1952, things not yet named
The year before, John Cage had entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard and, in a room where nothing should be audible, heard the sounds of his own body. The next year he wrote 4′33″, in which the performer plays not a single note. In the same year, Turing showed with equations that stripes and spots arise on their own from two substances diffusing at different speeds (Turing pattern). In March of that year, a 22-year-old Edsger Dijkstra took a job at the Mathematical Centre in Amsterdam. The occupation had no name yet; being called the first programmer in the Netherlands came later. Silence, pattern, program: in 1952 the names were running behind.
Supposed to work
Next to servers in Taiwan sits a green bag of Kuai Kuai, replaced when it passes its expiry date. It is not to be eaten. In 1917 the Royal Navy painted 2,300 ships in loud stripes (Dazzle camouflage). Evidence that it worked has not turned up, even in experiments of the 2020s. Around 2000, someone from Seifu High School began stamping their feet at a turnaround on a riverbank, and at the 2025 inter-prefectural ekiden many runners were doing it (Tsurutani turn). No study says whether it is faster. And in a 2025 simulation, the gears of the Antikythera mechanism jammed within four months. What was measured, though, were teeth corroded for 2,000 years. Things that go on being used without anyone knowing whether they work live less by whether they work than by whether they keep being replaced.
Pointing at things on a screen
In a doctoral thesis supervised by Claude Shannon, Sutherland drew lines directly on the screen with a light pen. That was Sketchpad, 1963. Five years later, Douglas Engelbart stood before an audience in San Francisco with a wooden box fitted with two metal wheels. On the Alto of 1973, windows, icons and a pointer came together (WIMP), and in 1983 a sculptor with a degree in art history came to an interview carrying a notebook of graph paper with the squares filled in (Susan Kare). A trash can, a wristwatch, a smiling face. It took twenty years before things on a screen could be pointed at with a finger.
Nobody intends to build a wall
On 15 June 1961 Ulbricht said so at a press conference, and two months later he built the wall. Talleyrand changed masters through five regimes, and at the Congress of Vienna seated the defeated nation on the winners' side. When a general tells each of the others something different, it takes only one traitor in three for the rest to fail to agree on a plan. The 1982 Byzantine Generals Problem proved this, and showed at the same time that with signatures that cannot be forged, agreement is possible however many traitors there are. In 1941, at Kuji in Kawasaki, a Circular diversion works eighteen meters across was built. Water wells up evenly from the center, and each share is fixed by nothing but the length of its partition. Everyone watches on the spot. Nobody can lie.
Copy me
Gutenberg cast type and printed the 42-line Bible, was sued by his backer Fust, and lost his equipment. About 49 copies survive. In 2012 Sweden registered the Missionary Church of Kopimism, which holds Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to be sacred symbols, as a religious community. It was the third application. Edsger Dijkstra went on copying drafts written with a fountain pen and mailing them to acquaintances, past 1,300 of them. Luhmann wrote 90,000 cards in forty years and linked them by number (Zettelkasten). Andy Matuschak rebuilt that method digitally and publishes his notes while they are still being written. A place that keeps growing without ever being finished is called a Digital garden.
Whom does the net augment
In 1962 Glushkov drew a net of 20,000 terminals that would pull factory inventories up to the center and do away with money (OGAS). In the same year Douglas Engelbart wrote a report on a net that would augment human intellect. The first was rejected by the Politburo on 1 October 1970; the second was demonstrated on 9 December 1968. The net that computes a state collapsed, the net that augments a person remained, and on that net, in 2011, a 26-year-old Ross Ulbricht built a market the state could not touch, out of Tor and Bitcoin. What Bitcoin solves is the 1982 Byzantine Generals Problem: the ledger agrees even with traitors among the parties. A net becomes a different thing depending on whom it augments.
Not having
A chip company without a factory only designs, and sends the manufacturing to TSMC, founded in 1987 (Fabless). A brewery without a brewhouse hands over a recipe; Far Yeast began in 2012 with beer brewed for it in Belgium and got a kettle of its own in Kosuge in 2017 (Phantom brewery). Mahaposha had believers instead of a factory. Assembled for free, so cheap — or so it was meant to be; by one account the difference was a few hundred yen at most. A researcher with neither a university nor a company publishes, on support from patrons, a review of the year every year (Andy Matuschak). Not having one thing works by having something else.
The shape of an equation
Around 1870 Kummer showed plaster models of the Roman surface. The firm Schilling stopped making them in 1932; the University of Tokyo's roughly 100 pieces were imported before the First World War, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, after photographing them, milled his own out of aluminum (Mathematical models). Turing showed that stripes arise from a difference in the diffusion speeds of two substances, and in 1995 Shigeru Kondo confirmed it on the skin of the emperor angelfish (Turing pattern). Carsten Nicolai draws moiré, and formed cyclo. with Ryoji Ikeda. Iannis Xenakis wrote for orchestra using the statistical mechanics of gas molecules. An equation can become plaster, fish skin, or an orchestra.