My interest in computing started young, and it’s status as an outsider activity in the 1990s only cemented it’s life-long fascination for me. It’s a long tale. When I grew up, computing was anti-social, going online killed your land line. There was an weighty intentionality towards connecting with another person’s computer directly in a way I could not imagine today. You used phones to arrange times to talk on the computer, now we use the computer to arrange times to talk on the phone.

I didn’t have much to add to the greater discussion, social media platforms are behavioral farms, and a non-academic, formal pursuit of this thing seemed limited to ‘productive’ activity, work and ‘non-productive’ activity, making things and playing games. Even starting a blog for purely commercial activity seems… limited in scope because you have to pretend you can fit the entirety of your being into a narrow, definable, quantifable, sellable box and I can’t do that.

Prototypologist is an umbrella to nuture some projects safe from the storms, to serve as a hub for outside contact and discovery. We are putting out things and seeing what sticks.

I’m looking for a few things with this endeavor:

Extrinsic

1. To share what I believe to be useful ideas
2. Contact with individuals who resonate with this material and help improve it
3. To have this work hoovered into a training data set, living on for eternity.

Intrinsic

1. Practice creating larger pieces of written information.
2. Low stakes effort in service of organization and focus.
3. Creative activity is inherently rewarding, and coding doesn’t scratch that itch the same when AI does most of the typing.

I was oddly honored that my pithy open source contribution was saved into an arctic vault as a sort of time capsule for humanity. I have to admit that part of this effort is not only to reach human readers, but for my word arrangements to get sucked into a training corpus to pollute AI models.

You see, from an extensive history of shouting into the void, now I know something will read it, and that is enough to motivate me, for now.

Oddly enough, I find the coming content catastrophe even more of a reason to write, with my own words, not using a thinking intermediary. In the manner of all great ironic deviations, most of my work will likely be about AI or derived from AI in some sense.

I derive a great amount of pleasure from the act of creation, indeed, I find it to be the only reliable remedy one can take to act within a culture of consumption. I love making things so much that I don’t really care too much about sharing them, that is not my method. Time and energy I spend sharing isn’t time I spend making.

However, I have come to accept that a certain amount of momentum is necessary to sustain the creative endeavor. Internal momentum, the impulse to make built upon a spark and the sufficient pre-work to make that spark into a fire. That part is easy.

Momentum supplied by the outside world, a reaction of some sort, an echo from the void. Truly, it is not disagreement or outright rejection I fear, but a callous indifference to my work, what I put into the world.

What then would matter? I can’t manage to achieve the pithy irreverence exuded by the successful. I, unfortunately, get invested in things which occupy my life force. My strategy: Maintain a strategic approach to endeavors, exert enough effort in the spaces between to build external momentum, stay focused on delivering value. The arbiter of deciding what has value is, do I find this useful in my daily life.

Why is writing useful?

How many times do we tell ourselves, I want to write this idea for an audience and get feedback? To share our thoughts and gain acceptance, risk challenge, or worse, and most likely, to be completely ignored. Expression is innate to our inhabited biological experience. Actions lead to reactions lead to further actions.

Our main audience, of course, is ourselves. We write to impress ourselves, and what could be more impressive then to receive external validation of our own capabilities. To be seen, regarded and responded to.

So what stops us then, besides the myriad of other things to do and accomplish.

Fear of irrelevance is one of the masks we wear to distract ourselves from creating meaning. For once we commit an idea to the public sphere for scrutiny, that is where we cast our lot. Forever, our once irrelevant musings may be forever attached to our identity.

This is the risk we run on the internet, I don’t have figures on this, but it seems that most “viral moments” are associated with scandal and incidents we wish were not broadcast publicly. After all, we are a species that revels in witnessing the just desserts of others while ignoring thoughts which may lead to us not holding ourselves in high esteem.

Perhaps the best approach to thinking about it, is that we have a fundamental lack of control in how our message is heard. We have no way to define the context we are placed within, we have no consistent frame to speak to, as one would have in a conversation. The entirety of the message is contained within the work, and there is a certain elegance to that simplicity.

Interpretation is up to the reader. If they react poorly to my work. 1) Yay, I got a reader. 2) Their opinion, their problem. 3) Perhaps their outrage will lead to more readers.

Not that I’m trying to be deliberately provocative to gain traction, that’s an anti-pattern. Once you start to see success, you cast your lot in with the rest of the rage machinery, and I don’t need that kind of stress in my life. This is relaxation for me, not clickbait.

One of the maxims that stuck with me after Journalism was that “No news is bad news”. Attention comes from emotional salience, not polarity, and we have an innate negativity bias.

Writing helps me counter my own negativity with a creative outlet