cwervo

Against Ink, Toward Universal Bits

Ink

There’s Magic Ink & then there are it’s responses & extensions:

• 4lpine’s notes on magic ink
• this “alternative approach” HN post
• this “alternative approach” HN post
• Steve Krouse’s commentary on Magic Ink
• This fascinating thing that features the quote:

  If you fully design the graphics, interaction design is not necessary!? April 24, 2007

These are all worth reading. I also think the metaphor of ink is basically the wrong abstraction.

Bits

Let’s now follow two different insstitutions Urbit & The Center for Radical Atoms

Both of these are what I’ll refer to as “packet first” groups. Urbit is fundamentally interesting in an append-only global computer with a microcomputing langauge that is shardable across n-devices. It’s concerned, philosophically, with “pushing packets through a new internet”.

The Center for Radical Atoms started as the Tangible Media Group’s Tangible Bits. It is my estimation that the move to Radical Atoms is really more about pushing a concept than moving away from bits. The atoms are still networked.

Universal Bits?

So what’s a universal bit? It’s a bit that can make it all the way from an implantable CGM to your phone (into your PAN) to a computer in the room (RPI, laptop, NAS server, w/e). Let’s stop here a moment & look around. If you’re a single bit, making its way “up”, then if you stopped here you’d be available to the WAN or WLAN network (e.g. localhost:1234/index.html -> returns 1). So that’s cool. But what if you wanted to keep going?

Let’s keep going up the powers of 10.

• Let’s say you want to share the bit with your friend who isn’t on the WLAN. You’ll want to get it into either your personal storage network (PSN) (synced Apple Documents folder, Google Drive, Dropbox, personal NAS connected to the internet, w/e). Fundamentally you want the bit to be in the internet. So you push it either to your PSN or to a traditional web server. Now the bit lives at e.g. example.com -> 1.
• Let’s say you want to push the bit up to the ISS. It turns out the ISS has a 600 bitrate uplink so you could trivially make it there. Tangent: Near Space Communications Reimagined announced ESC which actually does way more than just ISS but manages laser internet & the NASA NSN.
• Okay, one more hop. Let’s say you want to make it to the next celestial body, the moon. There’s people working on that
• Okay, okay, okay, really. Now we’re at the end of our journey. You can, finally, get the bit all the way to Mars

The universal bit is only possible when you decouple data from its representation.