computers feel, not see, we need new primatives

drafts

• eject the enchantments of technology
• western notions of mapping
  • algeria and prostitution
  • [1] J. Surkis, “MAKING THE ‘MUSLIM FAMILY,’” p. 30, 2022.

• Vision is an easier problem than language
• distill.pub and vision networks and information theory makes it feel like we understand it on a larger level
• https://x.com/SanNuvola/status/1594650926559764481?s=20
  • digital image is what makes machine vision possible -> is this true? it’s more seq2seq makes machine vision possible no? There’s a fetishization of the senses here, where we assume
• attention is all you need -> seq2seq is all you need, functional values is a texture, not a vision. Why does this matter? You feel texture.
• What are ways of building a new primiative?
  • eject this type of sense making, approach it as an anthropological problem, which means you have to spend time with the computer
  • we are all users of the computer, which makes us feel like we understand it, especially because it’s so intatmitely tied to our neoliberal structure and the fact that Bunz: School Will Never End: On Infantilization in Digital Environments
  • however, just like how you have to approach cultures as a producer, not a consumer, you need to understand computers in the same way (aka go become a programmer)
• the soul of a machine is not reflection, bryan cantrill does a good job instilling this ethos.
  • we must approach it without our own reservations
    • art and agency: https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Joukowsky_Institute/courses/materialworlds/1894.html
• intractability of NLP
• levered nature of the computer prevents the left from having a good understanding of it
  • we can only see it as levels of power, but the unique thing of computers is that we may not be able to admit that the generative power of the computer