Software Makes People Obsolete
I got this idea from William Carlos Williams’ poem The Rose is Obsolete, which you can read here, and hear a mini-lecture it about here. The parallel in painting is Nude Descending a Staircase, which caused a sensation when it was exhibited in 1932. I thought it had been lost, but it is now on permanent display at the Philadelphia Museum of Art – in case you are ever out that way.
What were Williams, and all the many artists like him, saying? This explanation would take volumes, and I can only hint at it here. They were saying that the symbols of our society, such as the rose and the nude, are obsolete. And we have become obsolete too because our creations, our technologies, have swallowed us up, or absorbed us, and become more important than we are.
All we can do now is serve them – or, as artists, describe the strange world and the strange beings we have become.
Bruno Latour puts this a little differently – the border between humans and non-humans has been breached, and cannot be repaired. Humpty-Dumpty (the symbol for our rich, satisfied self) has fallen from his wall.
I continue to study software development – because I feel it is somehow related to human development. One thing software does is model the human condition. But this model is fast becoming more important than the thing being modeled – us!
The industrial era, which created the population boom of mass man, is drawing to a close. In the post-industrial world we will be serving a new master – the computer.
Society is reorganizing itself along inhuman lines (a process that began in the 20th Century) and getting rid of its surplus population.
It’s not going to be a pretty picture.
on a different track…read a news about San Jose going ahead with a plan to erect street signs. Am surprised that until now, landmarks were used for directions.
your thoughts on it?
Costa Rica, like all of Latin America, inherited its basic society from 16th Century Spain and Portugal. Meanwhile Northern Europe and North America developed a different, more affluent culture – with a different sense of time and space.
The more progressive Tico elements want to update their society, to modernize it. And this would include what all modern societies use – street names and building numbers.
They have compromised, and retained the old way of organizing towns – with odd and even streets and avenues on opposite sides of town – and the use of landmarks – but with street/avenue names more visible. This won’t really change anything.
Medium size towns are a mess, and you have to ask your way around
Small towns, such as the one where I live, is small enough so everyone knows everyone else, and where they live. But life still goes on.