[davidthewatson]

Maybe.

I get the frame but I don't think arguing the co-opting of Cockburn by the MBA crowd gets us anywhere.

Think about it. GUI - Graphical User Interface - a concept taken from HCI Human Computer Interaction. I think that describes Peek and Poke in BASIC pretty well 50 years ago though nobody attributes those to Dartmouth. It also describes AI at present around the world.

But HCI is lossy. Why?

Exploding n-dimensional dot cloud vectors of language leveled by math are exactly why I fear that GUI should have died with CASE tools as a hauntological debt on our present that is indeed, spectral.

The world doesn't need more clicks and taps. Quite the converse: less. Read Fitts. You don't run a faster race by increasing cadence. You run a faster race by slowing down and focusing on technique. Kipchoge knows this. Contemplative computing could learn too but I'm not sure waiting on the world to change works.

Imagine a world where we simply arrived at the same kind of text interfaces we enjoy now whether they benefit from the browser or are hindered by it. We just needed better, more turnkey tunnels, not more GUI! We sort of have those from meet:team:zoom, but they suck while few realize why or can explain the lossy nature of scaling tunnels when many of us built them impulsively in SSH decades ago for fun.

The present suffers from the long-tail baggage of the keyhole problem Scott Meyers mentioned twenty years ago. Data science has revealed the n-dimensional data underlying many, if not most, modern systems given their complexity.

What we missed is user interface that is not GUI that can actually scale to match the dimensionality of the data without implying a 2D, 2.5D, or 3D keyhole problem on top of n-dimensional data. The gap from system-to-story is indeed nonlinear because so is the data!

I'd argue the missing link is the Imaginary or Symbolic Interface we dream of but to my knowledge, have yet to conceive. Why?

It's as if Zizek has not met his match in software though I suspect there's a Brett Victor of interface language yet to be found, (Stephen Johnson?) because grammatology shouldn't stop at speech:writing.

Grammatology needed to scale into Interface Culture found in software's infinite extensibility in language, since computers were what McLuhan meant when he said, "Media" and I'm pretty sure "Augmentation is Amputation" is absolute truth if we continue down our limited Cartesian frame - we'll lose limbs of agency, meaning, and respond-in-kind social reciprocity in the process, if any of those remain.

The very late binding (no binding?) we see in software now is exactly what research labs were missing in the late sixties to bridge from 1945 to 1965 and beyond. I can't imagine trying to do that with the rigid stacks close-to-metal we had then.

I hope I'm not alone in seeing or saying that the answers should be a lot closer-to-mind now given virtualization from containers to models and everything in-between.

One can only hope.