computers

In this day and age, seems a little redundant to have a web page about “computers.”  This page originally held links to whatever various topics I was reading about within computing.

What things are not being said about computers and IT and their effects on the world?

Computers are a tool, and although for most people on the planet they are a tool for looking at pretty pictures, fighting boredom, perhaps a little bookkeeping, etc., computers have a very different utility for transnational/multinational corporations.  For those entities, computers and IT are a tool for finding low-entropy niches and exploiting them.

Years ago, I did some reading and writing about how computers are (or could be) used by grassroots activists in the fight against global enclosure and exploitation. One thing that arose was that when said grassroots activists got access to computers (or, later, “got online” — remember, we’re talking about the late 80s early 90s here), the mere fact of having computers (or online access) changed the workflow, changed the goals, perhaps even changed the focus of the activism.

This led to some thoughts about what dedicated grassroots-activism software would look like, what it would do, what it would enable. Electronic tools for critical thinking, writing rebuttals, debunking. Probably such things quietly exist now, and are being used to quash dissent where it pops up.

One of the names for that type of software was/is “groupware”, although I have not seen that buzzword around for a while.

The most interesting material I found was that of Horst Rittel, an urban planner who outlined a method for arriving at solutions for complicated multi-stakeholder urban planning problems. Rittel called that method “Issue Based Information Systems” or IBIS. Note that this was in the pre-computer age, so it was a paper method, although it was later adapted to computers.

Rittel made the distinction between “tame” and “wicked” problems. A tame problem is one that has a known end state — a chess game, for example. But urban planning (and other giant social planning problems) do not have easily enumerated end states or stopping rules, and frequently have multiple agendas, multiple stakeholders, and clashing values. By what methods would you organize the discourse/debate on such issues so as to maximize possible perspectives/solutions and such that every stakeholder feels listened to?

There are a few other links here, also having to do with computers as the furniture of control.

Life Balance wins mention here because it is one of the few applications that uses the computer to help an individual reach a balance based on their own data, rather than forcing one to fit the programmer’s paradigm.