The Pnictogen Wing

Who here has read John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces?

It was one of my favorite books in the 1990s and I'm sure I'll love it
just as much when I re-read it (eventually) because I regarded it as a
moral warning, a milepost of sorts: Don't Be Like Ignatius V. Reilly. C.
S. Lewis talked about his moments of Joy or sehnsucht in
Surprised by Joy and I agree with him fully; such moments are
important—and Jack Lewis should have asked himself why he
stopped having them, even though he wasn't anywhere near Heaven
yet. But I've come to realize that there's a logical converse to such
moments: the times when you realize you've strayed too close to the Pit
and maybe you should back away. A Confederacy of Dunces was like
that. Reilly was too familiar for comfort. He was stagnant, soured,
morally and intellectually rotting in place, and as it turns out he also
predicted the future. The Internet is overflowing with Ignatius Reillys
and most of them call themselves "dark intellectuals" or something
similar. At some point in their pasts, as with Reilly, they decided
never to grow up: they chose some moment of dark epiphany to fixate
upon, some moment when they realized they were the only sane person in
an insane world, and they haven't budged a millimeter from that spot
ever since. I remember reading A Confederacy of Dunces in the
mid-1990s and thinking, oh gawd, let us make more use of college
education than THAT.

The "dark intellectual" people and the antisocial techbros who eat up
their stuff love to talk about their "redpill" moments, when they
supposedly realized that feminists had ruined the world or whatnot. Bret
Weinstein, who's peddled TERF diatribe and Sinophobic "theories" about
COVID-19 and is now claiming to be Saving the Republic^TM on a
speaking tour with a bunch of other propagandists, has a particularly
hilarious such moment: when he was fired from a teaching job at
Evergreen State College here in Washington State for being too bigoted,
he declared this was evidence that Evergreen was the secret headquarters
of a vast leftist conspiracy to corrupt all education or something like
that. (He's blithered about this at length and you can learn all about
it on YouTube if you like.) As it happened, Ignatius V. Reilly had a
similar moment: he bused to Baton Rouge to apply for a teaching job at
Louisiana State University, flubbed the interview, and then decided that
this experience was a trip into the Heart of Darkness of modernity.
Reilly would tell this story of dark awakening to all and sundry, and
write extensively about it into foolscap tablets in his bedroom at his
mom's house. Now, though, you can put that stuff on the Internet, and
get paid for putting it there.

If there's any ONE event that gets the "dark Enlightenment" people
worked up, though, it's the endless September, the day when the
Internet was finally too public and commercial a thing to remain the
exclusive domain of universities and .mil accounts and that sort of
thing. There was a long enough interval when the nascent Internet was
the exclusive playground of college students and military contractors
for a pecking order to develop between wise professional greybeards and
clueless college freshmen joining the party late (like I did) and thus
contributing to a September rush of "dumb" and "moronic" newbies on
mailing lists and Usenet. But then when there were enough people getting
Internet accounts through corporate outfits like AOL, round the clock
instead of clustered round the school schedule, that meant an "endless
September" of newbies at all times of year. It's quite clear that
there's a lot of rancid resentful nerds who still think of this as the
End of the World, more or less, the day that the barbarians arrived at
the gates. After all, nobody represents civilization better than a
racist computer nerd still waging Mac v. PC wars.

I'd love to kill this bit of toxic nostalgia stone dead, if I could.
I've experienced a bizarre reversed version of it: I came to hate
computer nerd culture so much that I aggressively took the part of the
unsophisticated user, partly because one of my best friends IRL is a
very old-fashioned gardener born in 1951 who NEVER got used to this
stuff even a bit and still prefers to talk on the telephone. I've helped
him out with computer stuff and shared his anger: why is this stuff so
confoundedly hostile and overcomplicated? It's not fair to make someone
like my friend deal with a labyrinth of bad choices like the modern-day
website or recent Windows versions, much less the fucking smart phone.
(He refuses to get one. Can you blame him?) "Endless September" now
seems merely like the reification of the casual bigotry of toxic
computer geeks, the ease with which they divide everyone up into the
[slurs] vs the high-IQ, more "evolved" human beings, hoi polloi
vs. hoi aristoi.

It's not like they even respect that era of computing anyway, not
really. Oh they still spout out sentimental glurge about it but in
reality they're happy to have left it behind. It's safely in the past
for them, like Napoleon or Julius Caesar, and therefore safe to
mythologize.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I don't mean that entirely seriously but gawd...if the web browser doesn't seem emblematic and symbolic of everything that's stagnant and byzantine and wrong with contemporary Internet technology ~Chara

multimedia was a hubris

but it turns out they were right all along

Every GUI toolkit has a half-life of 5 years before your code becomes unusable and is plagued by accessibility problems (actual, "screen readers can't parse your app" ones, not "this isn't a Google-Approved Flat Design and thus essentially unsuitable for the lumpenproletariat"). You know what's been stable for a couple decades and has excellent accessibility? ncurses. You can compile a curses app from the late 90s and it Just Works. 80char terminals with optional color are the only stable output device and the only thing we need to add is unicode.

Going back to TUI would also let us quit deploying Turing-complete end-user devices in big organizations. End-users don't need that kind of flexibility; they need a terminal that can run on a few AAs and has no writable persistent memory. End-user terminals don't need internet; they need a secured 115200 baud half-duplex link back to a computer that's being kept somewhere safe. we could fix "endpoint security" in a nice, tidy way, with proper engineering solutions instead of a thousand stupid bandaids on a general-purpose kernel. just imagine

the software industry has found itself a number of ways to keep itself permanently chaotic. UX stuff is a major one: it's unbelievable to me that thirty plus years of technological evolution hasn't settled upon anything better than markdown as a reasonably universal method for representing lightly formatted text, and as for displaying formatted text? forget it! the lack of standardization also means zero accessibility. a stable protocol for representing and displaying formatted text would be a solid platform for accessibility extensions, but nope everything has to stay soup instead.

I can't imagine anyone is openly saying "let's make sure nothing ever settles down" but the instability is perfect for driving a gamblers' economy like the startup scene.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I have seen a few times in the wilds of eugenicist Musk Twitter a hilarious "horseshoe theory" of intelligence and IQ: if you're too smart, in some indefinite way, you double back round to "dumb" or [slur], so a nice safe mediocrity is actually best. I have seen memetic images suggesting that such persons have a peculiar notion about the famous "bell curve" or Gaussian distribution which Charles Murray famously imposed on intelligence: they think it's better to be in the middle, where the curve is nice and high. One time though I saw a tortuous attempt to define some sweet spot off to the right of the mode, but not too far off to be "dumb" again.

It's rather easy to guess why this has happened: too many collisions between the high lords of IQ and people who actually know what they're saying, leading to strings of lost arguments and hurt feelings and consequent grumbling about "woke universities" and such. There's an entertaining tension between the need for the fashy techbro to stay indoctrinated while also strutting their supposedly superior intelligence, and it's led to a curious bipolarity in the community, a resolution of the techbros between two extremes.

Basically, the better any of these people are at mastering some kind of difficult scientific or technical subject, such as programming work or medicine, the more likely it is they're unable to communicate with ordinary human beings. Fashy professionals of this sort tend towards extreme misanthropy, as though it required every erg of their mental powers to do their technical job, so they tend to become hermits with very strange ideas about people. At the other extreme are the persol nle ones who become vigorous evangelists and boosters for technology, the ones who are able to sell their enthusiasm to others. Elon Musk is a conspicuous example. He's good at sounding like a wizard of technology (well good enough for his believers) but if he ever goes into details he's clearly lost. He's not one of the boffins himself. He wanted to be one, though, and that puts some sparkle onto his boosterism.

Hence there's been a peculiar sorting process at work for a few decades, culminating in the rise of persons like Musk and Elizabeth Holmes and Marc Andreessen. They inhabit a system that rewards their own ignorance. The more ignorant you are, the more enthusiastically you can lie and make wild promises. There's no awkward knowledge in the way. Musk can sell technology as magic because to him it IS magic, capable of anything; he doesn't know better and he's not rewarded for finding out.

There's a famous maxim about the doublethinkful nature of right-wing propaganda about the Law. To such people, the Law must bind others but not themselves; the Law protects them but not others. There's a similar state of doublethink in the corporate world about intelligence and technical skill. The boffins who know cannot communicate it to others; the boosters don't know, but they can talk about it anyway. One result has been the AI craze. It's like the AI machines are the ultimate boffins, able to think (well, supposedly) but requiring human agents to praise them and evangelize for them, agents who may vaunt their own intelligence but who clearly are zealous for AI because they need machines to do what they can't.

~Chara of Pnictogen

mind you I love Tinkertoys but you wouldn't engineer anything critical out of them unless you hadn't any better choices. but that's how all modern technology feels to me, like it's not engineered at all, it's just pieces attached to each other haphazardly and even the purported technological geniuses in charge don't seem to know how they work together ~Chara

I gotta tell you, even with my corrosive cynicism and bitterness at seeing all the fields I love being tread under the feet of the techlords...I am still shocked at how empty all those people are. There's just nothing fucking there. They feel like people who've been copying their whole lives off computer screens for so long they forgot what it's like to have...I dunno, a life? They often seem astonished and bewildered by things that I think of as household routine. I'm reminded of that infamous incident when George H. W. Bush embarrassed himself in a supermarket, talking about every little thing like he'd never seen it before because he probably hadn't, and it reminded the country of how out of touch he was. The tech people feel like that only Nth power ~Chara