Bootstrapping

The situation worsened when Bret Victor began to adopt the technical method of “bootstrapping” developed by Doug Engelbart in the 1960s. Engelbart was interested in an “augmentation system that would provide more opportunities for the development and study of augmentation systems” (Engelbart/English 1968: 396). Victor was not only interested in Engelbart's conceptual thoughts on the idea of “augmentation systems”, which were similar to his own: “to increase collective intelligence and enable knowledge workers to think in powerful new ways”, Victor wrote a few years earlier in an impassioned obituary of Engelbart on the occasion of the anniversary of his death on July 3, 2013.[36]

[36] worrydream.com/Engelbart/ , abgerufen am 2.2.2018.

He was no longer only interested in the uncompromising attitude with which Engelbart pursued his ambitious goals – “to collectively solve urgent global problems” (Victor in the same obituary). He also became increasingly interested in Engelbart's “interesting (recursive) task” (Engelbart/English 1968: 396): Engelbart's system was intended to enable people to build new systems together (a process that could then be repeated again). Victor also wanted to try something similar, but now with a spatial medium. However, this meant that all engineers had to build a/his spatial medium together.

It was not only a matter of banning the ubiquitous but increasingly hated screen work from the lab, but also of developing ways of thinking that would allow the next version of the spatial medium to be conceived. But all of this was highly controversial in the lab. Many of the younger engineers saw themselves relegated to the role of assistant.

At the same time, Victor developed an increasingly dark view of the world and, building on this, raised his demands further: a new medium had to help "prevent the world from tearing itself apart," Victor wrote in an internal email to the research group in the summer of 2016). This further radicalization was partly motivated by the experience of the political situation in the US in 2016, but also by the need to win over young engineers with ever more powerful arguments. However, it was precisely this argumentation that made the situation in the lab even more fragile, as many of the young engineers doubted that working in the medium could achieve such goals. Some demanded that the enormous demands be withdrawn, while others accepted them but wanted to implement them differently: either with other media or with means that no longer had anything to do with media. Victor fell deeper and deeper into despair: Inwardly, he could not assert himself, and outwardly, his reputation came under pressure because he still had nothing to show for it. All the prototypes were either not intended for a spatial medium or were so sketchy that he felt they did not yet have the character of demos that could have substantiated his ideas and engineering skills.

A series of conflicts ensued, during which most of the first generation of engineers decided to leave the lab. Victor hired a second generation. The conflicts recurred, but over time a fragile compromise was reached. Importantly, Victor now allowed the new spatial, dynamic medium to aspire to more than just new ways of thinking, at first largely against his convictions. Moreover, it was now about fostering new forms of collaboration, new forms of human interaction, not just as a means to mutual understanding, but as an end in itself. Moreover, the research group's desire to try all this was not only accepted internally. The group increasingly began to speak of a "Community". These compromises remained fragile, but they were enough to enable the group to work together on a particularly challenging part of their project: the construction of a technical system that would prototype a dynamic spatial medium, bootstrap the work, and demonstrate the group's principled stance and compromise on ideas and meaning. The group thus set out to build a "new kind of computer":[37] Dynamicland.

[37] Crises arose once again, but these were now more of a system-building nature: concepts were rewritten, technical solutions were discussed, programming languages were changed, forms of collaboration were tested and deadlines were exceeded. But in May 2017, the operating system was functional for the first time. Further months passed to make the system more robust and faster. In summer 2017, the system was ready to actually be used.

BACHMANN, Götz, 2018. Dynamicland: Eine Ethnographie der Arbeit am Medium. Zeitschrift für Volkskunde. 2018. Bd. 114, Nr. 1, S. 29–168, 42–44.

ENGELBART, Douglas C. and ENGLISH, William K., 1968. A research center for augmenting human intellect. In: Proceedings of the December 9-11, 1968, fall joint computer conference, part I on - AFIPS ’68 (Fall, part I). Online. San Francisco, California: ACM Press. 1968. p. 395. DOI 10.1145/1476589.1476645. [Accessed 4 September 2024]. pdf