friday, january 20
the text is a program
running on the reader's mind
this is no small responsibility
it consumes resources and
has side effects in
a highly stateful system
indexes into existing storage
and may replicate itself in exposed
environments
may run in parallel
on many minds,
or become a dependency
of other texts, other programs
entire operating systems
of the human soul
i mean this as more
than an image
it's broadly true, if imprecise —
just as in code we programmers
too routinely neglect our responsibilities
even as our art becomes the stuff of
power and territory,
in all this text we seem to neglect
the fragility and transience of mind
the possibility of harm
the cost of all these wasted cycles
and chained complexities