Aral Balkan
@benjohn @deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen I like that phrase (“retro futurism”) – I describe Small Technology¹ and the Small Web² (e.g., see Kitten³) as “not going back but going forward differently”⁴. I feel there’s some intersection of intention there.
¹ https://small-tech.org/about/#small-technology
² https://ar.al/2020/08/07/what-is-the-small-web/
³ https://codeberg.org/kitten/app
⁴ https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/106680277900274823
Benjohn
@deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen I think I feel similarly.
I think the major ideas I want to bring forward, and it’s almost a glimpse of better instead of a specific idea, are the ideas of profound “simplicity” and immediacy. Retro machines had these in bucket loads. Modern machines nearly never do.
I think the limit of retro machines is that many of their user abstractions, while very simple, graspable and immediate, were not very “good”. They didn’t compose well in to larger things.
But modern machines are also often not composable either! And they’re also wildly complex and unknowable.
My retro futurism is a hope for computing that feels tangible, entirely graspable, and very immediate, but which have abstractions that happily scale to modern sophistication, while remaining tractable.
Benjohn
@deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen
I think the essence is retro machines are steeped with agency.
You feel almost entirely in control of a small, mailable, magically powerful world, with nearly no external obligations. Even the physical “pull it apart and fix it” level.
Modern machines don’t, and in particular, **neither do modern business models**.
I’d like modern SSD, Ram, Network, CPU and GPU, Battery and display. And modern computer science and language theory. But I also want that agency back.
I think we can have both.
Aral Balkan
@benjohn @deprogrammaticaipsum @khinsen (That said, we must also recognise that the simplicity and affordance of agency present within the personal computing era were born out of necessity and technical limitations instead of any benevolent aspect of corporate/capitalist practice and differentiate that from retro-futurist initiatives that are inherently social, political, and ideological in nature; being, as they are, attempts at creating post-capitalist futures.)
Aral Balkan
Benjohn
@deprogrammaticaipsum @aral @khinsen 👍 It’s a good expression! Thanks for the links Aral. Hope to take a read…
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