not exactly what I expected it to be— such is writing. One thing I expected to talk about was Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich’s book looking at how tools control our behavior/lives vs empower us. I’ve thought a lot about these ideas. He uses examples like healthcare and education where specialized knowledge is used to exert control.. to be educated today is not about knowledge, but going through school. In my mind, the best example counter to this (ie, convivial) is language, something people freely use once learning it. Prescriptive grammar feels like an attempt of making language less convivial; I’ve never liked grammar nazis, etc. Let language change.

There’s a lot of ways this is relevant when thinking about computers and software tools. So often software is designed to maximize the leverage it has over its users— if it wasn’t there’d be no way to make money from it. This is part of why running code on web servers is so popular.

One metaphor for modern software that makes sense to me is thinking about platforms as being cities along a trade route like the Silk Road. Simply being one of the nodes that are touched while doing something means you can become rich. Perhaps it’s impossible to become as entrenched as a city because software is not tied to geography (except that computation must happen physically somewhere). I’m not sure.