Hey just an update that while I’m going to leave this blog up I’m going be posting at https://clarissalittler.github.io from now on. Nothing huge precipitated this change I just have found that I don’t really like using wordpress and that the workflow of org mode -> markdown -> git push feels a lot better.
Oh, and there aren’t weird ads inserted. That’s a huge plus.
I recently read the paper Technology Heirlooms? Considerations for Passing Down and Inheriting Digital Materials and there have been some concerns stuck in my head lately. The paper talks about considerations for how to create artifacts that enable for digital heirlooms, things that can be used to remember & celebrate the deceased, to record family history.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in it, enough that the paper is worth a read in-itself, but one of things the paper doesn’t address much is the maintenance of these artifacts over time. That’s what I keep getting stuck on. Sure you can have a box that displays a timeline of family events, with links to wikipedia entries for context and new data added to it from a web interface.
But what happens in 50 years? No, honestly, what about a mere ten years from now? Are the servers supporting the device going to still be running? Can this be guaranteed? Will there be changes in software or API or breakage in links they make the artifact defunct?
These things bother me. A lot. I think because it ties into so many concerns I have around the archiving and preservation of digital media, of open source software, of open hardware and the right to repair.
The reason why I get so fixated is because of bitrot. You see, the digital doesn’t decay the same way as the physical artifact. Physical objects decay through the degradation of their form: joints break, materials rot or corrode or tear. Digital objects die more like languages. They degrade in their interface. It doesn’t matter, for example, if you have millions of copies of a piece of software if not a soul has the operating system or hardware to run it on. It’s as inaccessible as a book in a language no one knows.
Now, much like the lost language maybe it can be recovered, reconstructed, but that’s so much work that’s fundamentally risky and unreliable.
Imagine it this way: one day the last original NES will have broken down. On that day it doesn’t matter how many physical copies of Super Mario Bros. there are floating around or how many passed around copies of the ROM are on harddrives across the world. If, by then, we don’t have a way to create more hardware accurately or a specification good enough to test our emulators against then we’re in serious danger of losing this cultural touchstone for good.
And that’s for a game that millions of people have played on hardware that has been well-understood and reverse engineered six ways from Sunday. What happens when a tiny startup offers their services in creating digital heirlooms for grieving families, operating with the best of intentions, makes promises of decades of service and support that they can’t possibly keep.
This is what bothers me. I don’t know what the real gameplan is. I know there are people working on the problem of archiving and preserving important works. I feel confident that the NES will be able to be accurately emulated on FPGAs for a long time to come. I worry about the small things. Who is working on the problem of ephemeral data formats and cloud storage?
I agree with the authors of this paper when they say that an heirloom needs to be able to be put away, to be curated and tended to. But who can do that work, who can pass along that knowledge? Things like open hardware designs and open source software give people a fighting chance at being able to maintain these digital heirlooms over time, but this asks for a world where—basically—everyone needs to be a programmer to maintain their own heirlooms. I think that’s asking too much and is fundamentally anti-convivial, making people bend to their technology rather than the technology adapting to them.
So what do we do? I’m not entirely sure. It may ultimately be unrealistic to make the maintenance of the digital be routine, to feel more like maintaining an old typewriter than the finicky nature of maintaining software or repairing electronics. I think that without even considering possibilities, though, we can never improve our situation.
So last time we talked about existential feelings and how things we often call “delusions” are actually just non-literal descriptions of experiences, attempts to convey things that can no longer be conveyed easily because the different horizons between clinician and patient are too different for simple explanation.
I alluded the the mad movement in my last post, but I realize there’s much more I could have said. The mad movement is an attempt to re-center our treatment of mental health around the distress experienced by the patient as well as secure certain rights and bodily for the mentally ill. We’ll get into why that’s so necessary shortly. Even though it’s over forty years old, the book On Our Own is a compelling and accessible introduction to the mad movement. For example, one of the observations the author makes near the beginning of the text is that a major distinction in how we treat mental vs. physical illness is that physical illness is always diagnosed by what the patient is experiencing and their distress but frequently mental illness is diagnosed by how their behavior or beliefs distress others.
The book gives many examples of how harmful this asymmetry can be: people declared delusional for their sexuality, for converting to other religions (especially Judaism at the time of writing, though I wouldn’t be surprised if conversion to Islam is also used as “proof” of insanity these days), or for just having an unusual amount of savings while living modestly. All of these are real cases of people being forced into institutions for acting in ways family, peers, or even total strangers found unacceptable.
What’s a compounding problem is that once you’re deemed mentally ill, all your beliefs and feelings are considered suspect from there on. The—mentally healthy—clinician gets to have an accurate view of reality and the patient—who is mentally ill—has an inaccurate view of reality. This is where two things that phenomenology emphasizes become important: the absolute nature of subjectivity—that for everyone the world is constituted by consciousness—and the rejection of the view that all descriptions of mental illness are propositional.
One of the stories I find most horrifying in On Our Own is one where an institutionalized woman—who is being offered the chance to work outside the hospital while still returning to it every evening instead of being discharged—expresses that she doesn’t feel free because of this restriction and is told that she’s being incredibly paranoid. Here’s the full quote from the book:
Patent: I’d do much better if the hospital would free me.
Doctor: What do you mean “free you”?
Patient: Well, it would be just like the other work placements I’ve had. You’re never really free.
Doctor: But if you stayed here on a work placement you’d be free to come and go on your own time. It would be just like a job.
Patient: No. You would still be controlling me if I stayed here.
Doctor: Do you mean we control your mind here?
Patient: You may not control my mind, but I really don’t have a mind of my own.
Doctor: How about if we gave you a work placement in —–—; would you be free then? That’s far away from here.
Patient: Anyplace I went it would be the same setup as it is here. You’re never really free; you’re still a patient and everyone you work with knows it. It’s tough to get away from the hospital’s control.
Doctor: That’s the most paranoid statement I ever heard.
Note the way the doctor immediately starts trying to move the conversation to a claim of mind control when the actual problem is quite plain: having a job outside the hospital but being required to still live at the hospital is not the same as living outside the hospital and having full autonomy. There is no attempt to understand the patient and where she’s coming from, only the inherent distrust of what she’s saying as an inaccurate description of the world.
Lest you think this is an artifact of the book being over 40 years old a mere year ago a friend of mine had been in a graduate program in psychology and was literally yelled at by a professor for suggesting patients might be able to provide useful feedback about the effectiveness of mental health programs, shouted down and sworn at.
So even still the mere suggestion that a mentally ill patient has some understanding of their own situation and experiences is met with hostility, like blasphemy. In my personal, and perhaps unfair, opinion I think psychology and therapy have not evolved as far past Freudian insight models as much as most practitioners would like to think.
One needs to only look at the story of Dr. Marsha Linehan, inventor of Dialectical Behavior Therapy, to get more confirmation of this. She developed her therapy modalities based on her own experiences with mental illness, while keeping quiet about those experiences until after she was an established researcher. Once she did, though, there was a huge backlash against her and her work. There are still clinicians who swear DBT can’t be trusted because it was invented by a mentally ill person.
All of this context is why I feel so strongly about the model of patient-centered experiences that Feelings of Being is describing.
The author doesn’t make this point himself but I’ll argue that existential feelings provide a good theoretical framework for a lot of the work the mad movement has been doing, giving an understandable framework and philosophic orientation for why we need to take mentally ill people’s experiences seriously. Why we should understand first-hand experience not as a set of flawed judgments about the nature of the world but as providing real, valuable information.
So at this point you might think I’m putting off the more personal and difficult discussion of how existential feelings & trauma intersect, which I am to a certain extent.
The next post is likely the point at which I can no longer put this off.
So after the first couple of posts in this series, that involved mostly setting the stage, but let’s talk more about the implications of existential feelings as a framework for understanding mental illness and experience in general.
Just as a summary from last time, existential feelings are feelings connected to how we constitute the world, how our horizon of experience and possibility is constructed. One of the big insights of this book is realizing that instead of a single Husserlian “natural attitude” we all share there are many different possible orientations towards the world.
The book applies this framework towards the experience of what are generally called delusions. The two he deals with most explicitly in the text are the Capgras delusion, where someone says that the people around them have been secretly replaced, and the Cotard delusion, where someone says that they are dead or do not actually exist.
Here’s where we start to get into the connections to the madness movement. Feelings of Being makes the strong, but I think accurate, claim that a lot of psychological attempts to understand these delusions misunderstand what’s happening. The typical approach involves seeing delusions as propositional claims about the world. Thus, a person who says “my spouse has been replaced with another person” is literally claiming that their spouse is not the same person but rather an imposter who looks identical. A person who says “I am dead” must literally be claiming that they are in a state of death.
Of course, assuming statements are always literal propositional claims is a little odd when you think about it, right? If someone were to say “my heart is breaking” we would all understand that this isn’t a literal claim that their heart is breaking apart like an egg shell. We don’t read the work of poets and think they’re all mad, delusional, for their attempts to describe the world and their feelings.
This is actually a point made by Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception. He argues that hallucinations, by which he means something very similar to how we use delusions now, are not judgments and need to be met on their own terms. We don’t need to believe them but we need to believe in the experience that the person is having. One of his examples is someone who says they can feel the branch of a tree outside passing through their head. You don’t have to believe that the branch is magically extending through solid objects in order to agree that they are, in fact, experiencing that feeling. Merleau-Ponty even makes the argument that people experiencing delusions don’t “believe” their delusions in the sense of judgments about the state of the world, which you can tell from the fact that they are willing to acknowledge contradictory aspects of their delusion: for example something that happens frequently in the Cotard delusion you can show someone they have a pulse and they won’t argue with it yet still say that they’re dead.
So if someone doesn’t really “believe” that their family has been replaced, or that they’re dead, etc. then what is happening? Feelings of Being, much like The Phenomenology of Perception, is making the argument that a person is attempting to convey experiences rather than express propositions. In this model, the goal isn’t to convince someone of a correct view of the world but to help them with the distress they’re experiencing.
Feelings of Being fits this into existential feelings rather neatly: the Cotard delusion is, if we take their descriptions of how they feel and interact with the world seriously, an existential feeling on the same spectrum as depression and depersonalization. The person is alienated from feeling capable of affecting the world around them, from feeling connected to other people and even to their own body. The only truly notable thing about the Cotard delusion is that the distress from this existential feeling so is great it’s no longer possible to convey how they’re feeling but in poetry. Now, to be clear I’m the one drawing the connection to poetry not the text. But I think it’s a useful one to make, especially drawing off of Graham Harman’s argument that poetry is a way of making contact with objects in the world.
Similarly, the Capgras delusion is an attempt to convey feeling like a fundamental aspect of their horizon has changed: namely, the relationships to loved ones. It’s a kind of alienation where the people you know well feel like strangers. You may want to say “but the person is the person is the person” but think about how different your memories of someone are from before you knew them well? They seem similar but not the same, much the same way your neighborhood doesn’t feel the same in your memories as it does now. Your experiences and the possibilities you can imagine shape the way you experience literally everything around you, including the presence of loved ones.
Now, what does this all mean? Largely that we get a much more useful, understandable, way of talking about experiences that otherwise seem puzzling if we just focus on what is being conveyed rather than taking a propositional view. Existential feelings give us a useful framework for thinking about what these experiences might be and how to connect them to other forms of mental illness and distress.
Next time we’re going to take this further into talking about how existential feelings relate to trauma. It’s going to be, uhh, fun.
While I’m on a phenomenology bent I want to talk about something I’ve been kicking around in my head for awhile, about approaching social media as an extension of the body and self.
One of the things I took from The Phenomenology of Perception is that “the body” as experienced is a much more complex and fluid thing that we normally think. The things we use to sense the environment around us because inconspicuous, fade into the background, and thus—in a sense—become a part of the body. The body is simultaneously the thing through which the world is felt and, itself, a thing that can be felt.
We can tie this into recent research on spiders, who are some of my favorite creatures on this planet, that show spiders use the web as a part of their senses and that changes to the web appear to change decision making. To me, this says that the web is a part of their phenomenologic body! Changes to the web create changes to the horizon of the world.
Now, I’ve argued for awhile that smart devices like phones get integrated into our bodies and perceptions and I think that has meant something significant for how social media after the mass adoption of smart phones and tablets has gone.
To go back to the spider, the spider’s web is something they can check constantly in order to take stock of their surroundings, focus their intentions in different ways and shift their awareness.
Similarly, I think the kind of inconspicuous social media checking that one does out of habit on a smartphone ends up being like testing out our own web and surroundings.
The problem is that I think this makes social media too close, too integrated into the self. This is why I think so many people have experiences with social media being extra harmful to their mental health, more so than even just reading the news. What I mean is that I think without the proper distance, reading other people’s thoughts and feelings reflexively in idle moments is too close to the experience of internal monologue, enough so that I think starts to make it hard to separate your feelings from my own.
This is why, though, I think anger, hurt, and fear propagate so easily across social networks. We have hundreds, thousands, of other people’s thoughts coming so quickly into our minds through something so inconspicuous, so a part of our own body, that it undermines our boundaries and self.
I’m basing this in part on my own experiences, where somehow idly scrolling through social media seems to cause me to get “stuck” in a way that other things don’t. It feels like I have to expend energy on anger or arguing in my head to create any separation from another person’s reality and my own. I’m no newb to being mad on the internet, but it feels like something changed when I started checking from a device that was always on me, always on, and whose use was reflexive.
Now, if my theory is correct then what implications does it have?
Well, I think we don’t let social media be inconspicuous. It needs to be a more conscious choice, maybe with transitions in and out from the activity rather than something you can start doing with a fraction of a second’s notice.
I’ll end this post here in order to get this fragmented thoughts out of my head, but I want to return to them later to start sketching out what a more distanced approach to social media on smart devices might look like.
In the previous post we’ve mostly set the stage for what phenomenology is and how it relates to discussions of mental health.
This time we’re going to hit a lot harder on the topic of subjective vs objective experience & the role of the body in generating the horizon.
I skimped a little on discussing what a horizon of experience is, even though it’s an important part of how the world is understood and experienced. Sometimes the literature talks about the world being “constituted”. This has a connotation I’m not entirely satisfied with.
As soon as you start talking about how the world is “constituted” I think it sounds like you’re claiming that the world has no existence outside the human mind.
In fact, many people claim that philosophers like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty believed just that! They’re wrong, though, and I blame Hubert Dreyfus in particular for propagating this idea. The phenomenologic position is that you are interacting with the real world but that those experiences are extremely context dependent. Its subtly different than some kind of Kantian hidden thing-in-itself, though.
There’s no hidden nature or deep metaphysics of objects assumed here. Instead, I think it’s helpful to think of it like you can’t ever entirely rid yourself of all the context around how you encounter all things. This puts us in a situation where objects are real, something we interact with, and yet are inexhaustible in the ways they can be encountered.
I went pretty fast over describing what I meant by calling objectivity an abstraction so let’s spend some more time on that now.
We can start by considering something as concrete as a recipe. What is a recipe but an abstraction away from the details of an act of cooking, maybe many acts of cooking, to grab a core set of experiences that can be communicated, the ones that we find essential.
A recipe leaves out: the exact stove, oven, pots, pans and utensils used; the humidity in the air when it was performed; what time of day it was cooked; what kinds of devices were used in timing; the timings down to exact moments; the way things smell at every step; whether the author was reminded of a meal they ate as a child; how they felt while cooking; were they familiar with the kitchen and knew where things were &c.
What of these is essential to include? Some of them, like what was used when cooking, are potentially quite valuable: a gas stove is very different than an old electrical stove. Many of them are inessential and can be abstracted away.
There’s another kind of abstraction that I think is an interesting one: the natural numbers are objective abstractions over the subjective experience of any actual finite collection of objects. Three is the abstraction that lets us communicate a quality that’s the same between the pens in the pencase I have in my bag and the group of people sitting around me as I write this sentence.
Now, I’m not saying abstractions are bad. The problem is that we need to know we’re dealing with the right abstractions and we can only do that by investigating the subjective experience directly. The right abstractions should be invariants of experience, things that are essential.
So we’ve established that our goal is to understand the invariants and abstractions we use to describe the world, that a phenomenologic approach doesn’t need us to disbelieve in the existence of the world, and finally that in order to investigate our abstractions we need to pay attention to the fact that our experience has a context that affects it. But what is this context, or horizon, and how is it generated?
I’ve been calling it a “context” but I worry that has implications that aren’t quite right: the context isn’t just a set of facts and circumstances, but relationships and possibilities.
Have you ever had the experience of moving to a new city, learning the streets, the bus lines, the neighborhood, and then you look back and remember those early days and it still feels like a different place? That’s the horizon at play: the world is different not just because of our experiences but because of what we expect and what we believe we can do. Its not that one is even more correct than the other, the world is simply constituted differently.
The Hawthorne street of 2009, when I moved to this city, is not the Hawthorne street of 2020, because I know the bus lines and shops I like, I know what places are overpriced for people who watched Portlandia, and I have all this knowledge not as something that I need to consciously recall. This understanding is baked into the environment. As I walk down the street these possibilities and understandings almost reach out to me as my senses engage with the world around me.
That’s the horizon. And it isn’t just a part of the mind as something separate than the body, though. The world is always experienced with and through the body. This is, I suppose, something you could dispute but it’s an assumption coming from Merleau-Ponty’s work.
The relationship between body, consciousness, and horizon ends up being a mutually recursive one.Sensation isn’t a thing that moves in one direction and up into the mind, but rather the horizon impacts what the meaning of perception is, which in turn creates the horizon in the next moment. In other words, how you perceive the world around you affects how you expect to be able to interact with the world, which in turn…
So coming back to Feelings of Being, the fundamental insight of the book is that there are emotional states that correspond to ways the world is being constituted, active modes that affect this recursive process. He calls them existential feelings, to distinguish them from other kinds of emotional feeling.
Now, this isn’t something invented out of whole cloth: phenomenology from Husserl on assumes there is a kind of default state, a set of assumptions, that affect the construction of the horizon. Husserl calls this the “natural attitude” and much of his work was trying to understand what lies underneath it. For Husserl, the natural attitude consisted of assumptions like the existence of the world, the fact that intersubjectivity is real, that other people are conscious like you are, etc.
The thing that I think is clever about existential feelings is that rather than believing in a single natural attitude we can acknowledge that there are many fundamentally constitutive attitudes and that these attitudes are deeply related to much of mental health.
So next time we’re going to dig into existential feelings in practice and how trauma, depression, OCD, and so-called “delusions” can be accounted for well by this model.
I’m starting a new series on the book Feelings of Being and the intersection of phenomenology, mental illness, trauma, and the madness movement.
First, let’s talk about what this book is even about. Feelings of Being is a text attempting re-examine much of our models of mental illness from the perspective of the philosophic tradition of phenomenology.
“But why?” is a pretty reasonable question to ask. After all, we don’t want to just engage in intellectual exercise for its own sake. Just because I find phenomenology interesting doesn’t automatically make this a worthwhile venture!
So to answer the “why”, let’s get the basics of phenomenology laid out. Phenomenology was an attempt to reground philosophy in first-hand experience. Why? Because its all we have access to: “the things themselves” as Husserl would say.
To explain more I want to go back to Hermann Weyl’s observation that the subjective is more absolute than the objective because the objective is fundamentally an abstraction. Abstracted descriptions allow for the ability to shift perspective, to communicate experiences.
These are good things as long as we understand what we’re missing in the abstraction, because our abstractions can be the wrong tool for the job! Think of using euclidean space in basic physics. The ability to translate between perspectives through affine transformations is certainly convenient but is ultimately very wrong because it ignores the complications, in this case the curvature of spacetime, that make different points of view non-trivially different from each other.
Now, where does this tie into discussing mental health and models of conscious experience?
We can think of a lot of diagnoses of mental illnesses as abstractions, ways of trying to convey an objective quality to the experiences that can be named and communicated.
But what’s lost in the abstraction when we say someone is suffering from delusions, such as someone expressing the belief that they are actually dead? What’s lost in the abstraction of a diagnosis of schizophrenia?
I’m not asking you to uncritically accept all of the madness movement or throw the DSM into the garbage. I merely ask you to accept that the abstractions we’re using for describing mental health and mental illnesses are “objective” in the sense that they’re meant to be easily communicable and understandable without the details of the particular person’s inner experience, but they’re not neutral in the sense that they’re choices that have been made in a space where there isn’t one obviously correct abstraction.
This is where I need to point out that it wasn’t so long ago that queerness or transness were considered mental illness and sexual disorders to be fixed. Diagnostic criterion change over time as we refine our understanding, hopefully growing towards better abstractions.
Here we come to the point of Feelings of Being. The author, Matthew Ratcliffe, is investigating how we get at the important information lost in our current abstractions and how to build better ones using phenomenology to lose less of the important aspects of the subjective experience.
In practice, this means he’s starting largely from Merleau-Ponty’s work with a little bit of (spits) Heidegger, rejecting any form of mind-body dualism and focusing on lived experience in one’s environment.
In other words, he’s arguing that we need to understand concious experience, and thus mental illness, as something intermingled with bodily experience and not as a possibly warped lens for viewing the objective world of the senses.
This is one of the more profound points in Merleau-Ponty’s The Phenomenology of Perception: senses aren’t an absolute experience apart from the context in which the perception happens, even though it seems like they should be because they’re caused by physical stimuli. Surely the same frequency and intensity of light hitting the same eye at different times is the same “sensation”, right? Well, no. The way the world is perceived in a moment is governed not just by the physical stimulus to the body but the person’s past, their mental state in the present, and their expectations of the future.
Husserl described this in a limited way when he said that you don’t hear an individual note in a song but hear the note with the song that came before it and the expectation of what will come next.
All these past experiences and future expectations help create a context to the world that changes how everything is experienced, a kind of landscape into which events and perceptions are set. In phenomenology, this is called the horizon.
What Feelings of Being is attempting to do is discuss the relationship between mental health and the creation of these horizons, including the idea that there are certain emotional experiences that literally are the feeling associated with this horizon. He calls them “existential feelings” and that’s where we’ll be picking up in the next post.
I love music. It’s not something I talk a lot about with people but I’m one of those people who is just driven by music: if I’m not listening to it I’m making up melodies and rhythms in my head, mentally remixing songs I know, always needing to move with a beat to feel comfortable. Music is thinking.
Now I mostly used to listen to music over streaming services. After all, it’s easy, convenient, and thus not too hard on my incredibly bad executive dysfunction.
See that’s the other thing I don’t talk about that often: just how bad my executive dysfunction is.
I’m one of those people who can take hours to successfully make myself coffee because I keep having to reboil the water. Even as I’ve been typing this post I keep thinking every few words “your coffee is in a mug in the kitchen, go get it”. Pardon me for a second. There. Got it. Where was I? I’ll check the handwritten version of this post. Ah, yes, I can lose big chunks of my day just to simple context switches: 20 minutes here and there gone as I try to move so so slowly from one thing to the next.
It’s not all bad. I can go into writing and coding fugue states where I can get a ton done as long as I’m working on a single thing and don’t have any inconvenient distractions or bodily needs that mean I have to stop.
The intersection of these topics is that I don’t listen to music on streaming anymore. Not just because services like Spotify are exploitative towards artists—though that’s reason enough alone—but because I’ve started making myself listen to music on physical formats more often. In particular, I listen to a lot of music on vinyl.
There’s something about listening to music on records that actually feels like a challenge to my executive dysfunction. I have to physically get up, flip the record over, and gently brush the dust off of it every 20 minutes or so.
Sometimes this effort can backfire and I’ll go a month without using my turntable, but other times it functions like a small victory and the small victories are sometimes the really useful ones.
Why? Because executive dysfunction causes the most damage when it gets paired with a kind of fatalism, when “this is so hard” starts getting finished with”, why am I trying?”
The little victories are the ones that help keep that fatalism at bay, and make everything feel a little more possible.
Today I had a big meeting that was cancelled. I’d planned today out last night: what I was going to be doing, how I was going to get work down, and where & when I’d be.
With that planning gone I felt stuck and I was getting mad at myself for wasting time. I plugged in my headphones, brushed off an album, and grabbed a pen.
One of the topics I’ve been getting really passionate about lately is algorithmic music: also called live coding, algomusic, or algorave depending on emphasis.
No matter what, though, algomusic is essentially this: writing code that generates patterns which generate music.
In algomusic, performances involving writing code in real-time to generate the music, changing the code over the course of the performance—sometimes entirely improvisationally & sometimes from pre-written pieces and snippets—in order to create a progression to the music.
It’s actually an incredibly interesting world and one that’s far easier to break into than you might think!
I want to start by talking about two different algorithmic music systems that I think represent very different ways of treating algomusic. The first is Sonic Pi
In Sonic Pi, the fundamental model is that you create imperative loops that all run concurrently. They have explicit timings through both the use of a sleep function as well as synchronization primitives between the various threads. Sonic Pi is really simple to install, get started with, and teach to people who have zero programming background.
The other end of the spectrum, and probably my favorite live coding system, is TidalCycles which has a very distinctly functional programming feel. Not just because it was written in Haskell, either, but because its built around the composition of functions to output a pattern, which is itself essentially a function from time to sound events. Rather than being set around explicit time TidalCycles is organized around “cycles”. You write patterns that each fit into a cycle, which ends up being a very natural way to think about the flow of time. TidalCycles isn’t necessarily difficult to set up, but it does require more work than Sonic Pi. On the other hand, its pattern language is absolutely brilliant: you can create so many complex melodies and rhythms in a single line of code.
What I want to talk about the rest of this post is why I think algomusic is so interesting.
First, one thing I find fascinating as an ex-PL researcher is that the programming involved in algomusic isn’t even very complex!
Mind you, the actual libraries themselves are big impressive pieces of software, but the actual user experience involves very simple code: Sonic Pi could be boiled down to a small imperative fragment of Ruby and Tidal could be recast as a lambda-calc + Pattern monad & primitives.
That’s really neat! It says that there’s a very sonicly expressive core to algomusic, at least as it currently exists.
This also means that algomusic is fairly accessible. It’s easy to get started with experimentation even without being an experienced programmer. And, experimentation is a really key point to how algomusic works in practice. It’s a fundamentally different way of programming than most typical coding.
After all, for a lot of computation we have a clear picture of the intended object of what the program should do when it’s done. There may be surprises along the way, you may change your mind, you may come up with a novel way to solve a problem, but you’re not going to be experimenting with code to see what happens in the same way.
What’s interesting about algomusic is that, much like art, it frequently doesn’t have something concrete as its intended object. There is experimentation, improvisation, a feedback process that involves the senses and the body, and the possibility of surprise. It’s not just that you’re writing code to make art but you’re writing code like you’re making art.
Now, there is one area of Serious Computer Science that has a very similar feel to live coding, at least to me: working with a theorem prover! Yes, you may have a theorem in mind that you hope to prove but frequently working with a theorem prover is far more experimental and improvisational.
You try definitions, see what can be proved, imagine properties and see if they hold, look at what goes wrongs and gain intuition to help you bridge the gap between definitions and properties.
Is it surprising that using a theorem prover might feel similar to coding art? I don’t think so. Plenty of people before me have argued that creativity in mathematics is like the creativity in the arts.
I want to be clear, though, I’m not talking about a binary of experience but of a spectrum. I just think that live coding is rather interestingly on one far end of the spectrum.
So, I’ve been talking about from a languages and a philosophic perspective what I find interesting about algomusic but what about from the perspective of, well, music?
Part of it is that code has potentially far more expressiveness than a traditional symbolic notation for music. Not only can you give note and percussion orderings but you can very concisely describe ways to create complex structures from the basic patterns.
In TidalCycles, you can take a pattern like s "bd*2 hh27", which is two bass drums samples followed by a hi-hat, and then apply the following change sometimesBy 0.25 (off 0.125 (# speed 0.5)) $ s "bd*2 hh27" which now says that 25% of the time we follow the beat by a pitched down echo of itself at a delay of an eighth note.
That’s not easy to describe in traditional notation!
At the same time, code in algomusic is less like a score than a single note of a rather strange instrument, because the code creates the music all at once in one action on the performer’s part. This sounds weird with respect to a classical instrument but has some precedent in synthesizers with arpeggiation modes, where a single key held down plays through a pattern of notes. An algomusic score, strangely, would then have to look more like a sequence of diffs of the code over time like a version control system might keep.
I’m not aware of any such system that currently exists but it opens up a lot of novel possibilities for how algorithmic music can be recorded, performed, and played back apart from the moment of performance.
Even more, algomusic allows us to ask interesting questions about time in relation to our experience of music. For example, Alex McLean—creator of Tidal—had a blog post recently asking questions about what it would look like for a system like Tidal to have something like record scratching where you can non-linearly shift back and forth in time. I think not only is that just a cool idea it’s also fascinating since music in a way is felt time. Playing around with the way we feel time is fundamentally a way of getting at the essence of what music even is!
Now, to wrap up these various threads I think that algorithmic music is exciting because it involves a novel twist on every subject it touches on. It’s different as music, different as coding, different as performance. It’s exciting to be a part of something that is so young that there aren’t even rules yet & so open we can’t even guess what the limits could be.
Today I want to talk about a book that feels just as, if not more, relevant than it did when it was published in the early 1970s: Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality.
Illich was an anarchist, philosopher, and Catholic priest who is probably best known for his thoughts on “deschooling” and the deconstruction of formal educational institutions. Tools for Conviviality is his big visionary text on how industrialized nations must reinvent themselves in order to enable human freedom.
The first point I want to say is that by “tools” Illich means something like continental philosophers saying “technology”: it’s more a general term for systems, institutions, and processes than a descriptor of a single object like a hammer or a car.
What Illich wants is a world where all tools exist within our control, able to be modified and used as we need them, adapted to our lives: or, in his language, they should be convivial. Now this obviously implies things like the right to repair, which is the idea that the ability to repair software and hardware is an inherent part of ownership. If you can’t repair something then you can’t really own it, the logic goes, which I think was proven rather neatly when Sonos started bricking old devices without the consent of the “owners” or by Adobe deciding that older versions of their creative suite simply aren’t allowed to be used anymore. Right to repair laws are about trying to prevent companies from making products purposefully unrepairable.
Illich’s conviviality goes much much further than this, though, because “ownership” applies to larger scale systems as well as personal property. Take, for example, Twitter. We use it, we rely on it, but who among us actually has any particular control over it? Surely the minority of neo-nazis and gg bros would have been kicked long ago if any of us had any real governance over the site. We can demand, we can rage, we can boycott services but can we actually do anything? We just have to hope that we annoy Jack et al. into doing the right thing, but ultimately we have no ownership over Twitter. The same is true of basically all centralized social media.
Another example would be the YouTube recommendation system. It’s a well-known problem that YouTube drives new users or people who are interested in any masculine-coded things towards far-right content. Any of us are about a single Joe Rogan video click away from suddenly being recommended just an endless stream of reactionary content. However, does even Alphabet claim any real ownership over this problem? No! It’s the algorithm that’s at fault: it’s just an emergent property of a system too big to control, right?
American politics is just full of examples of this lack of control: we in the US are consistently to the left of the policies that are actually passed. Things like universal healthcare or student debt forgiveness are actually incredibly popular, far more popular than is represented in legislatures.
I don’t think most people would really disagree with the examples so far. Let’s get into the spicier takes. You see, Illich posits that most technologies go through two phase transitions. The first involves rapid improvement in knowledge and development, which is good, but the second involves the technology becoming institutionalized and gatekept. The second phase transition is the point where the tools have gone outside our control and are no longer convivial.
What’s Illich’s first big example of this course of development? Medicine! It’s understandable if you wince at reading that, given the problems with anti-vaxxers and boutique quack medicine we’re having, but Illich actually has a very good point here. He argues that the second phase transition for medicine involved “doctor” becoming a gatekept class with special access to knowledge, who have a kind of epistemologic primacy when it comes to describing and naming illness. We can see the problems with this all over. Medicine as a practice is full of biases and bigotries with no actual recourse. I think almost everyone either has, or knows someone who has, a horror story of not being believed by a doctor. People with cancer get diagnosed with “being fat”. There’s a well-worn joke among trans people that every health problem we have will get blamed on taking hormones, no matter how absurd it is. Black people are much more likely to be seen as “pill seeking” or exaggerating pain levels than other racial groups.
My own controversial opinion is that the unconviviality of medicine didn’t prevent but in fact helped create the anti-vax movement, as a backlash to feeling unheard combined with a lack of accessible education.
So what do we do? How do we restructure things so that our tools are convivial? To explain that, I want to reemphasize that Illich is an anarchist. His vision of a better world is absolutely grounded in his anarchism and how you feel about anarchism is probably going to have a big effect on whether he sounds ridiculous or like a prophet in the wilderness.
Illich wants us to completely tear our societies apart. No more specialization and economies of scale. Those kind of interconnected economies lead to things like multi-national corporations that have power beyond any government and governments too centralized for any real control. He wants us to drawn down our productivity away from its peak. He basically wants us to live in small communities that are capable of providing for themselves, very clearly anarcho-communist collectives despite not using that phrase. To Illich’s credit, he does understand that this disentangling of the global economy would have to be done very carefully lest it cause devastation and starvation. Illich also makes it very clear that he doesn’t think we need to have this drawn down of our productivity due to anxieties around overpopulation. He argues that Malthusians are just eugenicists by another name. Which they are!
Now, regardless of whether you believe it’s feasible to do this in terms of our material lives I’ll argue that we still can do it for our digital lives more easily! We need to move away from these digital kingdoms of websites and centralized services and towards decentralized and peer-to-peer services. We need to stop giving our data as a tax to these computational fiefdoms whenever possible. We also need to start shunning closed devices whenever possible. This means no Chromebooks (an absolute surprise, I’m sure!) but also that I think we need to support attempts at making open source/open hardware equivalents to smartphones and tablets, even when it means we’re using devices that are more rudimentary than closed ones.
Inconsistent Universe 