People are not software
When I manually migrated all 150 WordPress posts to my photography blog, I did so knowing I could automate the process using software export and import tools. My programmer friend laughed at my struggle and asked why I make things hard for myself when software can do all the work? He even offered to code me a tool for the job (he is, of course, used to me enduring the longer and rockier roads).
I thought about that for a while because, on the surface, it seems a reasonable use of software to ease such a burden. Apart from the fact that I've always manually done such tasks, going through each and every post and photo allowed me to fix errors. More importantly, it allowed me to reflect on every post and photo, reliving those moments in some small way. The migration required numerous hours, but it became a personal and organic journey through the past 18 months of holidays, thoughts, changes, struggles, locations, cameras, and photographic learning. All of that is important and can't be experienced when a software tool does it for you.
Software brains
Cory Doctorow refers to some people having software brains - the idea that the world is viewed through the lens of software and programming. When your mental construction of the world is like this, everything is a database or a loop or a program. Even the universe can be seen as a simulation with the speed of light as maximum CPU processing speed.
For ai tech billionaires, a person is a collection of information. If this information can be flattened into a database, all of a sudden the messiness of people is made understandable. Add billions of investment dollars, a healthy dose of self-deceit and mythmaking, insecurity, and a longstanding inability to relate to people, and you get the modern ai and tech industry.
Not that there's inherently anything wrong with this kind of brain. Doctorow makes the valid point that software brains have given us some wonderful tools. What other kind of brain would you want to solve some of the toughest programming challenges? It isn't wrong, but it also isn't right. It's just another way of viewing the world and people. The problem happens when people who think this way are given all the money and power and influence in the world to run wild.
People are messy
The truth is that people are messy. We're disorganised, emotional, illogical, hypocritical, and often mistaken. We can change or remain stubbornly stuck to beliefs, or both at the same time. What works on paper and in the logical minds of programmers and economists often fails when applied to people at large. As Walt Whitman once wrote in Song of Myself:
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)
The mistake is in thinking there are only right and wrong ways of viewing the world. There are simply many views. Human societies can be organised in all manner of ways, including the fractal geometries of some African communities. To allow a specific view of the world to dominate and back it with power, money, and influence, is to create a monoculture.
Yes, we contain multitudes - contradictions, faded memories, myths, self-conceits, raw honesties, and nurtured vanities. To be human is to be multi-dimensional and complex. The mess is natural and real and normal. The mess is not for databases and data points on a screen.
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