Look at that image above. Every ring on this “memory plane,” or RAM module, would represent one computer bit. Do those rings look like abstract 1s or 0s to you?

One reason I’ve released my 14,000 word post Cheating at Peekaboo against a Bad Faith Adversary is to put our socially constructed perceptions of “information” in its place. Especially its fluid nature; we hear everyday that information “flows” and “spreads” around our mediated environment.

This makes intuitive sense at the basic level of how gossip gets around, or how events or ideas come to everyone’s attention all at once when broadcast and widely discussed. However, at risk of being thought of as a guy who always just states the obvious, there are a few mantras I’d wish I could convince everyone to repeat to themselves daily:

1. Information does not have

I had to make a visit to the doctor’s clinic yesterday, interrupting my writing for this website. In order to not lose much time, I grabbed a book I hadn’t yet opened, but knew would be of benefit to what I was working on: Sherry Turkle’s 1995 book Life on the Screen. I had picked it up in Boston last years while attending the Free Software Foundations annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023. Now, from having read the opening chapters, I get the unfortunate impression that to the author—at least in 1995—, I may as well have been attending a Microsoft Appreciation convention.

Of course, working with the benefit of 29 years hind-sight, I have Dr. Turkle at an extreme disadvantage. I’ve found all of her books to be absolutely invaluable as sociological histories. Further, I will personally attest that her …

Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, two foundational giants in the world of personal computer interface design in the ‘70s and ‘80s, appeared before the American congress in 1995. Specifically, they were witnesses testifying to the House Committee on ‘Technology in Education.’

They are both huge critics of the way computer education had been rolled out in schools. As an elementary school student in the ‘90s, and a product of the system they’re critiquing, I find this entire chapter in the story of microcomputers extremely enlightening for reasons of personal understanding. Kay says that dropping a Mac (let’s say) in every classroom is like dropping a piano in every classroom. Imagine that. Every classroom in the school gets their own piano, and then every teacher—none of whom, we can assume, are musicians—are given two-week long “piano” classes in September. And then …