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  1. Dec 2020
    1. our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.

      i'm less concerned with the general level of incomprehensibility than i am concerned with the un-seeability, the un-learnability.

      in the age of the personal computer, we could act like scientists, studying & understanding systems. in the new cloud age, most of what happens to us, what affects the world, runs in very very far away data centers, deep behind firewalls & secured entryways. computing has become unobservable, unwatchable, & whether it is complex or not, we have precious few means to begin to tell.

      this new era of computing has become deeply deeply against the course of Natural Science, where man awakened an understanding of the world. we have, recently, rapidly, plunged all humanity back into dark unknowningness, cut off each other from being able to puzzle our & advance understanding.