"postmodern computing" entries

The computing of distrust

A look at what lies ahead in the disenchanted age of postmodern computing.

Ominous_II_James_Loesch_Flickr

Sometime last summer, I ran into the phrase “postmodern computing.” I don’t remember where, but it struck me as a powerful way to understand an important shift in the industry. What is different in the industry? How are 2014 and 2015 different from 2004 and 2005?

If we’re going to understand what “postmodern computing” means, we first have to understand “modern” computing. And to do that, we also have to understand modernism and postmodernism. After all, “modern” and “postmodern” only have meaning relative to each other; they’re both about a particular historical arc, not a single moment in time.

Some years back, I was given a history of St. Barbara’s Greek Orthodox Church in New Haven, carefully annotated wherever a member of my family had played a part. One story that stood out from early in the 20th century was AHEPA: the American-Hellenic Progressive Association. The mere existence of that organization in the 1920s says more about modernism than any number of literary analyses. In AHEPA, and in many other similar societies crossing many churches and many ethnic groups, people were betting on the future. The future is going to be better than the present. We were poor dirt farmers in the Old Country; now we’re here, and we’re going to build a better future for ourselves and our children. Read more…