You are not a Gadget: A Manifesto Read Free

interface so a Mac could use MIDI to control a synthesizer, and I worked up a quick music creation program. We felt so free—but we should have been more thoughtful.
    By now, MIDI has become too hard to change, so the culture has changed to make it seem fuller than it was initially intended to be. We have narrowed what we expect from the most commonplace forms of musical sound in order to make the technology adequate. It wasn’t Dave’s fault. How could he have known?
Digital Reification: Lock-in Turns Philosophy into Reality
    A lot of the locked-in ideas about how software is put together come from an old operating system called UNIX. It has some characteristics that are related to MIDI.
    While MIDI squeezes musical expression through a limiting model of the actions of keys on a musical keyboard, UNIX does the same for all computation, but using the actions of keys on typewriter-like keyboards. A UNIX program is often similar to a simulation of a person typing quickly.
    There’s a core design feature in UNIX called a “command line interface.” In this system, you type instructions, you hit “return,” and the instructions are carried out. * A unifying design principle of UNIX is that a program can’t tell if a person hit return or a program did so. Since real people are slower than simulated people at operating keyboards, the importance of precise timing is suppressed by this particular idea. As a result, UNIX is based on discrete events that don’t have to happen at a precise moment in time. The human organism, meanwhile, is based on continuous sensory, cognitive, and motor processes that have to be synchronized precisely in time. (MIDI falls somewhere in between the concept of time embodied in UNIX and in the human body, being based on discrete events that happen at particular times.)
    UNIX expresses too large a belief in discrete abstract symbols and not enough of a belief in temporal, continuous, nonabstract reality; it is more like a typewriter than a dance partner. (Perhaps typewriters or word processors ought to always be instantly responsive, like a dance partner—but that is not yet the case.) UNIX tends to “want” to connect to reality as if reality were a network of fast typists.
    If you hope for computers to be designed to serve embodied people as well as possible people, UNIX would have to be considered a bad design. I discovered this in the 1970s, when I tried to make responsive musicalinstruments with it. I was trying to do what MIDI does not, which is work with fluid, hard-to-notate aspects of music, and discovered that the underlying philosophy of UNIX was too brittle and clumsy for that.
    The arguments in favor of UNIX focused on how computers would get literally millions of times faster in the coming decades. The thinking was that the speed increase would overwhelm the timing problems I was worried about. Indeed, today’s computers are millions of times faster, and UNIX has become an ambient part of life. There are some reasonably expressive tools that have UNIX in them, so the speed increase has sufficed to compensate for UNIX’s problems in some cases. But not all.
    I have an iPhone in my pocket, and sure enough, the thing has what is essentially UNIX in it. An unnerving element of this gadget is that it is haunted by a weird set of unpredictable user interface delays. One’s mind waits for the response to the press of a virtual button, but it doesn’t come for a while. An odd tension builds during that moment, and easy intuition is replaced by nervousness. It is the ghost of UNIX, still refusing to accommodate the rhythms of my body and my mind, after all these years.
    I’m not picking in particular on the iPhone (which I’ll praise in another context later on). I could just as easily have chosen any contemporary personal computer. Windows isn’t UNIX, but it does share UNIX’s idea that a symbol is more important than the flow of time and the underlying continuity of