the comments seem not incongruent with the ostensible user

[Thomas Eckhardt]

To expand: The following is very congruent with my view of the author of 
BE (my very own "implied author"). It is also very much worth reading no 
matter who actually wrote it:

"Here's the thing I can't shake: I can't shake the feeling that it's not 
worth it. None of it. From soup to nuts. Yelp and Fiverr and Tumblr and 
Taskrabbit and Mechanical Turk and a fancy phone from Foxconn that I can 
tether to my laptop and the billions of lines of code in Microsoft 
Windows and Microsoft Office 365 (can you picture a product name more 
dystopian than "Office 365") and Arduino-driven toys and piles of linear 
algebra stacked layer on layer that no one can understand and that no 
one can beat at Go, and GNU and Linux and TCP/IP and DNS and gcc and 
flex and yacc and bison and Visual Studio and IRC and Mozilla and Safari 
and Hearthstone and The Legend of Zelda:Breath of the Wild and Nethack 
and Rogue and Super Mario World and DooM and Quake and the Unity engine 
and videoconferencing from the beach and SMTP and POP and USENET and 
wordy metafilter comments and Wired and Lisa and every Macintosh and the 
imaginary desktop on your real desktop, kitted out with windows and 
icons and menus and a pointer you control with your mouse from Xerox 
PARC, and PLATO, and booking tickets through the SABRE system that will 
never die and Pong and Oregon Trail and Altair BASIC and the Apple 1 and 
Space War on the PDP-1 and the Homebrew Computer Club and all the money 
Tim Leary gave them and and Stewart Brand selling an individualist 
computer-driven version of/replacement for revolution through the Whole 
Earth Catalog and Watsons Sr. and Jr. telling people to THINK (while 
also telling them do what they're told) and OS/360 and Project SAGE and 
Project Whirlwind and the deadly little brains in every ICBM (so much 
smarter than the V2's guidance system, so much lighter and cleaner than 
the beautiful mind in 00000) and Grace Hopper's A-0, A-1, A-2, B-0, and 
FLOW-MATIC (this last name chosen by Remington Rand marketing, because 
what woman would curse a product with that name?) and the Univac, built 
in a factory between a scrapyard and a graveyard (the workers would joke 
that if the machine didn't come together they'd push it out the window 
on the scrapyard side and then all jump out the windows on the graveyard 
side), the Univac which would correctly predict Eisenhower's victory 
live on TV with less than 1% of the returns counted, and Frances "Betty" 
Holberton née Snyder taking every piece of paper generated by her sort 
routine autogenerator down to her firm's copyright office because the 
drones there didn't understand that she had written code to write code, 
and some IBM guy writing FORTRAN, and Backus and Naur unknowingly 
repeating Pāṇini's work, and all the great things that people have done 
with and around and to computers, I can't shake the feeling that none of 
it was worth the investment of human lives and human minds that it took 
to build it.

None of it.

The original Bletchley gang gets a pass cause they used their computers 
to kill nazis, and that's always worth it.

But the rest of it? I can't shake the feeling that we should have been 
doing literally anything else with our time and our brains. It's a very, 
I don't know, 1960s feeling, wanting to secede from the entire system 
our generation and our parents' generation and our parents' parents' 
parents' generation spent their lives building, but I can't get that 
feeling to go away."

https://www.metafilter.com/173596/the-heart-of-dorkness#7378053

(Me, I'd say Doom was worth it...)

And, answering to a reply to the above post:

"'But personally I couldn't imagine living my life in a fulfilling way 
without Google search and all the things it leads to.'

I can’t imagine it either. That’s a problem. A serious problem."

And:

"Bitcoin bros and VC rip-off artists aren’t an exceptional thing 
colonizing computing; they’re the culmination of it, a revelation of 
what it always was, no matter how much we might have hoped for it to be 
something different."

The person posting under the name of Reclusive Novelist Thomas Pynchon 
also uses "Tlön and Uqbar" as a verb...

As for Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalogue -- surely this movie, 
which may be found on the internet, has been recommended before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Netz

Ken Kesey, LSD, MK Ultra, Stewart Brand, McLuhan, the terrifying Heinz 
von Foerster, the origins of the Internet, an exchange of letters with 
Ted Kaczinsky...





Am 02.08.2018 um 03:23 schrieb peterthooper at juno.com:
> https://www.metafilter.com/user/232480
> Name: thomas ruggles pynchon jr.
> Joined: October 11, 2015