Good afternoon, beloved -
Today I’d like for us to do something we haven’t done in a good long time, which is to weigh the merits of a novel informational interface being proposed to us. I know this is likely to feel a little beside the point, at a moment when there are missiles falling on Teheran and literal Marines on the streets of Los Angeles, but bear with me: I promise this is going somewhere meaningful.
Our text is going to be a video from the Dynamicland project that’s been making the rounds lately, called “Computational Public Space” (which is, of course, a title bespoke-tailored to wind me up). It’s been getting a lot of accolades among folks I follow, tending toward jaw-on-the-floor whoah, and rather than just snarking about it I wanted to explain in some detail why I can’t affirm the vision of cooperative computation it presents to us.
Dynamicland describes itself as “a prototype of a humane dynamic medium,” and as “a computer that is a place, where real people work in the real world,” which situates them squarely in a tradition of “tools for thought” and human sensory-cognitive augmentation that’s been an enduring interest of mine for something like 35 years. Their video, accordingly, presents a rather appealing vision of screenless computational interaction: of information processing embedded in the world, and in the ordinary objects and spaces around us, to be grasped and used by ordinary people. It goes unremarked-upon in the video itself, but this conception descends from a long line of thought in the field of human-computer interaction, from Vannevar Bush and Doug Engelbart down through Mark Weiser (at Xerox PARC), Hiroshi Ishii (at the MIT Media Lab, in the days before its disgrace under Joi ito) and Jun Rekimoto (at Sony CSL).
The fact that this line of descent goes unacknowledged in the video is actually OK. Sure, it would have been nice — both helpful to assist viewers in orienting themselves, and kind of a class move — if Dynamicland’s Bret Victor had been more explicit about the tradition his team is operating in, but it isn’t really fair to expect a demo video to come with a full citational apparatus. The more you know about this history, though, the better you’ll be able to understand exactly what it is Dynamicland’s proposing, and what it is they’ve achieved.
And let’s be clear: what you see in the video is a technically impressive achievement. If I characterize it as the realization of certain ideas that have been floating around for awhile, now that the necessary distributed sensing and processing capacities have matured sufficiently to permit that realization, that isn’t to take a single thing away from it. And it’s cool, too! It’s fun to see cheap, simple, universally available objects take on the magic of interactive computational capacity, right? And what a blessing to manipulate information without screens, their untoward entrainment of the human perceptual apparatus or the environmental footprint they impose on us.
You can easily see, I think, why this setup might appeal to those of us who are burnt out on the regnant paradigm, where all of the intellectual and expressive possibilities folded up in networked computation get sequestered in individual, expensive and often-enough fetishized devices. What Dynamicland is proposing is kind of the apotheosis of a particularly Northern Californian way of thinking about computation that’s undertaken not in the isolated cells of those devices, but together with others, out in the world, where we’d be able to draw upon our very deep (and arguably instinctual) repertoire of skills around the management of physical and social space.
Inflected with a few distinctively Japanese notes — whimsy, animism, possibly at the edges a certain respect for negative space — this approach surfaced around the turn of the century in the form of some very interesting experimental UIs. For me, the most provocative of these were modular, tiled interfaces like the one made manifest in Rekimoto’s MediaTiles project linked above, where you as user were presented with pleasingly textured physical artifacts you could compose as you desired to achieve complex effects. These tiles had semantics, in other words: some of them would allow you to scrub back and forth through a timeline, others raise or lower volume, still others handled copy/cut/paste operations. The logic of composition was seductive, and so was the thought that the process of composition might be collective.
Relatively soon thereafter, of course, all these operations were drawn up into the gestural/haptic interaction space of the capacitive touchscreen, along with a whole lot else, and the tangible-interface line of thought went quiescent for a few decades as the possibilities of the touchscreen were thoroughly explored/commercially exploited to the fullest possible extent. To the degree that physical computing had a continuing life, it took the form of an “internet of things,” where sensing and processing came to reside in an array of single-purpose networked devices. And that’s been successful, I guess? I mean, I literally ride my Peloton bike every day, and if it isn’t quite what the heads at Xerox PARC or Sony CSL or ITP had in mind, it’s nothing if not an instance of the internet of things.
But it’s that long-somnolent current of thinking that Dynamicland is now reviving, in the particularly congenial form of computationally sophisticated, semantically rich, compositionally modular everyday materials and objects. It seems to me that what they’re trying to bring into being is a cheap, low-commitment platform for collective exploration and thoughtwork, where a wide scope for experimentation is implicitly encouraged by accessibility, ubiquity and the low cost of mistakes. Before moving on to a critique, let me be clear again that this part is great! The intention is beautiful, and the accomplishment is genuine.
You just know there’s a but coming, though, and there is. My issue — and it has a lot to do with why I eventually left technology, and the concerns for information processing and interface to it bundled up with it — has to do with the assumptions undergirding Dynamicland. To the extent that they’re largely the same assumptions underlying Engelbart’s work, or Weiser’s or Ishii’s, in 2025 they feel culpably unexamined.
The first assumption has to do with the idea that a module of digital functionality needs to mimic the appearance and behavior of analogous real-world objects in order to communicate what it is, what it does and what it’s capable of to users most effectively. This was known as skeuomorphism, and it was common to early designs in the graphic user interface, whether that meant an icon for a file of contacts that looked like a Rolodex or, rather more whimsically, the search interface developed for Wim Wenders’ Until The End of The World. This sort of thing has been increasingly dispensed with over the past two decades, as the broad global userbase has developed fluency with native-digital metaphors for our interaction with information. So that skeuomorphic bookshelf on Dynamicland’s site is more than an anachronistic affectation. It’s a straight transposition of real-world constraints, without any of the delightful affordances of the actual physical object — among the least effective and user-considerate ways, in other words, of presenting that information in the web medium, with profound accessibility limitations for those who might not realize that the bookshelf can be scrolled, or the books clicked on. It’s “humane,” rather than functional, and just not a great sign that any of the designers involved understand the distinction between actual conviviality and the mere appearance thereof.
I hope you’ll forgive me for saying so. I think we all understand that critique from the sidelines is easy, and in any event I’ve kind of come to despise the intellectual move that involves asking the obvious questions pointedly for in-group brownie points. It feels like a cynical and not particularly fructifying way of accumulating local social capital, without generating much in the way of shared light by compensation, and I don’t want you to read me as doing that here.
Nevertheless, it feels really, really important to interrogate propositions like Dynamicland in this way, by asking the basic questions any sociologist would, even at the risk of sounding patronizing. And still more so of a project proposing any such thing as a Computational Public Space than of the ultimately rather harmless skeuomorphic bookshelf on their website. Therefore: just who is it that constitutes “we” here? What kinds of spaces are you proposing to endow with computation? Who inhabits those spaces, and under what conditions of use?
There’s a reason it feels so vital to lodge these kinds of challenge, which is that the Northern Californian vision of computation in everyday life in many ways came true. And we need merely look around ourselves to perceive the consequences.
Yes, nothing about this history is linear or straightforward. As I tried to argue in Radical Technologies, determinism is far too shallow a way of reading what happens when human societies fold themselves around the affordances and constraints presented by a novel technics. But at least all of us in the field ought to have twigged by now that endowing a space with computation does not straightforwardly or simply lead to the flourishing of human creativity or power. I think it’s fair to insist on the level of reflexivity and sophistication that would be signaled by such an acknowledgment, where such sociotechnical interventions are concerned, and to demand more when it appears to be absent.
The appealing promise of sociality in Dynamicland’s computational public space is undermined — at least so far as I can perceive, in the materials available to me — by the lack of a robust theory of the public. It offers an idealized kind of small-group interactivity, in an equally idealized setting: a tidy, well-lit room, with no sign of tension or conflict. It sidesteps any question of antagonism, exclusion, contestation or mess. The “public” we see here is polite, effectively homogeneous, and engaged in pursuits with stakes that are frankly somewhere pretty close to zero. Dynamicland, further, doesn’t appear to encompass any move toward the social structuring of information, of the form represented by collective data ownership or emergent governance models, though again maybe it’s not fair to ask that of a proof-of-concept demo.
The deepest issue of all, though, goes to what I perceive as a kind of naivety about information and its uses that feels genuinely untenable in 2025. The tacit proposition I perceive underneath Dynamicland, and the entire current of interface thought out of which I read it as emerging, amounts to a curious kind of informational Habermasianism: in essence, the implicit assertion that there’s an ideal informational situation that we might achieve with just the right deployment of tools, in which “the right information, presented in the right way, at the right time” leads to “better decisions.”
At one time, I believed this profoundly, and took it as a given — as I know some of you will know full well, given that we’ve been corresponding since those days. In my effort to help construct such situations, I marinated myself in the sociotechnics of communicating information, from Ed Tufte and the granular details of highway-sign typography to the cognitive science around screen refresh rates. Some of the people I admired most on Earth were the friends who ran a cutting-edge dynamic data visualization practice, because I reckoned that their work would be foundational to any practice involving the collective navigation of complex multivariate decision spaces. I really believed that information wanted to be free, that it should be open and accessible to all, and that its visualization in the correct form and delivery at the proper moment would be vital to the evolution of a flourishing, humane, twenty-first century democracy.
Well, we know how that all turned out. Open municipal data, as it transpired, most readily facilitated not so much citizen oversight as commercial exploitation (and directed swarms of sociopathic harassment, into the bargain). It further transpired that there was no meaningful interest in the collective navigation of complex multivariate decision spaces — or, at best, where people were confronted by such decision spaces, they negotiated the complexity not by visualizing the options before them, but via outsourcing the traversal of decision trees to large language models. And at the meta level, the Enlightenment assumptions of public reason all of these notions were founded on were progressively demystified and stripped of their aura of transcendence — revealed not as the timeless, Apollonian universals they claimed to be, but as local and contingent positions, inextricably mired in a denied history of rapine, extermination and empire.
It’s easy, now, to make fun of the privilege and liberal cluelessness bound up in these propositions, but I’d still insist they’re not prima facie evil things to believe. I just think they fail to account for the asymmetry of the world, the reality of power, and the experience of people on the wrong side of those equations — which, let’s face it, is most of us on Earth.
I say this without rancor, but given that everyday life has been colonized by information processing in the course of the past 18 years, just about everywhere, I think it’s fair to expect propositions relating to further arrangements of same to be assessed on that record. And given our real experience of what that colonization feels like, it’s something pretty close to unconscionable to propose “computational public space” in current year, however appealing its granular technics of interaction may be. At this juncture, I don’t think it’s possible to credibly claim that such spaces would serve any ends but those of exploitation, surveillance and control, whatever the designer’s intent. So to put it mildly, I’m just not convinced that the management of the messes we’re saddled with has anything to do with more computation distributed in the world, more accessibly and comprehensively. I think it’s clear that we need to consider radically different modes of becoming-together, instead — and if it does turn out that we need to develop some novel technics of information to support these ways of being, which is not at all a given, we should start from the needs of people engaged in them in compiling desiderata for their design. It feels, in other words, that explorations like this continue to put the cart of a playful, expressive and notionally accessible interface before the horse of some lived requirement.
Someone on Mastodon asked me if my intent in laying all this out was to get researchers like the folks working for Dynamicland to reconsider their priors and leave the field, the way I eventually did myself. I want to be clear, first, that any such move would be a mighty big ask at any time, triply so in a time of precarity, and not mine to ask of them to begin with. What I would like, though, is to encourage such researchers to develop a theory of the public that is robust, radical and explicit, rather than weak and liberal and implicit, and to anchor the elaboration of their craft in the experienced needs of real communities under real pressure — to become, as it were, radical technologists.
My bottom line is that Dynamicland’s vision of computational public space would have been electrifying for a younger version of myself, and — who knows? — may yet find fruition, in whatever bubbles of space and time communities with access to it are lucky enough to not be confronted with any particular challenge to their integrity, wellbeing and survival. I think it’s radiantly clear, though, that none of us live in such a bubble, or are ever likely to in all our remaining years on Earth.
Could I be wrong, about any or all of this? Badly wrong even? Sure. Of course. Who knows but that this is exactly the set of tools that will help us learn to think with the Tao rather than against it, and in that way build the structures and systems that will allow us to live in persisting dignity and decency and care. That’s all possible, and I don’t mean to suggest for one second to say that it is not. But I know what my gut tells me. I know what my experience suggests. And I know — I think we all know — what the present moment holds for us. Given what forces exist in the world, and how those forces are disposed, at this point I think it’s fair to say of “computational public space”: been there, done that, seen how it all turned out. Maybe it’s time to try something different, you know?
Either way, I’d be delighted to hear what you thought of all of what I’ve laid out here, especially if you’re involved with Dynamicland yourself. Let me know what resonates with you, and what doesn’t. I’m listening with interest.
§ Right now I’m reading the lovely Fitzcarraldo edition of A Shining my friend Jemma bought for me; listening to the mighty Dhyana, the Buddhist-doom project I’ve been waiting for my entire adult life; and watching the last few episodes of Big Mouth.
That's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 145 of Wednesday, 18 June 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊