American Yak

[Please note this post was in response to a question posted on my Facebook wall by a friend, so instead of raiding his Facebook wall, I decided to post my response here and direct him this way.]

Posted on Facebook: Just hit on the definition for what I believe will be the next major generational change in computers, the Internet, distributed social networks & visual machine language: organic.

Cu Mo’s Q: I am very interested in your thoughts. Please share more.

[And now my response...]

I’ve just been thinking that as the world of software and online interactivity grows beyond epic proportions that there is a greater need for very thorough abstraction, symbiosis, and visual/modular representation of all its parts.  Organic to me implies that the Internet, the beast that it is, will come to behave more like an organism, with coherent parts, ones that move and work together, like an animal or human.

I’m coming at this both in terms of development and as a participant.

We have several tools right now that approach something more organic — wysiwygs, CMS systems, blogging and social networking tools, etc.  There are all kinds of media creative tools, but everything is fragmented, and, unfortunately, as the Internet grows ever larger, it just all gets more complicated.  APIs crop up hither and thither, new languages, new tools, new standards, new open source tools, more identity and communication protocols.

But there is also a movement afoot right now to make data and identity more portable and standardized via distributed social networks and so-called microstreams.  (Both are terms, incidentally, which I think are inadequate for the longer projected needs of the Internet…still…)  Joseph Smarr, one of the advocates of this movement (called “DiSo” by some advocates), has called what’s coming a “sea change,” and I think he’s right.

(You can read a little bit about the movement here http://bit.ly/PcQHN and here http://diso-project.org/. If you want more sources, I can provide.)

Anyway, I see this online identity and data ubiquity as just the beginning.  The next stage in it all I believe will *require* something more organic, i.e., there will be no way to scale or really connect all this data without really powerful tools that can drill down or project up to all facets of the computer world.

This is a difficult concept to explain, and I’ve been working on a way of explaining it for a while.  I conceive a world where computer software and programs can be managed in extremely powerful ways, beyond our crude codified approaches.  Think of it as art rather than programming.  Or for some it will be more like puzzles or games.  Engineering and Math all have their place, and are obviously indispensible, but I personally believe the Internet will see its greatest maturity and potential when almost every aspect of computational power can be controlled or handled by a very visual — read ORGANIC — approach. Remember bits and bytes? Why can’t we flip them visually, or look at the stream of them float by, like DNA in synthesis. Or go up a level and see code flex like muscles, or examine the shell or structure of an operating system, like looking at the bones of a skeleton.

This is a start for explaining what’s in my brain. However, when I think of a really good way to convey the story developing in my head, I’ll be sure to drop you a line.  I’ll be posting it either here on my blog (so check back) or over at ArxPoetica.com, an artistic effort I’m spearheading with a few others.

Thanks for letting me ruminate on this for a bit!  Hope I didn’t overwhelm your wall, ha, ha!