07:33, Wednesday 27 Apr., 2005 Link

The Age of Point-at-Things, Tom Coates.

It's the semiotcracy, the tendency and drive to merge the physical and virtual worlds.

Swift's problem [Nick's comment] is a navigation problem. Once we've got addressibility, there's the difficulty of constructing an address. Our technology is very good at global addresses (lat/long, URLs, ISBN), and very good at addressing things you can already see (Swift's domain, point+click, direct manipulation, visual affordances), but it's very bad at discoverability of addresses relative to your current position. As Engelbart put it, in real life we can say to a friend that the forks are in the second drawer down in the kitchen, but in the computer world we either have to express the address of the door in the context of the solar system, or walk to the kitchen and mutely point at it.

I must admit, naming makes me nervous. Names have power. Once an object is named, there's a force for it to keep that name. I'm concerned about a nonhuman objectivisation taking place where what's in my house is determined not by my use, but how the things were manufactured and named. I don't want to be part of a production line. I'd prefer, instead, to have no names or an infinity of names, and to make identification through a binding of addresses against possibilities. Polymorphism, phenotropics. We need reflection.