New Computer Working Group: Fictions, Future Times

[urcades]

I think it would be interesting to begin the important process of hyperstitioning (read the first couple of pages of this if you are unfamiliar with the concept) the idea of 'new computers' into being through short fictions.

These can take on the form of short, paragraph-long 'future recollections' of using a titular 'new computer', longer short stories, or even tweets from 50 years in the future.

Stories like this could be bundled up with products or services we build in the near future. Embedding pre-existing fictional meaning into systems we develop might be an excellent way to warm people up to the idea of expanding their own notions of what constitutes 'computers' or 'computation'.

This is a task, if I had the funding, that I would definitely pay writers to do for our group. Obviously, I would want to drawn from a pool of people who are 1.) diverse as fuck 2.) not technically aware of "where the boundaries of computers begin and end". These two requirements are deeply important for the generation of orthogonal notions of computers.

In the meantime, I'll be collecting concepts for "future recollections" in this repo issue.

[urcades]

Tentative titling for a serialized publication:

• Fictions
• Future Times
• "New"
• New Computer Fictions
• Stories from the Future
• My Grandmother's Operating System, and Others
• ???
• more later

[urcades]

We can use the following simple format for story suggestions:

Fiction Title: My Grandmother's Operating System

Summary: A young woman tells the story of her family/intergenerational operating system, passed down throughout a span of decades. A grandmother relays her experiences with this system when she was young.

Themes to explore: Inter-generational conflict, death, permaculture, fashion cycles, ancestry, political turmoil, original (congenital) sin, passed-down recipes, etc.

[urcades]

@callil came up with a nice name for this project potentially:

"Computer Folklores"