Significance

Significance for the field includes: extending theory further into post-literacy; promoting digital literacy; modelling doing humanities scholarship by working code; rejuvenating the classics; and grounding future philosophies of computing.

Decades of thinking and thoughtfully writing software has brought me to conclude that there is, and has always been, a crisis at the heart of the philosophy of computing, namely the dilemma between the incompatible epistemological imperative to comprehend the subject matter, and the reflexive avoidance to not look too deeply at it, not to study what is judged to be inscrutable and ephemeral anyway, therefore, echoing Plato, ridiculous to question, and Seneca, ponenda non sumeret. The consequence of this avoidance is that our intellectual trajectory has deaccelerated from symbiotic improvement as cyborgs intermediated with machine technologies to humans getting dumber, like the Nietzschean last man, bourgeois capitalist commodity consumer, while the machines continue to get smarter. To begin to extricate ourselves from this downward spiral is a if not the task for the philosophy of computing. By developing a more finely nuanced conception of the human situation with respect to technological media by considering their constitutive platforms through the method of critical programming studies, rekindling interest in learning programming among adults and promoting teaching as any other essential human skill like orality and literacy, humanity may alter its collective, long term intellectual course.

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