1.2 complexity

chapters/00_coding_contingencies.md

@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ This process does not stop with programming, and it is both more and less than j
 
 This economy of interactions and interfaces results in a bestiary of bugs, glitches, and issues that affect and effectivly shape what we do call software culture. Far from being caused just by the intersection of life and code, many of these problems root into ideologies and forms of violence that plague the world long before Google. The problem of toxic masculinity and gender gap in the IT it's the first elephant in a room that should be, at this point, called natural reserve. Uneven distribution of access, evergrowing hunger for resources, extractive and neo-colonial practices, etc.
 
-These critical questions relate with software from different angles and distances, so it is useful to draft a map of the swamp we want to navigate into. Writing from the eye, there are three main aspects in sight: the violence of bias and hostile environments, the challenge of complexity, and the empty promises of techno-solutionism.
+These critical questions relate with software from different angles and distances, so it is useful to draft a map of the swamp we want to navigate into. Writing from the eye, there are three main aspects in sight: the violence of bias and hostile environments, the challenges of complexity, and the empty promises of techno-solutionism.
 
 1. **Biased and hostile environments**
 
@@ -44,11 +44,21 @@ These critical questions relate with software from different angles and distance
     - disproportion of means
     - mistification
 
+Software development is a disease writes Ellen Ullman (Ullman, 2017), and this disease has several consequences. The first one is that it comes in forms that are basically alien to us. It's a virus that works and thinks differently, and to get your head around it requires a lot of effort. It's not just mnemonic knowledge, but, as learning a foreign language, it's a radical change in the way one organizes their thoughts.
+
+This often comes with intimidating learning curves, that get twisted even more with the tangled list of dependencies that every system carries on its back. Where to start is always a rabbit hole: there is always something more low or high level, and the linked list of references seems a Moebious strip.
+
+Another symptom of the developer disease is found on the other side of the gradient: in the fever of coding easy problems generate complicate solutions. Probably over-engineering comes with the current perceived abundance of computational power of modern machines. Probably programmers back in the days would have been hesitant of reserving 2GB of RAM on their machine to run a todo list app written with the brand new reactive framework in a browser. The very same reactive framework is built with an amazing network of open source contributions that fade far away on the horizon of a package manager.
+
+This evergrowing structure is fascinating and scary, and resembles the kind of architecture that Nihei imagined when drawing the city of Blame! An unsupervised and perennial construction site assembled by IAs surpassing the diameter of the Jupither's orbit. The inaccessibility of complexity is really suited to this kind of aesthetic explorations, but lends itself also to process of mistification and mis-representation that often characterize processes of propaganda, populism and one-sided information.
+
 3. **The universal solution™**
     - Techno solutionism
     - gray tech
     - ideology
 
+Without some guidance seems impossible to orientate in this maze.
+
 ### 1.3 Propose documentation as a surface to address these issues
 
 1. Welcoming diverse knowledges
@@ -63,3 +73,5 @@ Ullman, E. (2017). _Life in code : a personal history of technology._ New York:
 Marino, M.C. (2020). _Critical code studies._ Editorial: Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Mit Press.
 
 https://vimeo.com/105069079
+
+Tsutomu Nihei, Paul, S., Montclare, B. and Macasocol, J. (2005). _Blame! Volume 1_. Los Angeles, Ca: Tokyopop.