Against malleable software
When someone tries to zoom in on part of an image and reaches the max-zoom allowed by the operating system, takes a screenshot, and the continues to zoom in more, where is the lack of malleability?
When a kid records their rock climbing on a Sony VX1000, imitating skateboarders from the 90s, transfers the Mini DV tapes to digital via a capture camera connected to their Windows desktop via a firewire port they ordered off Ali Express, which then gets captured by Adobe Premiere Pro so that it can be uploaded to TikTok, where is the lack of malleability?
When I ask Claude a question, copy-and-paste the answer into Google to try and get more information, stumble upon an author, search for the author’s most important book on Libgen, download the IPFS version to my computer, and upload it to Discord to share with friends, where is the lack of malleability?
When someone takes a screenshot of an image from a stock image vendor online, making sure to leave the watermark out of frame, pastes it into Photoshop, exports the collage as a JPEG to their Desktop, opens it up on their phone via a Dropbox sync, and then uploads it to Instagram, where is the lack of malleability?
Software (aggregate) is malleable. Software (singular) has no need to be. You don’t need to read an essay by Kittler to understand that, at its core, the computer is a machine for manipulating ordered sequences of bits.
The malleable part of wood-working, an oh-so-fetishized sibling to software engineering, is the wood. You can plane it, sand it, cut it, screw it, nail it, glue it, crack it, throw it. The tools are ridiculously simple (hammer, circular saw, table saw, sander, etc). The malleability is not in the tool, but between the user and the material.
Software engineers trying to make “malleable substrates for computing” are like woodworkers trying to build the Mega-Jig, one jig that lets you build anything. It’s a fool errand and is blind to how wood-working is done by ordinary users.
Using the computer is messy like a wood-shop floor. It’s impure and hard to replicate. It has side-effects. It’s not like using a closed-off Smalltalk image that can be the same everywhere. These idealized systems are homogeneous. They are Seeing Like The State. They are high modernism. They are attempts by people who like control, who are attracted to computers because they follow their orders, to impose the demand for the same amount of control onto others. It is an inability to cope with otherness, with mess, with excess.
Intead of building a new software substrate, go teach someone how to program. Enzo Mari and Ken Isaacs knew that an instruction manual was invaluable, not for the things you made, but because of the process of making them. The projects in their manuals were merely exercises. As you performed them, you would slowly begin to appreciate the nuances of wood working.
Show a friend what an image really is. Explain how two computers talk to each other. Help them on a task they don’t know how to do. Break down the abstraction, take them down the ladder of abstraction. The goal is for them to be able to wield computational primitives (images, files, sockets, codecs, tensors) like a true hacker.
Again, the malleability is in the user, not the tool.