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The words came so easily. I love you too. But I didn’t pull my hand away. It hurt me to see him like this, crinkled and grim. This was not a man who windsurfed at dawn; this was a man who could barely dog-paddle. Had he always been this pathetic? Maybe that was why he chased such young girls—they were easier to fool. He could siphon their optimism, their dopey hope. The name of the website we met on was Seeking.com, and I could still feel him seeking, like a cat in the dark. He wanted it all; he wanted out. He wore his disappointments like a rank corsage. He wanted to be sleek and bright, baptized by his nightly high. I glanced down at the coffee table, feeling my extremities tingle. I knew how to help him, to take the edge off. Did you take your pills, Daddy?
I hadn’t told Ophelia that my birthday was today. I was turning twenty-eight. Was that old or young? I didn’t know. When I was twenty-three, I wore heart-shaped stickers on my face. When I was twenty-five, I fell in love. I only drank tequila and pineapple juice, as if that said something important about me. At twenty-seven, I grieved and made bank. I felt tired when I pictured it, twenty-eight years contained in my body, an overstuffed carry-on. At the same time, it seemed like a sexy number, rounded and lush. Young for a writer, old for a gymnast, the perfect age for a bartender or anonymous fuck. I would throw away my flavored condoms and start reading about Bitcoin. I would buy satin sheets and retinol creams and carbonated water. I’d be sleek but fun, poised but game. I would dance with my eyes closed alone in a bar. All my shirts would be see-through, chopsticks in my hair. I couldn’t ever be embarrassed. From now on, I’d sleep naked with the windows ajar; that felt very twenty-eight. I took comfort in remembering what Simon had said, his eyes wet with meaning: You’re still so young!
As I walked, I thought about my answer to Nobody’s question. What would I miss most about being alive? It felt like bad luck to say what aloud. Instead I kept my answer close to my heart, like a locket containing my lover’s hair. It felt good to hold it there. It was both a secret and not, both hush-hush and public. I tried to imagine what my loved ones would say. Ophelia would miss sudoku, Dino would miss lingerie, Mazzy would miss Aperol. Or maybe Ophelia would miss yoga, Dino would miss ice cream, Mazzy would miss trashy paperback novels. The things we loved most were both elemental and petty. You squeezed them while you slept, these scraps. They made your body look beautiful, like the perfect accessory. Dog’s kisses, blue jeans. No one was dumb enough to say justice or family. No, we lived for Halloween and yard sales and driving at dusk with the windows rolled down. We lived for honeymoons and midnight snacks, blow jobs in chain hotels. We lived for paper valentines. It was garbage, but beloved. The devil’s in the details, my mom used to say as she stared at the TV. So too, it seemed, was heaven, or something just as good.
[...] Since the massification of computing they have in some small ways also been able to construct themselves in relation to other forms of life. (In the sense that Ludwig Wittgenstein means when he says, "To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.") This self-sufficiency of software, in such a context, allows (in much the same way as it allows a programmer to think he or she is working on the formulation of a particularly interesting and chewy algorithm when working at another scale, perhaps more determining, on an insurance program to more finely exclude the poor from public services) a certain distance from social or cultural norms. Things can be done in software that don't require much dependence on other factors. [...]
[...] buttons force decisions into binary choices. There is no way of answering that one partially agrees, has not realized the consequences of accepting, or does not care, even though these would probably be franker answers from most users. Buttons are verbs that rule out tenses other than present tense, and rule out modal auxiliary, subjunctive, and other more sophisticated ways in which our language expresses activity. Buttons also designate you as a masterful subject in full control of the situation, which obviously is problematic in many cases, such as the one above, where one cannot oversee, predict, or even understand the consequences of clicking "I accept," [...]
The benefit of these criteria of elegance in programming is that they establish a clear grounding for the evaluation of approaches to a problem. This set of criteria emerging from programming as a self-referent discipline it works on the level of disciplinary formalization, as a set of metrics that allow for a scale of abstraction. This formalization can also be politically crucial as a rhetorical and intellectual device that allows programmers to stake their ground in contexts where they might be asked to compromise the integrity of their work, and something that allows them to derive satisfaction from work that might otherwise be banal.
[...] it is entirely debatable whether framing the issue of machine intelligence in the mirror of the human will allow us to understand what the real problem is. That machines can replace humans tells us nothing special about intelligence, particularly if this is as part of an economy that, in its entropic repetition of the eternally self-same, generally produces stupidity rather than intelligence. [...]
[...] One trains a neural network on specific, finite datasets. The ability to pattern-match more generally presupposes the existence of redundancy in the data and thus self-similarity. So, one could argue that the ability to discern redundancy in data is the ability to learn about how things imitate or repeat themselves (like the data-mining software that tells us which books we want to buy).
For the software designer, programming with interaction involves seeking a kind of magical moment of transformation, a moment when one begins to get back more than what was put in; an unexpected moment when the system seems not only just to work, but to almost come to life; a moment when what had previously been a noisy mess of buggy half-working mechanisms seems to flow together and become a kind of organic whole.
The elusive chase for this kind of transformative moment is the essential reason why geeks keep banging away at their keyboards, deep into the night, deprived of sleep and propped up by caffeine and sugar and the adrenaline of the experience of feeling in contact with something larger than oneself.
If the interrupt teaches us anything about software, it is that software is in many cases only as effective as the people who use it, those mondeterministic machines with their complex, non-reproducible behaviors, those "others" on whom it relies--can it really control such beasts? To understand software in terms of the interrupt is to understand it in terms of its place within larger structures of social formation and governance. Software engineering is simultaneously social engineering. Software criticism, therefore, must also be simultaneously social. In critically engaging with software, we must not only map the vectors of the interrupt, but also seek to make our own interruptions, to pose questions and insert alternative vectors and practices within the assemblages it connects to.