My thinking is in a transitional state, as I sort out things technical and personal.

As a
result, this Ftrain article is not a finished thing, but a big pile of ideas, thrown out of
my head into a buffer. You're welcome to any ideas you like, but there are so many
digressions, so few real points, you may want to spend your time elsewhere.

I make my living putting words, then paragraphs, then sections of text, into structured
sequences. I could call it writing, but it is often as much sorting or design or listing.
Some of my sequences are published as brochures, business articles, or Web sites,
others are read by corporate Vice Presidents and discarded. Some influence the design
of a particular piece of software. From necessity, I usually create these documents in
Microsoft Word, the established, standard tool for American corporate alphanumeric
symbol-arranging.

Microsoft Word is a fascinating landscape of cultural thought, expressed as a consumer

software product. It breaks the writing process of creating a document into the
application of hundreds of small tools, very few of which have anything to do with
writing words. Most of the tool involve operating upon symbols, syymbols which might
or might not be made of the characters on your keyboard. One tool might allow you to
sketch a circle, turn a paragraph red, or include a rotating 3D cube in the middle of your
document.

In the most recent millennia, thousands of rhetoricians and professors have

desconstructed the writing process into component structures, from before Aristotle to
I.A. Richards to Richard Lanham. While they've written enormous essays on the theory
of composition and the structure of documents, Microsoft has not heeded their counsel
in its design for Word. Microsoft has built something quite different, a composition tool
for various kinds of media, something McLuhanist, with Postmodern currents beneath
it, and ultimately intended to serve the marketplace rather than promote best practices.
Many computer types seem fascinated by Postmodernism. I've written a mini-essay on
this, which began as a note but got too big for its trousers. It's included at the bottom of
this article.

Other software is also designed along these lines. Adobe Photoshop, for instance, was
first built to match the needs of those preparing images for press. It offers a host of
components based on darkroom techniques - "dodge," "burn," and so forth, as well as
canned "filters," which are the same in theory as MSWord's host of icons. The filters are
a sort of prefab creativity, and mostly emulate other media; they turn images into
pretend oil paintings, or photocopies, or crosshatch drawings. Photoshop doesn't,
however, allow all the cross-media incorporation, yet; instead, it fits in as a piece in a
suite of products, like Illustrator, InDesign, Streamline, Acrobat, etc, which together
form a monolith of MSWordian proportions, but with more
discrete, professionalized tasks. As image or video processing becomes more and more a
daily task, however, you can expect the worst abuses of Word to perpetrated upon other
software. Even the free-software GIMP has a built-in e-mail mode, created self-
consciously to fulfill the computer-science axiom that "all software expands until it can
send mail."
Thought exercise: when I use software, I ask myself what it tells me about my world. The
browser which will display this random, meandering essay tells me, in large icons, that I
may wish to go back from this page, receding, or forward to where I've been before. My
personal experience of the non-linear Web is very linear; I move back and forth across a
line of pages, creating a personal "history" file (which I can also browse), adding
bookmarks to a menu, where they're listed in the order I put them there. Later, I can
sort them into a non-linear, categorical form.

So the browser is an archive, a timeline, in its way.

There's more, though. Its primary application is to display Web pages,. Most browsers
now contain tools to create Web pages, chat live, send e-mail, and maintain addresses.
These are more fundamental acts than reading, which is personal, based on the
technology of text; they're communicative. The Browser connects you to the landscape
of information, and the other tools allow you means to discuss it, to share inside of it? I
know the goal of the browsing experience is to be all-integrative - ultimately turning
into Virtual Reality, fully immersive 3D, superseding the phone, superseding face-to-
face meetings. The idea then is that there is no conversation without annotations,
without references and hyperlinks, and a call to your father will include forwarded jokes,
pictures, reviews, everything.

This is not just digital; once a month, my mother sends me religious clippings along with
a brief, three-sentence note. She is annotating our relationship, pulling in samples from
the media and collaging them onto our connection, adding them to the wire. VR and the
Internet simply formalize that sort of thing, by providing a consistent addressing
scheme for everything under the sun.

So, why did they choose this approach for the browser? And when you have the obvious
solution to that obvious question, then why? And why again? The Why? matters,
because everywhere I read, regardless of the creed or ideology of the authors, people
agree that the future is tied somehow into all of these networks and digital tools. After
all, if you were going to sneak in "cultural imperialism," there's no better way than
software design; it flies under the radar in the guise of abstract utility. And these are
tools, thus they can be probably be used as weapons in some way. And a million other
reasons. The interface of MSWord may not matter as much as the homeless problem, or
world hunger, at all. But it might not be as far from those problems as we think.
Language is a sacred space for me; I'm not an athiest when I write. While my apartment
can be a mess, and my life in shambles, I'm liberated at the black, text-only console.

Recursion: there is also software, in the form of a computer script, inside of the page
you're reading now. It just loaded a text file, listing each entry, placing links at the
bottom of the page. I wrote it so that I wouldn't need to bother with much HTML, just

tags and image references. It converts a tag into the gray note boxes on the right,
without the need for complex HTML when I write. I wrote the script/page for utility, but
it also consistently expresses the things I think are important about this Web site: the
image at the top, the word "F T R A I N," and the other elements create an Ftrain
"brand." They're inescapable to the reader. They create the Ftrain "culture," in a way.

Further recursion: I am writing a novel, a sci-fi type thing. I have an editor who will look
at some chapters, so I'm undertaking a more focused and active novel-writing process
than I might otherwise undertake, putting aside paying work to do so. The narrative of
the novel and the narrative of this site are beginning to intertwine, often outside of my
control, and they connect with the flow of my life. My friends read these Web pages and
speak to me as if I'd spoken the words here directly to them, over the phone or in
person. In the novel, the ideas, including these ideas, are being played out 100 years
from now, in the standard cities with tall spires, with the expected sections of the
protagonist's brain accidentally turned into quantum-biological-nanotech computers,
jangling and tuning the nerves in his head, where each aspect of life is absorbed by the
network, and yet the desires and kindnesses and passions of the human, part of phylum
Chordata, remain identical to those I know from experience.

Furthest recursion: When I erased the dozens of old entries and re-started Ftrain in its
current incarnation, I'd spent 4 months of my spare time mapping out exactly how to
represent complex documents in relational databases. It's been done before, but I
wanted to figure it out myself. I eventually arrived at a way to hold all level of complexity
and structure inside a small number of tables, thus making documents easy to sort and
edit, while allowing for multiple authors per document and a moving window of what a
document was. It could be an entire community of Web sites, it could be a single
sentence, at any given time. I was going to implement all of this as a multi-author Web
based system for mutual communities of expression, first as a newspaper that would
compile itself, but then with more complicated interfaces, and I built some prototypes.
They worked well enough, enough to convince me it was viable. But I found myself
shirking the responsibility of writing. It made me wonder what the whole point of it was.
Enough with the encapsulating interfaces, enough with the jargon and the vapid
punditry; what about the sequences of letters themselves?

Take those three recursions above, and multiply them times thousands of marketers,
programmers, testers, managers - a real culture of corporate development, not just a
penny ante Web site - and you have fractal software design, a recursive pool of desires,
wants, market research, technical limitations, and exhausting deadline, and thus you
have Microsoft Word.

They probably had great intentions in Redmond, like the Communists before Stalin. But
it's ultimately a failure for all but defined tasks. Technologies like the Office Assistant,
with its dreaded paperclip, interfere in your most private moments:

So what's the alternative? I don't know. I'm not so savvy as the 20-something Web
pundits, so I can't tell you.

Others have thought about it more, so let me pull in a quote; in Electric Language,
writing specifically about word processing, Michael Heim, who from the 1980's has
written about computing as a philosophical endeavor, and is the opposite of the Media-
Virus- Meme-o-matic pundits, puts it this way (with my emphases):

In any case, current research on computer interface has shown that it is necessary for
the user to develop a mental model or set of inferences concerning the
underlying movement of the system. However crude and unsophisticated it may be, a
mental model allows the user to build some basis on which experiences can be
collected and from which the user can respond to the interactive processes
of automated writing. A metaphor or sense-endowing map of the system is not
provided ready-made by the technology, as was frequently the case with mechanical
operations. Because of the indefinite number of its operations and becaus of the
flexibility of any given software, the user can never wholly rely on a so-called
idiot-proof system; it will always be necessary to manage problems as the
system is applied to different tasks in the flow of information in thought
and writing.
Michael Heim is a "philosopher of cyberspace." But he means it - he takes Leibniz,
Heidigger, and the rest of them and applies them to the digital. He's focused his mind on
virtual reality for much of the last decade. It was a somewhat unfashionable choice of
study, I think, since VR is out of favor in the computer world and computers spook
academics, but it will prove prescient as the digital world expands. Mark my words.

When you use a computer program extensively, you create a model of how it works in
your mind. MSWord, in theory, works like business is supposed to work: every piece fits
together, and the end result is hopefully greater the sum of its parts. Microsoft Office is
called that for a reason. But it doesn't happen: you run up against limits as you attempt
to use the program in any seriously advanced way, because the program was
designed to anticipate your behavior, to predict your needs, rather than
providing you with the tools you needed to satisfy them yourself. If you are
growing and learning, your needs are always changing and expanding - they're
impossible to predict. So, ultimately, you hit the Redmond Paradox: the canned routines
of MSWord - even though MSWord is built with enormous cultural assumptions about
how we order our world built in - can't satisfy your work. And successive versions of the
software are self-fulfilling prophecies: we release this new version to meet the needs the
old one didn't, acknowledging in turn that this software will also not meet needs.

I need to come back here and back up my argument with lots of examples. For now, I'll
wuss out.The trouble is, this whole modularity thing isn't effective when there's a lot of
work to do, especially in a knowledge economy, where putting ideas together creatively,
in new ways, is key to corporate growth. Most recent business theory books, especially
those focusing on the digital economy (like Unleashing the Killer App push creativity,
teamwork, and exploration over modularity of individuals. Working on building Web
sites, which is a network-and-knowledge intensive, incredibly rapid growth industry,
I've had roughly 14 positions in 3 years, which makes the concept of a title, or a set role,
meaningless. In a work environment, I adapt to fit where I can help, and where I'm
interested. If I don't make a difference, or I'm bored, I quit. Total Quality Management,
understanding my place in the organization and filling it completely with responsibility
to the whole corporate entity, has no meaning to me; there's no point in me learning
a role as much as learning techniques for adapting.

Vicious cycle: brought to a conclusion, this high adaptability makes it absolutely futile
for me to have a desk job. Corporations must do things well in a reliable manner, and
minimize failure. I am interested in doing things wrong and failing (hence this essay,
which is definitely a failure, but hopefully an inspired failure--see?--which will lead me
to clearer and more valuable, in-depth thinking later.

Right now, no role exists for me to fill as writer- thinker- bad-programmer- strategist-
creative- brand- mascot- etc; I flounder and thrash unless I can consider documents and
databases along with the flow of language and poetry. This sounds pretentious but it's
fairly grave; I've gotten to a point where I just can't handle being in an office working on
projects, and my mind wanders so far off point I feel I shouldn't even charge people for
what I do, and it makes me a liability. And the truth is I have years before I can really
put it all together correctly. I'm still as dumb as dirt. I'll be up all night this Sunday
doing the things I didn't bother to think about last week because I was reading library
books. Can the instinct to express and learn be reconciled with the instinct to work and
be part of a productive group? Academia doesn't really work that way. Are the two
instincts like Eros & Thanatos? Tom & Jerry? Ricky & Lucy? Clinton & Lewinsky?

Since all of it is my life, and I have no interest in separating life and work from one
another in some corporate centrifuge, I remain gainfully unemployed, writing code
some weeks, writing copy some others.

This is where the essay ends, for now.

Early Notes on Postmodernism and Computer Science

Many computer types seem fascinated by Postmodernism. The first example of this I
found online was computer scientist Andrew C. Bulhak's Postmodern Essay
Generator (link broken; new links don't work), based on his "Dada Engine." This
produced random text from sets of words. I found the Dada Engine about 4 years ago.
(In a strange recursion, after I wrote a draft of this Ftrain, but before I posted it, Andrew
linked to Ftrain via a "weblog" site. Connections between knowledge online are fractal in
subtle ways, but more on that later.)

In the four years since, I've seen essays ranging from How To Deconstruct Almost
Anything, "the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of
postmodern literary criticism" to Larry Wall's lengthy explanation of Perl as a
Postmodern programming language. On the other side, the Theory crowd digs science,
usually without a lick of understanding, writing about chaos theory and "quantum
gravity as the roots of the other" in a seamless, cheerful stream of babble. There's an
amusing book out there called Fashionable Nonsense where scientists take on Pomo
Critics. Me, I understand neither the science nor the Postmodernism very well, at least
during this decade of my life. The hazard of being a generalist is you stay stupid longer.
More on this later.

To hypothesize from a ridiculously tiny experimental base: do code wonks and Theory
wonks have the same fascinations? Postmodernists are extremely curious about
the deep structures of our culture, and they'll go so far as to say that our culture is what
defines our atoms, not the other way around. Computer scientists interested in non-
traditional domains (say, algorithmic video and sound composition, as opposed to
efficient search algorithms) and especially those interested in the Internet are also
arguing against the atoms. They won't always talk about it, but they're into re-arranging
the creative and cultural universe into manageable structures; they're implementing the
structures the PoMo critics are exploring, actually hard-coding "units of meaning" into
their software, or to take it up a metalevel, they're implementing tools which have
built-in assumptions about the structures the PoMo critics are exploring,
like with VRML, or CSound, or MSWord. I think it all emerges from data instinct, that
weird ability humans have to simply absorb ideas after enough time online, rather than
knowledge (more on data instinct later.)

In any case, that's the real promise of Virtual Reality. VR is not just a jackoff
fantasyland; it's a tool for modeling all the wacked-out nonsense and relationships, for
playing out the differences in our minds and our situations. More on this later.

It'll all out when quantum computers show up, mark my words. More on this later.