Liber Indigo: The Affordances of Magic
9 points by brudish
9 points by brudish
Today, I was randomly reminded about this wild series of videos and I was mildly surprised to see it hadn't been posted here. It's a dive into the realm of a hypothetical user interface that challenges our current common structure of directories. It gets into some pretty outlandish stuff, but I think if you watch it without trying to take it as anything but a thought exercise or an exploration of the ideas it's interesting. You can tell from the creator's replies and comments that he's also not entirely sure what to make of it, only that he had a weird idea and made 95ish minutes of video essay to talk about it.
The link I've provided runs the full 7 video playlist.
Indigo OS is part of a whole genre of projects that reimagine the tools for knowledge work. In pre-literate culture, the zodiac and astrological signs were originally mneumonics for memorizing the night sky, which was needed so that you could look at the sky and figure out what the date was, which was needed for timing of agricultural activities. (These symbol systems are mentioned in the videos, but I'm adding missing context.) The invention of writing was obviously huge, and still relevant today. The title "Liber Indigo" reminds me of "Liber Notoria", a medieval grimoire of angel magic used by university students to memorize the curriculum. (The videos mention ritual magick, but not its application in knowledge work.)
The predecessors of hypertext can be traced back centuries. The Memex machine in "As We May Think" by Vannevar Bush in 1948 was the first proposal for a mechanized hypertext system, where you can click on a link, and the machine will follow it and pull up the linked document. The author mentions Sketchpad from 1960, which was the first GUI and the first constraint-based CAD system, and it was even programmed using a form of object-oriented programming (the data structures used vtables). The author also mentions Doug Englebart's NLS system and his "mother of all demos" in 1968, which introduced the mouse, a tiled window manager, and hypertext running on a digital computer. The author mentions that Xerox invented the desktop metaphor, which Steve Jobs refined for the Macintosh, but he doesn't really talk about what preceded that at Xerox: Alan Kay's "personal dynamic media" project which gave us a GUI running on a bitmap display with overlapping windows, and Smalltalk, and which did not use the desktop metaphor, but something more powerful.
The Macintosh, with its desktop metaphor, represented a significant dumbing down of the personal computer systems that preceded it. So I was nodding along as the author attacked the desktop metaphor, and the 1980's industrial office environment that it was intended to mimic, and the capitalist/industrial complex that creates these shitty work environments in the first place, and the entire framework of Western consensus reality that supports capitalism. This seemed like a nice mental warmup exercise for introducing some really interesting and radical user interface ideas.
Unfortunately, the buildup was a lot more impressive than the set of ideas put forth in the final video. The author acknowledges as much in the book: "As much as I deeply long for the skill and talent to design such an interface myself, there’s a long way to go and many iterations to cycle through before humanity can manifest this sort of organic GUI."
IMO, if you go to the trouble of tearing down capitalism and consensus reality as the prelude to designing a UI, then you need a positive vision of the social system to replace it. Understanding the requirements of a post-capitalism, post-tech-feudalism society will give us a foundation for imagining how computers should work in this new society. How will we relate as humans, and what role will computers play? My suggestion is to start with Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illyich, for a critique of the harms of modern society and a critique of the harms of the technology supporting that system. Enshittification by Cory Doctorow also has some good and more recent analysis.
As for the UI itself, well we need to talk about the social context first, but skipping ahead, I think we need to get rid of files and apps. Files and file formats are historically just walled gardens for your data (try writing a parser for a Microsoft .doc file), although today, the walled garden has moved into the cloud. Apps are walled gardens for code; they are the units of top-down hierarchical control and monetization by software publishers. The early utopian software environments I mentioned didn't have them.
I was surprised to hear a clip of Werner Herzog interviewing Ted Nelson at around 9 minutes, and sure enough I found out about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo_and_Behold,_Reveries_of_the_Connected_World. I wonder if this is worth tracking down?