Article: Against Usefulness

Olteanu talks about discovering Folk Computer while also attending ACM events in Brooklyn, and goes on to talk about where / how people work on “what’s next”, without being “useful” today.

It all sounds very familiar.

The recurring criticism of this whole lineage, and I have felt it myself, is that you see the demos and cannot do anything with them. The knowledge stays locked in one building, open to the few who can visit. Folk Computer inverts that. The code is on GitHub. People around the world have set up their own systems. Strangers contribute. A friend of theirs built a music sequencer out of physical cards; flip a card, change a track. The thread that ran through PARC and CDG and Dynamicland is, for the first time, something you can pull on from your own home.

Paradigm work has always run on patrons. A new paradigm is useless at the beginning, by definition, so markets have nothing to price. The first personal computers were toys. So was the early internet. The people who fund this stage are buying a position in the future before anyone can price it.

Nothing in this lineage worked that way. Nobody could have written “interactive paper computing” on a request list in 2013. It exists because a specific kind of person pulled on a specific thread for over a decade, through four institutional deaths. For paradigm-level work, you cannot spec the what. You can only recognize the who.