Jonathan Harris
Life is very messy and chaotic, but when you’re building a computer program, it’s incredibly orderly. You know where everything goes and you can obsess over every little detail, so you can live in this perfect, imaginary universe. You can engineer a reality and then live in that reality for most of your days. That reality can be free of conflict, free of complexity and emotions.. It’s very utopian.
«[…] the medium of code [feels] like the most appropriate medium to express the times in which we live. It communicates the speed, complexity, and interconnectedness of everything around us, but it also expresses the beautiful patterns that can emerge from that chaos. Code is an elegant way of approaching all of that, which I think is more difficult to approach through older mediums like oil painting or sculpture.
I frequently struggle with my relationship to coding. I’m not someone who adores the process of coding, but there is something about it that can be beautiful. Life is very messy and chaotic, but when you’re building a computer program, if it’s designed well and if you’re the only one working on it, it’s neither messy nor chaotic: it’s incredibly orderly. You know where everything goes and you can obsess over every little detail, so you can live in this perfect, imaginary universe. It’s kind of like the ultimate expression of my childhood impulse of hiding under a sheet fort and reading comic books all day. Code allows that on a much bigger level, where you can engineer a reality and then live within that reality for most of your days. That reality can be free of conflict, free of complexity and emotions, and I think there’s something appealing to a lot of coders about disappearing into such a space. It’s very utopian.»
Jonathan Harris, The Great Discontent, 2014
«The Internet is a miraculous tool, but all too often, it affects us like a drug. Many of its popular apps, news websites, and social networks have been carefully designed to addict and distract, so they can harvest human attention like the natural resource it is. “Keep searching and you will discover,” these services seem to proclaim, but the deepest truths cannot be found by searching — and you will not find them in data, in videos, or in images of other people’s lives.»