Technology is a humanism

text–script–machine is a blog dedicated to the premise that the boundaries between our physical, mental, and representational life-worlds are dissolving, giving rise to a new, emergent reality. This reality is prefigured, but not entirely realized, by such twentieth-century concepts as Gibson’s cyberspace and Derrida’s “enlarged” textuality.

The name text–script–machine is meant to draw attention to the script, i.e., the computer program, as a paradigm for the entities which will inhabit this new reality. The script dwells at an intersection of the previously distinct categories of text and machine. A work of both literature and engineering, the world it invokes is both fictional and real.

In particular, the “object” of object-oriented programming, which by virtue of its opacity gains metaphysical substance, has begun to serve as the building block of simulations which are more than simulations, enabling such characteristic developments as science in silico and a brisk commerce in virtual goods.

Meanwhile, computing is transforming our experience of physical space, not only through the influence of its output devices—screens, speakers, printers, rapid prototyping devices, and so on—but also by changing our habits, expectations, social interactions, and theoretical categories.

text–script–machine will take it for granted that engineering cannot be allowed to stand separate from humanistic questions; in particular, the methodological abstraction of “how” from “for whom” must be regarded as a mistaken notion from a now-fading historical era.

This will probably suffice for introductory remarks. At any rate, the character of the blog will be determined less by my mission statement for it than by what trends emerge as it develops. This is very much an exercise in exploration, and it’s far too early to determine what that exercise might turn up.