💾 Archived View for tilde.team › ~mathpunk › gemlog › 2023 › ludditetoluddite.gmi captured on 2023-05-24 at 19:35:49. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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From a young age, I was deeply fascinated with computers. In particular, I wanted to know how they worked. I grew up on Windows 95/98, playing CD games like Freddy Fish, Reader Rabbit, Putt Putt, and a ton of others I can't even recall the names of. I remember being fascinated to such a degree that it was almost upsetting: how the heck does the computer know that this whole game exists on what looks to me to be just a shiny circle? It seemed to me that everything a computer is and does should be impossible, and yet, there it was, in front of me.
Unlike a lot of people with a similar story, I didn't start learning to code at a young age. My dad was the kind of kid who would take things apart to see how they worked, even if he knew he couldn't put it back together again (though he'd try his damndestto). I wasn't like that. I took more after my mom: I read a lot, obsessively, about anything and everything people were willing to write books about. I didn't start to explore my fascination with computers until I was an adult.
For most of my life, I was a luddite in the pop culture sense: someone who was bad with computers and didn't really understand them. Sure, I had basic computer literacy. After Windows 98 and Freddy Fish, I graduated to playing games like Shogun: Total War on Windows XP. I was obsessed with video games. I recall picking up a copy of Supreme Commander that my XP machine could barely run, but I loved it so much that I just ignored the crappy frame rate. It got to the point where I couldn't envision that game running smoothly, because my brain had adapted to playing at something around two to five frames per second. Resulting from my daily gaming, I could navigate a Windows computer better than the old teachers at school who's job it was to teach us computer literacy. I could type faster, too, and so I ignored the touch typing lessons that, looking back, I really should have paid more attention to. I can still type faster than average, but I use a weird 2-3 finger system that, with my small hands, often results in wrist strains.
It's important to note that both my parents worked in IT. My friends all had stories about their parents "banning" them from the internet by deleting the Internet Explorer icon off the desktop, not knowing that the shortcut doesn't represent the program itself. From their perspective, a "luddite," someone who was "bad with computers," was someone who could barely even operate a computer. My 90 year old grandmother, for instance, has never owned a single computer in her entire life. Even now, in 2023, she doesn't know what email is. My childhood perspective was perhaps a little bit warped by the fact that both my parents were "computer wizards" by many people's standards, but the truth is, I thought of myself as being "bad with computers" because I couldn't do what they could do. My parents knew how to actually ban me from the internet: they could prevent every device I had from connecting to the internet past 11pm every night. From my perspective that was pure magic, and I would never know how they did it.
My machines broke down frequently and quickly, because I didn't know how to take care of them, and I didn't really think I could learn how. I grew up with a strong fixed mindset about things: I believed I was incapable of most everything except playing video games. Why I believed that is a topic for a different gemlog, but it's important to know I believed it very, very deeply. Thus I grew up watching my parents work magic with computers and desperately wanting to do the same, but refusing to learn, because I simply believed I couldn't do it. Computers were scary and obscure things that defied me with their very impossible existence.
The first thing that changed for me was that I graduated high school. I truly don't think there's any reality wherein I learn to code, or become good at math, while still in school. I don't want this post to be too ranty, so I'll keep it short: the school system where I live is held together with duct tape, and the curricula are written by throwing darts at a board with random words on them. I'll give one example of what I mean: in my final year, my precalculus teacher cried in front of the class, because she was expected to teach a curriculum that required 120 class hours, but the school division would only give her 90. When the administration saw how this was impacting both her and our "school spirit," they decided the solution was to take even more class time away from us to have weekly mandatory attendance pep rallies, as well as events like "movie days." They were shocked when we started skipping school to go home and study.
Truth be told, I always loved math. My mom claims that my first complete sentence was counting from one to ten. I don't know if that counts as a complete sentence, but that's what she tells people. I do remember being young and obsessed with numbers. The patterns they took on and the way those patterns jumped out at you when you looked at them just right were like nothing else. I remember learning about negative numbers and multiplication from shows like Cyberchase, and practicing what I learned because I thought it was cool. I was 6. I wish I could tell you I was definitely gifted and went on to become some kind of mathematical prodigy, but then my name wouldn't be MATHPUNK, it'd just be MATH. As I said in the previous paragraph, the school system I grew up in was not very good. By the time I was in third grade I had completely lost any passion for math, and had become convinced, just as with computers, that it was something beyond my reach, that my brain simply wasn't designed to be good at it.
Anyway, I graduated high school - just barely. Around age 20 I met a computer science student named Jane, and she helped rekindle my love of mathematics. I had been trying to pick it back up for about a year at that point, but I was struggling with the mindset of it. I viewed any mistake I made as a sign that my teachers were right, and I didn't belong here. It took about four years to shift my point of view to something more constructive, but that shift was crucial in my understanding of computers, as well. I'm good at math. I'm really good at math. I don't claim to be the best, or even to know a lot - I'm still learning - but what I do know, I am very good at.
What struck me at the time was: if I could become good at math, the one subject that I was regularly told I could never be good at, what else can I learn that I've been sequestering myself away from? Jane had jokingly told me "a computer is just a rock that we tricked into thinking," and that brought back my childhood obsession with wanting to know HOW we tricked it into thinking. I had begun learning to code in python, because I needed a program to help me practice my number sense, and everything available online was either unsatisfactory or covered in ads and trackers, so I figured I'd make my own.
I have celiac disease. It sounds scary if you don't know what it is, but the long and short of it is: I'm allergic to bread. Well, it's not actually an allergy, it's an autoimmune response to gluten, a protein found in grains like wheat, barely, rye, and triticale, but I find that "I'm allergic to bread" tends to suffice for most people. Have you ever tried to eat gluten free? I don't mean "gluten friendly," I mean full on, no cross contamination, cold turkey gluten free. It's not that hard, actually. Unless you don't know how to cook. Then it's horrible. Everything you could buy pre-made tastes like cardboard. Most restaurants, especially fast food chains, make no attempt to avoid cross contamination, and the ones that do are nearly twice the price of the average. You might even end up with nutrient deficiencies due to how few options you have. Of course, if you have celiac disease, you'll end up with nutrient deficiencies anyway, as your body's response to gluten slowly destroys your small intenstine's ability to absorb nutrients.
For a lot of people in the modern world, cooking is a skill they just don't have time for. For me, it's exactly the opposite: not cooking is harder and more time consuming than cooking. I'm lucky to have come from a family where almost everyone knows how to cook really well, and that my mom made sure both her kids knew the basics. Celiac diease is genetic, so we ALL have it. When we found out, the most we had to do to adapt was adjust cooking times and temperatures to the fact that gluten free food often cooks differently, and that was about it. Thus for us, cooking our own food is easier than not cooking.
I'm a powerlifter. And a woman. Tell that to the owner of basically any clothing brand and watch them start to cry in horror. Nobody makes clothes that fit me. Women's shirts are too tight around the shoulders and arms, and men's shirts are too long and loose around the torso. I wear men's pants because I like having pockets, but they're always either too tight around the hips and thighs or way, way too long. So I have to adjust my own clothes. Hem my own pants, etc. Which means knowing how to sew, which is a skill that takes time and effort to learn. But it takes MORE time and effort to find clothes that fit me than it does to learn how to sew. Thus, not adjusting my own clothes is harder and more time consuming than adjusting my own clothes. This is especially true considering how often I rip them.
I'm 5'3". I've always got to sit in weird, awkward positions, because chairs, couches, desks, etc, are always too tall or the seat is too deep. Now granted this isn't like the other examples. It is often easier to find a smaller chair than it is to just make your own. But I spend a lot of time at the computer, and I have back, shoulder, and neck issues from spending a lot of time at the computer. It's important to my continued ability to powerlift that I get ergonomics right. My dad is a woodworker, and I've found that being able to make your own things - or hell, alter your own furniture - is a valuable skill when it comes to making an ergonomic computer setup - especially if you want to have a sitting/standing desk - without dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars. They make cheap standing desk converters that just sit on top of a regular desk, but I'm so short that if I used one of those, the "sitting" position would be a couple inches too high, and would mess with my neck. So it's easier to know at least a little woodworking.
And even if it wasn't, it gives you more freedom to know.
I'm not constrained to pre-built designs. If I want my computer desk a certain way, I can make it a certain way. If I don't want to eat too much sugar, I can cook without sugar. If I want my clothes to look a certain way, I can make them a certain way. I don't have any grand reasons for enjoying that kind of freedom, and I don't need to. I eat what I want, wear what I want, and work at a desk that supports the exact kind of workflow/environment that I want. Knowledge is power, and skill is freedom, and that freedom is very important to me. Of course, the tradeoff is going to be different for different people. For most people, having your desk be exactly the right height down to the tenth of an inch probably isn't important enough to learn how to saw parts off of your desk to make it shorter. Neither is having your clothes be exactly the right fit important enough to learn to sew, or having your computer's operating system configured in just the right way important enough to learn how to use a minimalist operating system in the first place, etc. Different people are different, and that's good, because otherwise none of this would be interesting to read and I'd have wasted several hours writing it.
The point of all this is just to explain my rather strong feelings about Do-It-Yourself. We don't just cook our own food, my family grows a significant amount of it ourselves. I'm really enthusiastic about self-hosting, even though I'm not really ready to do it just yet. I eventually want to self-host almost everything I do online: I want to move my discord community to a self-hosted chat server (I haven't decided what protocol, yet), I want to self-host my own email, cloud storage, capsule, gopherhole, and hell, maybe even a few Fediverse instances. I want to raise chickens for eggs. Most of the math I know, I taught myself. It's a bit of an obsession I have. I even powerlift in my own home gym, cobbled together from equipment friends and family had and didn't use anymore, equipment I bought myself, and a bench press my dad has had since he was in his 20s. I can give explanations for why I'm like this, but at the end of the day I love to do things myself because I just do. That's how I am. So it was inevitable that I'd want to move away from Windows eventually, and it was inevitable that I'd want to learn more about how computers work on the lowest level.
So, back to computers. Only about 2 or 3 years ago, I started learning python in order to write a program to help me practise math, because nothing else really did what I needed, and as explained, I just love to do things myself. I still wouldn't say I know how to code in python, and the code I wrote is absolutely not good. That's because, once it did what I needed it to do, my focus changed. Now I was interested in how the hell does the computer know what to do based on some words I typed onto a screen? I picked up python because everyone told me it would be an easy language to start with, but I had no idea what the hell an "interpreter" was.
A little before this, I had bought a game called Factorio, and I sunk 160 hours into it the first two weeks I owned it. I seriously took two weeks off to play it like it was two full time jobs, that's how obsessed with it I was at the time. Factorio scratched a gaming itch I knew I had since I was like, 10, but the "automation" genre hadn't been developed yet, so I didn't know how to word what it was I wanted to play. Jane kept telling me that Factorio was basically tricking me into learning how to code. She insisted it was EXACTLY like programming. I didn't believe her, because Factorio was fun, and programming is something people do as a job, so I assumed it was like when math teachers say they're going to make math fun, but all they do is give you regular math problems with some outdated memes on the page.
I fully admit I was being a fucking dumbass. Coding is fucking fun, and it's fucking fun in the exact same way that Factorio is fucking fun.
For Christmas that same year, Jane bought me a game called TIS-100, an assembly based Zachtronics puzzle game. She told me it was "kind of like Factorio," and that was enough for me to give it a try. I wouldn't say it's like Factorio. The kinds of problems you have to solve are similar, but the biggest similarity is that they both trick you into coding. It's just that TIS-100 is very open about that fact. In a very small way, the first programming language I learned was technically assembly.
At this point, all I actually knew was that Python and Assembly were both kinds of programming languages, and that assembly was much closer to how the computer actually thinks than Python. But I didn't just want to learn how to code, I wanted to learn how the computer knows what code is. I can't say I actually know, but I'm closer than I was. I picked up a book called But How Do It Know? by J. Clark Scott, and I didn't just read it, I built every diagram inside a game called Virtual Circuit Board. I went through some of the lessons on computer science on places like Khanacademy, and I even learned how to construct logic gates from other logic gates from resources like From Nand 2 Tetris. This has kicked off a love of computer engineering so strong that I've decided to study it alongside mathematics in university.
At some point along the way, I remembered being told about the existence of an operating system called Linux. So I started reading obsessively about that, too. Understanding what Linux even is can actually be kind of a challenge when you've never before heard of an OS having different "distributions," so it took a few days of deep diving into the topic for me to really get my bearings. This inevitably lead me to encounter the concept of free software. I knew that "open source" software existed but I didn't really know what it was. So of course when I encountered free software I read as much as I could about that topic, too.
And then I got a letter in the mail from a business I had worked for briefly, over five years ago, stating they had had a massive data breach, and some of my data could have been stolen, and please check your credit score in case malicious actors have stolen your banking info or opened a credit card in your name or some shit. Why would they even have that kind of data for five years? What good does it do them to keep it? In trying to answer these questions I started asking more. I had heard that internet corporations were always spying on you, I had even heard that facebook can track you across the web even when don't have facebook open. This deep dive was much less fun. I wasn't learning for fun, I was suddenly very concerned with just how much these faceless entities know about me, how they can even spy on me in the first place, and how lax their security is to allow for these data breaches in the first place. Honestly? I didn't sleep much that night.
I said in my last post I was going to try not to talk about the problems with the modern Web, and if you're reading this in the first place you're probably aware of them to some degree, since you're on Gemspace. Suffice it to say my comfortable little "luddite" worldview had been completely shattered. I had already known for a few years that I was spending less and less time online because being online wasn't really fun anymore, but now, being online felt straight up unsafe. Especially with the rapid, dangerous changes in the political climate in the US - which frequently gets imported to my country, for reasons I will never understand - I frankly have very, very good reasons to be concerned about my privacy online.
This lead to all sorts of other questions, not just about privacy and safety, but other things I care about, like climate change. I started wondering about things like e-waste, and it shocked me to learn that the average smartphone is used for only 3 years before being thrown away (often because it is no longer supported/updated). I read about how much energy the internet uses, and how much carbon emissions result from that usage. Admittedly, it's only a small fraction of the problem. Reducing the amount of energy we use and increasing the lifespan of our hardware won't exactly stop climate change. But I'm at the point where I know a little bit about computers, certainly a lot more than I know about most other topics (except math), and I figure if I CAN do something responsibly, I should. I still need to read more about permacomputing. My thoughts on this topic so far can be summarised as "we end up doing less with more when we should be trying to do more with less."
The point is just that I've come to adopt a view you might think of as Luddism in the real sense: technology is fundamentally neutral, not good or bad, and what matters is questions like "what does it do, and who does it do it to?" and "what are the consequences of adopting this technology?"
Ultimately, all of these experiences come together at this final point: I want to do my computing safely and responsibly, and I want to do my best to help my less techy friends do the same. My love of DIY makes this possible, because I can configure my machines on a very fine-grained level to use as few resources as possible to accomplish the same tasks as before. My love of coding can make this possible, as long as I choose to focus on improving my ability to code WELL: that is, to accomplish a task in the most efficient possible way (which I understand can be very hard, and can mean different things in different contexts). In terms of privacy and safety, I can learn how to encrypt my private communications so they stay private, and with that knowledge, I can help my friends learn to do the same. I can learn how to self host internet services we all use, and provide that service to my friends and family, so they don't have to choose between going without or being data harvested. And throughout it all, I can have a lot of fun doing it!
That's more or less where I'm at with computers right now: they're fun to play with, fun to learn about, and it's fucking awesome that I can make a difference doing it! I am under no illusions that this is going to change the world or solve the climate crisis or anything like that. From my perspective, what I'm doing is the bare minimum, and there's lots more that needs to be done. But I'm also not one of those people who thinks there's nothing that can be done, or that our choices don't matter. If I can help even one person in some small way, I'll do it.
I don't know a lot just yet. I don't think I've actually earned the title of "hacker." I'm just some jackass who knows a little about hardware, less about coding, and has grand dreams of self-hosting. But I'm gonna keep learning, and making, and doing, and trying my best to make a difference, however small.
This was a pretty long post. It actually took about four hours to write and proofread. I don't really like my own writing: I have a lot of thoughts that are usually part of the learning process, which means I often talk about things I don't fully understand, which means I'm frequently wrong. Often, my thoughts and feelings are cobbled together from stuff I've read by people far smarter than me, which I guess is how learning happens, sort of. I don't write with a plan, I just have a vague idea of wanting to say something, and writing whatever comes to mind until things stop coming to mind, then going back and making sure it at least sort of makes sense. I have a tendency to delete my own writing whenever I inevitably get sick of it. I can already feel myself getting sick of this post. I thought about not posting it at all. But yknow what? Fuck it. If my thoughts are at all half baked or ill informed, good. Email me and tell me why. I'm not exactly going to become more knowledgable by only putting myself out there when I'm An Expert, and it's also impossible to become an expert on everything anyway.
I will make a serious attempt not to delete this post. If, down the line, I disagree with my past self on something, I'll write a follow up and explain what I've learned.
Happy computing!
-MATHPUNK