Wenqi He · Research Software Engineer, NCSA, University of Illinois
Dear A.,
Have you read this essay? Quite an interesting read.
The author is exactly right about so-called “users”: Singing in the shower does not make you a singer, and dressing up as a king doesn’t entitle you to levy taxes. What we are doing is just a performance of ventriloquism: the user needs us as much as mi señora, la sin par Dulcinea del Toboso.
What the author didn’t quite realize is that the user problem is just a glimpse of the deeper conflict between our capitalist ideology and our socioeconomic reality. He is unfortunately trapped within the very bourgeois framework he sets out to critique. We have taken these capitalist values, these creatures of the deep-sea, out of their habitat of high pressure and salinity and darkness, and thrown them carelessly into a shallow freshwater tank. Those fish are dead. And we are the killers.
And the author dares to say he situates our profession in its social relations! What social relation does our work actually serve? We answer to no one’s real interests — only through the state as intermediary, a ventriloquist that speaks for “the people” precisely as we speak for “the user,” reaching into their pockets on our behalf, whether they like it or not. And what do we produce in exchange? A prototype, a mere mirage of actual utility — so first we make a promise of a promise, then we fulfill that promise by delivering the very promise we promised to make — and yet he thinks himself somehow more noble than the snake oil salesman?
What a hypocrite! People really can’t escape their class consciousness, can they? So let me ask: What are we, if not parasites?
—K.
Dear Kynikos,
You are exactly right that we are parasites. This world has always been corrupt and we are all complicit in it. What is your cure then: eradicate ourselves?
But you wrote this letter to me — and what for? Is it for the justice you owe to “the people”? Like researchers creating a prototype to benefit other “researchers” in the field, or designers thinking about the needs of the “user”? What’s society to you? Who are these people to you that you seem to care so much about? What do you have to do with them? And yet, you are not writing to them. You are writing to me. Is this, then, not an act of ventriloquism? Are you not a hypocrite?
You said the author is trapped within the bourgeois framework he set out to critique, but are you not the one actually trapped, Kynikos? In assuming utility as a given, are you not blinded by the language game of capitalism, forgetting that there is more to our existence? You are fixating so much on the instrumental rhetorical divide that you forgot you were holding this very instrument — your pen — with which you wrote this letter to me?
We could go on forever — whether our work is worthwhile, whether the system is just, whether the user is real, whether any of this means anything. Let’s just say: our work is not worthwhile. The system is not just. The user is not real. None of this means anything. And yet here you are, writing to me. What is it that drives you to write to me, if not life itself?
Stop thinking about users and production, my friend. Why not write poems and stories, proofs and equations, just as we are exchanging these very letters? Why not wield that instrument we call software to conjure visions and summon sounds for whatever curious souls might watch and listen — whether we get to meet them in this lifetime or not — offering the truth, beauty, and justice that you and I both value so much?
So what if there isn’t an audience — yet? Does it matter that two black holes merged a billion light-years away, their gravity folding the fabric of spacetime into waves that traveled through stars and silence until this very moment, passing through every millimeter, every micrometer, every nanometer of your body as you read this, and yet left no trace upon our socioeconomic “world”? Did you not feel it, if not through your body, then through your soul? Let us create, then, so the ripples of our creation might reach an audience that, if not here yet, will be, in decades, or centuries, or millennia. The stars were dead long before us, and we are still marveling at them.
God did not create the universe as a product to be consumed. He authored it as an artwork, so that one day we would come to appreciate it.
nur als ästhetisches Phänomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt.
Yours, Aisthetikos