it seems interesting but there's no way to play with it without paying the 30 upfront and I don't even understand what I get for that. is it downloadable? Does it play in the browser?

as computing professionals, we should identify code literacy as a civic skill; it is a prerequisite for recognizing domination in software ecosystems.

from Kartik's piece:

There's a tight analogy here with prose literacy: anyone can read a novel, anyone can write an email, anyone can write a short critique on a novel, but only a few "vendors" can write novels. [...] I want above all to bring code literacy to a similar point to prose literacy: anyone can drill down to understand a large program as it affects them, anyone can write short programs for themselves, anyone can modify large programs in small ways for themselves.

the difficulty I encounter is that code literacy has many other guises: AI literacy (Long & Magerko 2020), visualization literacy (Börner et al 2019), and data literacy (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green 2020), to name a few which don't immediately contradict each other

the ability to read and write is ill-defined for texts, of course, but librarians over time managed to form an adequate consensus. now we (as educators, broadly) have to do the same for computing! somehow

code literacy

I don't love framing this literacy in terms of code. I was very technical, and increasingly media savvy, for about a decade before I learned to code. I was the go-to "technomancer" for all the non-technical people in my life. I don't feel like my understanding of code has changed my awareness of the place of technology in culture, or the risks of (eg) proprietary walled-garden platforms.

So maybe "code literacy" as used by Kartik is actually two (or more) different ideas being smushed together — different literacies perhaps, like you suggest, but maybe other non-literacy ideas too, maybe better called "awarenesses"?

Maybe a more succinct way of putting it:

I'm skeptical that coding is emancipatory.

this is an excellent point. my immediate reaction is that we could go straight to "media literacy", stepping on all of the landmines. I am worried that the literacy that is emancipatory is the literacy that is intertwined, and consists of two or more disciplined ways of seeing

e.g. seeing like a technical person, and seeing like an interface designer.

it is a prerequisite for recognizing domination in software ecosystems.

@Jasmine Otto I love this connection!

I was wondering if you could expand on why you think it's a prerequisite for recognizing domination ? As opposed to, in my mind, a necessity for liberating folks from such domination?

I'm skeptical that coding is emancipatory.

Ivan Reese One example I think about in this regard is how our community here, with tons of expertise on producing software, has failed to to "free" ourselves from Slack's lock-in and increasing decay

If anyone wants to throw me $20k I'll take a month off work and get going on "lifeboat", the slack successor I want to build to suit the discussion norms of this community.

So in this case, where my desire is to build a software tool to solve a software(+more) problem, coding skill is I would argue necessary but not sufficient.

Christopher Shank Totes, I do think that literacy is necessary for achieving liberation. Another desirable outcome of computing education is to have more kinds of folks articulating why they desire liberation from terrible software - and not just more convenience, lower friction, faster answers, etcetera.

A lot of those problems are symptoms of domination! But I hate to see "enshittification" shade directly into boring entitlement in folk (consumer) discourses.

I'd love to hear more about ways to help people redefine their expectations of software!

In my experience there is this kind of fish in water phenomenon where people treat things like siloed apps, implicit feudalism (i.e. governance), lack of ownership, etc. as laws of physics . It's hard to pop this bubble that there is nothing inherent about these things in software

I appreciate that Kartik Agaram concludes that essay be saying "we are all illiterate". There is still so much we don't know about how people use software day to day. Some of the few studies we do have on how people use (or really don't use) keyboard shortcuts might be revealing of computational literacy. It's sort of hard to imagine the average person "drilling down to understand a large program as it affects them" when reportedly 40% of people don't know about copy and paste shortcuts. 😅

Ivan Reese It's the $20k figure that illustrates the problem very well. If a high-literacy community such as ours considers satifying its own needs unreasonably expensive, that means our world is very far from the .* literacy that Kartik Agaram (and others, including myself) is dreaming of.

I wrote .* literacy because I consider the precise label to put on this premature to discuss. As of today, we call the hard-to-grasp medium to deal with "code", so it's "code literacy". Which is fine with me as a temporary label. "Media literacy" is too vague, it can easily be misunderstood as most people probably wouldn't include "code" in "media". The specific medium that is hard is the automation of information processing. Call it whatever you want, I am fine with "code".

I also wonder if we are putting the bar too high (or in the wrong place) for satisfying our own needs. Community-owned tools are by definition not industrial tools. Writing our own Slack clone may solve the problem of Slack dependence, but it won't make a community-owned communication medium. It would still be out of the reach of most of us.

The closest I have seen recently to a community-owned communication medium is org-social. I didn't get it initially, I though it was an elaborate joke. But if you consider it as a medium for Emacs power users, then most of them can understand and hack on all its aspects, relying only on an infrastructure consisting of Emacs itself and git. Better yet, even an alternative implementation outside of Emacs is a reasonable project even for an individual.

Of course such a network will never scale to the level of Slack, BlueSky, or the Fediverse. It doesn't have to.

So maybe our starting point should be different. Could we build a communication medium around the git-backed Slack archives run by Kartik Agaram and Mariano Guerra? Building just as much as we need, as the needs become progressively clearer?

Yes we could. But many of our members expect a UI that's polished to the nth. It'd take me a month to build one of those, just like it'd take me a month to renovate my basement or record a 10-track LP. The point of the $20k figure is to make clear that literacy isn't sufficient — building stuff takes time, and we've got mortgages to pay, so we can't just stop the clock and build all our own tools today.

Yes, you can make something quickly and cheaply, and you'll own that thing. But that thing will be quick and cheap. I don't want to live in a community that's quickly and cheaply made.

I would be okay living in a community that's under construction, if there's a desirable end state and a clear path to get there. "Make our own platform" is the desirable end state, but "spend a year worth of nights and weekends building it" is not a clear path.

I don't want to live in a community that's quickly and cheaply made.

I think this admirably summarizes why I've been demotivated lately, and find this thread exhausting to contemplate where I would once have participated enthusiastically.

In an earlier era, large numbers of people took to the jungle to live in freedom. You'd rather live in an authoritarian-feudalist Weyland-Yutani company town with good interior designers. And so, for the most part, would I.

We are all unworthy.

It's worth repeating: I still feel determined to do this. I just need a moment to recharge from renaming the community. (And finish doing all the work of updating all the things). I also need to wait for the snippy "I liked the old name better" comments to die down before shaking the wasp nest again <3

To be clear, I don't care how long it takes. I am trying to change frame from absolute "cheap vs polished" to relative trade-offs.

Even if you build it instantly and exactly how you like it, I suspect you'll still have a challenge getting people to leave here. Because you built it how you like it, see. The builder has full freedom to build, and everyone else has freedom to join.

I think what we need is a collective determination to compromise on each of our requirements. Less freedom to build, more commitment to join.

Kartik Agaram I really like your framing of why the Slack replacement is difficult. Yes, a committed person could build it. But the reservoir of 'free time to learn new messaging platforms' in the professional & educational communities we cater to is quite low. (So of course the 'company town' messaging app is named Slack! We'd all like to have an inch of slack.)

Not only do we have to live within the existing compromise, we also have to know that things could be otherwise. And we have to teach people who enter this space that things could be otherwise. That way, we all can change our circumstances when the correct opportunity arises.

I too am unworthy of the Liberated Computing Medium, for I am not free of compromise. We should still coordinate on why we want it, and how we would build it, and what compromises we need to make with each other so that everyone can live there eventually.

I agree with all of this except the self-defeating "unworthy" bit. I don't get why that's needed.

I don't want to live in a community that's quickly and cheaply made.

Phrased this way, me neither. But I'd be perfectly fine to live in a community that starts out simply on a road towards autonomy and then adds bells, whistles, and eye candy progressively. Much like I would be fine with moving into a bare house and only then start decorating it (something I have actually done).

I don't get why that's needed.

It's how I feel.

I'd be perfectly fine to live in a community that starts out simply on a road towards autonomy..

Actions speak louder than words. If someone joins you in a bare house, they're sure to join you when you have feature parity. Trying to build everything all at once denies us that source of feedback.

Then again, I feel like I've fallen into a trap along with everyone else and started focusing on the Slack question rather than the broader question that started this thread. Is coding emancipatory? Coding might be emancipatory if you assume people are rational and constantly thinking about their self-interest, and willing to change behavior once they're convinced of a superior alternative. But it's definitely not emancipatory assuming a behavioral model of people as bundles of irrationality, ruled by rationalization, subject to cognitive fallacies of sunk cost, lazy and unwilling to change habits. Above all, it's easier to see the flaws and limitations of others rather than ourselves.

I think I'm ready to grant this. Coding is not emancipatory. I'm not sure any other .* is emancipatory either. Unclear where to go next.

Now I'm thinking about the word "emancipate".

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipate

etymonline.com/word/emancipate

There's a connotation here of giving up control over someone one had control over. Which doesn't really fit in the code sense. "Empower" seems more apt.

Perhaps empowerment isn't some obvious shift in category but a more messy, gradual process. That would explain why it's sometimes hard to see any progress. Perhaps if coding doesn't seem empowering, it is empowering, but just hard to discern. Usually when progress it is seen, it is in economics. Perhaps the concrete way to make something more empowering is to show how it yields more economic leverage. This at least points at a direction to go next. Most of the stuff we do isn't empowering because it depends on the reader/listener to hear what we say and then... somehow... use it to better their economic life. We could claim it's empowering if we could better connect the dots between knowledge and economics.

But I dunno. I'm just thinking aloud. Perhaps there's more than economics to think about. This way leads to coding bootcamps? 😬