Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 1)

Hello and welcome to Quornomics, Path Dependency and Semiotic Fatality. I am going to pass off the mic to the course instructor, Nick Land. Great. Thanks a lot. I will stop apologizing, not because it's wasting everyone's time. um I'm very grateful that hang around um so we had a weird sort of broken confused session last week but I'll treat that um the introduction and that we're sort of already

um and i won't sort of make an attempt to do a kind of overview thing i'm i'm going to take it that we're talking about these two papers that i think have been thoroughly publicized um if anyone wants me to put new links in i think it should be unnecessary it's the point is the paper by um and this is the kind of touchstone of course at least this first module which is this

paper by Paul A. David called Cleo and the Economics of QWERTY published in 85 and having in the sidebar sorry I think it might have just done some kind of smiley thing or something and then a response to that now actually it's five years later so it's not a it's not really quite happening in real time this debate and as far as i'm aware there's no comeback um but the two fit together extremely well um which is the paper by

Stan Leibovitz and Steven Margolis in 1990 um I also just might as well stick in there um so there all these two courses to these two papers to found and everything that I think we need for the next and I'll I'll try and fat made up this it's already I've got a classroom

available of course yet I was going to put a link up which I'll just do now very interesting this is actually a Paul Krugman article from 1999 on evolutionary economics and I think people will find uh lots of relevant material in that too i might talk about it a little bit so some sort of i i won't go on for a long time i'll just make a few introductory remarks um thing to do is to start with a question that i answer to at all at the moment i know

i'd like to sort of learn something about this which is why did this debate disappear um you know my sense of looking at it is that importance of this discussion is so huge and it absorbs and subsumes so much and for instance i think there's almost nothing in the kind of contemporary left-right accelerationism, political-economic controversy that isn't already to be found in this QWERTY controversy of the 1980s and 90s.

Huge scope. And part of the scope, I think, captured by this I'm just going to quote a little piece from that it's supposedly on a very different subject but I think you'll find that to really melt together extremely well.

Nick, are you there right now? Can anyone else hear me right now? Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, yeah. I think we may be having a little bit of difficulty hearing Nick again. Yeah, my video is frozen as well. Same. Is it okay on our end? Is it just his end? Yeah, you sound fun. You guys sound really clear to me. I'm just going to send him the link again. It looks like he just got dropped out. Sorry about this, guys. That's cool. Nick's in China. Where is everybody else?

I assume everybody else is around the globe, too, so it's not one particular continent or one particular network. Yeah, I'm in North America. Yeah, North America. North America here. I'm in the Pacific. Pretty good. At the bottom. Pretty good coverage. I thought about the pumpkin spiders are not actually spiders last night. Did you know that? You know the picture from Australia with the giant freaking spider

with the rat climbing up the wall. They're actually another family of arachnid. They're actually what? Another family of arachnid. They're not spiders. Yeah, well, I mean, it said it was a banded huntsman, but it didn't look like any of the huntsmen that I recognize around here, which are also really big and gnarly, but they don't have, like, it kind of was gray with sort of spots on its... Yeah, my earth scientist from was just telling me last night that they're called colloquially huntsman spiders, but they're actually a different family of arachnid. Like, they're as closely fighters as scorpions, basically. Cool. I remember I moved into a, like, terrace house in the middle of Sydney that had been abandoned

for a while. It was used as, like, a nightclub office, and that was kind of had been left empty for about a year. And this huge huntsman spider was in my bedroom. It was so big that I had to catch it with a mixing bowl. And then slide a piece of cardboard underneath it and then throw it in the gutter. Usually I'll put a glass over spiders and take them outside, but this guy was just so big I had to use a mixing bowl. Hey Nick, can you hear us right now? Nick, are you there? Can you hear me?

This is a huge Halloween prank. Can you see the shit out of me? What are you cooking? Egg sandwich. Overslept and just got home. Can you make enough for the rest of us? Huh? Can you make enough for the rest of us? I've got a lot of eggs. I can just do an assembly line style. If you guys figure out how to pass it through the screen, I'll take care of the cooking.

Hi, Nick. It seems like we're having some connectivity issues again. It seems like everyone on our end has clear audio and video, but I think we're getting some lag possibly on your end.

Actually, I'm not even sure if you can hear me right now. This is the first time we've had trouble like this. I don't think it's yeah, I mean in the past is is internet has been really good yeah Change computer new location anything else more people class size This is the top class size for sure Let's go There's definitely some shady censorship shit going on.

Damn right. Can I call that a good sign in and of itself? Yeah. It means the material's puttin'. Yeah, you can. You can also do private messages in the bar. I forget what the string answer for it. Private messages in the bar, I mean.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.

So I'm coming back to the region again by email. All right, Nick.

Okay. It just totally collapsed. I don't know what's going on with this. Seems okay now. Yeah. But that's not been the track record for that. Okay, I'm going to put it on my thing on low. Yeah, I don't know why this is happening. Like, we've done something without anything that's cataclysmic. Yeah, I think, I mean, it seems like our end is okay. I have clear audio and video of everyone else. Is everyone else, if everyone else's bandwidth is low, that helps again. Otherwise, we can just continue. Okay, let's try.

Sorry, I've just shut everything down, so I'm not going to load up too much there. and okay I'm not sure how useful it is to me to rehearse the whole argument in these two papers it might be better that that's something that we do together rather than me monologuing on it I think maybe I'm just gonna sign sort of simple point which is that the basic argument in the David paper QWERTY is in the if I don't know whether I was still with people when I

was quoting a cookman thing but he talks about the program the problem of a local maximum it's the same basic problem as that of a bad equilibrium of the kind that totally dominates Keynes's criticisms of the functioning of the market economy that define our epoch and the Keynesian and anti-Keynesian arguments that completely structure political economic controversy in the modern age map onto this QWERTY discussion with extraordinary and and to

such a point that I think the David article ends with a very interesting he says he talks about QWERTY worlds and by QWERTY world he means worlds exactly that have become dominated by some sub-optimal local maxima by the kind of processes he discusses in his uh in his paper and he says i believe there are many more qwerty worlds lying out there in the past on the very edges of the modern economic analyst tidy universe worlds we do not yet fully perceive or understand but whose influence like those of dark stars extends

nonetheless to shape the visible orbits of our contemporary economic affairs most of the time i feel sure that the absorbing delights and quiet terrors of exploring qwerty worlds will suffice to draw adventurous economists into the systematic study of essentially historical dynamic processes and so will seduce them into the ways of economic history and a better grasp of their subject and i think in in saying that he really is folding the entire maddox of modern macroeconomics into the problem of querting canes his own names for the for the uh

these suboptimal traps of a preference and low employment are the historical dynamics things that that David is saying can be modeled by QWERTY so QWERTY takes on this on this function for him as of being an epitome of the dominating structuring our economic universe and the responses by which I think the paper

uh libowitz and margolis is is also a fastening paper and partly because it too captures all the basic critiques of uh of keynesian macroeconomics the ones particularly obviously coming from sort of market friendly people of Austrian persuasion specifically are all to be found in in the type of response they are making to David's paper and again I'll just quote a tiny little piece that I think is indicative but we can go into all of this in much more detail where they say at a certain critical point in

their paper Scholes's decision to solve a mechanical problem through careful keyboard arrangement may have inadvertently satisfied a fairly important requirement for efficient typing so he's saying that by mistake the the Scholes the QWERTY keyboard actually has a has an efficiency it could not be predicted to mr. ground he then he then can they then continue it It appears that the principles by which Dvorak rationalized the keyboard may not have fully captured the actions of experienced typists, largely because typing appears to be a fairly complex activity. so i i don't think it's at all uh hallucinatory to to see these the same sort of patterns of

objection here as you get from hayekians and people against kane saying you know the the micro texture of the economy is complicated and rational solutions that seem extremely impressive in university classrooms to these problems are failing to fully understand that the fine-grained difficulties that are being actually confronted by economic processes and so it's there's a there's a criticism here of rational planning in general and and the Dvorak I hope I'm pronouncing that right simplified keyboard that's that the the counter pole of this whole

discussion it's kind of in a way and it's treated as a kind of hero in in David's account and it's kind of a subject to to a certain amount of them criticism obviously by Leibovitz and Margolis in conclusion is just as QWERTY is is serving as a proxy for the spontaneous market solution um the the the dvorak simplified keyboard is it is a proxy for rational planning in um i think we can say in this case economic technological and economic affairs it's supposed to represent a rational standard as opposed to the kind of spontaneously emergent perhaps sub sub optimal market solution that's

represented by quality so i think that what i'm saying repetitively and obsessively here is that this controversy about qwerty is is a stand-in for these absolutely all-consuming uh political economic controversies of the modern age and so to get back to the question I don't understand it's like how did this how did this controversy disappear I mean that seems to me and I think it'd be interesting to get a sense of why that might happen and one solutions that maybe the mobile phone input system is sufficiently divorced from the problems of of the quality interface that it

somehow bypasses it I don't know what the answer to that is so yeah I think I'm gonna try and open it up and come back with sort of attempts to push people down particular lines if they seem reluctant to to go down them and let's see as ever is everyone actually still in there i'm still here does anybody have a

question or something they'd like to come in and say I can I'd like to hear a little bit about like the software aspect in the second article sort of like this performative dimension of the software and how that contributes to the QWERTY phenomenon can you say a little bit more about that you're talking about the um you're talking about the libowitz and margolis paper no no not that one um the david cole one he uses the term software as and like so the the remington is the hardware and then it's sort of like

the actors themselves are the software so the typists that are learning the software that be right right yeah okay yes yes um so he he actually I've shut down all my tabs on this but he's saying uh that that artificial culture of QWERTY proficiency becomes let's sorry let me just if I can take one step back because I think there's a kind of quote I might have already used on a blurb but I think it's worth repeating that that envelops this a little bit from David's piece where he says I think this is a really crucial building block of his

argument we said touch typing gave rise to three features of the evolving production system which were crucially important in causing quality to become quote locked in as the dominant keyboard arrangement these features were technical interrelatedness economies of scale and quasi irreversibility of investment they constitute the basic ingredients of what might be called QWERTY-nomics and then when he is like he's explaining those technical interrelatedness is then is then the term he uses to cover what you're now talking about isn't it by technical technological sorry technical technological interrelatedness let me just look again and he actually means

the acquired habits and competences to use your term that the software level of typists who've become versed in the um quality system becomes in his narrative this insuperable obstacle by the mid 1890s that no other competitive uh if keyboard standard can can overcome just because people don't want to retrain the cost of retraining is too much but people then start aiming at what people already can do as as governing

that the keyboard rather than some and I think this is we're really getting to this utterly crucial point that crosses the whole thing that it's not referring to some transcendent criterion of optimality it's that the reference is no longer to what in an ideal abstracted world starting de novo with a rational solution to the keyboard layout, that is not an accessible point from where we are. That is where how path dependency, the path we're on is one in which there is now

this cultural dominance of QWERTY competence among typists that therefore controls the development and spread of this technology. and obviously that becomes a crucial point of controversy when when Leibovitz and Margolis then say well you know well there's a whole bunch of related objections they have to that but one of them is that it's not just chance that people doing this they're doing this because it works there was a whole history of alternative keyboards before QWERTY was established that there had been competitive selection of this keyboard already,

there were typists that would have that had tested it and and so they're obviously disputing with him the fact that this this is kind of locking people into hard to some tight local optimum that hasn't been subjected to a wider process of competitive selection but both of them i think that the crucial thing is that both of them are accepting the principle of there being some transcendent criteria they both are in some sense at least modeling the fact

that there is this global this or sphere in which we can sort of look for and with some reliability or some confidence and point to what a global optimum might be I think I sort of been too fast with this make it persuasive that's something I'm going to come back to so I maybe won't push it too hard at the moment in case it's going off into a software question.

Is there a way, maybe a way to warm up to this? One of the, I'm not sure if people noticed this detail but it fascinates me that Gander I was actually using a Dvorak keyboard because I never met anyone that used one before. So, but the other detail from the David paper or the Davis paper, the Apple IIe computer had a switch where you could- Yes. Dvorak. Just cross over, yeah, yeah. And it's, you know, very, I think it's part of the, myth around Steve Jobs but it's also observable in the history of Apple

computer over and over again where they will decide that they know better than the user or that decide that they will know better than the consumer and you know in the pursuit of a larger design goal you know based on you know their insight or their study of of their consumer base basically or their potential market um and then even they forced new standards to be adopted time and time again uh they weren't able to do that successfully with the vojok keyboard but but it ties very much back to the stuff that you're saying about they know better they have a sort of a rationalist uh insight that there's a

things are stuck in some sort of local optima and that they can they can pass it yes it's an interesting case because obviously when Leibovitz and Margolis are making their case they entrepreneurial pressure and entrepreneurial strategy as being they put that on the side of the market that that David is underestimating that and the kind of phenomenon exactly that you're talking about way someone a highly motivated driven entrepreneur figure like Jobs tries to push the Dvorak keyboard and I think that

Liglitz and Mogollis would say you know that that testing of QWERTY and that kind of competition is something that David isn't allowing for you know and the fact that QWERTY still prevailed even against this jobs type initiative is a sign that its resilience is not purely reducible to this kind of accidental first-move advantage form of path dependency that David seems to be looking for you know which is just the reign of accident and so I'm just saying

I think it's really good crucial reference but it's kind of weirdly ambivalent in papers who it's helping and who it's it's complicating stuff right I mean it sort of comes back to you know stuff like the efficient market hypothesis right so where basically they're saying well if that is more optimal for someone or if that's a better outcome then some entrepreneur will find a way to profit from it. And then if you have some entrepreneur that does it,

well, it just confirms the theory. It doesn't sort of, it's not counterfactual or counter theoretical. It is one of these ways that sometimes the efficient markets can be framed so broadly that it's in some sense non-falsifiable. I saw someone drop Karl Popper in the chat room a while ago because it's a you sort of say everything is a utility function and it's always being maximized so you just didn't look hard enough basically it's more like a frame of reference than a sort of testable hypothesis. Right. yeah I'm sort of tempted to try and push you a little bit like um let me just see oh yeah

because I've probably missed a whole bunch of your comments in there in the sidebar on this so so I think there's an interesting conversation going in the sidebar but not much of this in it but that the I think the interesting thing about what Apple does when they push a new standard is no one changes because of the standard what they always do is they use their existing market power to to put out some product and because of the lock-in on that existing platform they're able to

get people to change to other standards so like if you look at in switching from the old Apple phone charger the old iPhone charger to the firewire charger no one said fantastic at last I have a more efficient charger port you know actually they everyone said gosh darn it I will I'll have to get another new charger and all the things I plug into I'm now obsolete and that's a pain in the neck but I'm using all these Apple products and the phone is so sexy and whatnot so so they're always using one form of platform inertia for to move another part of the platform and force people to upgrade um it's never the

standard itself that sort of even if it's more optimal it doesn't really have much attractive power in the market um i i i think you can see that at other scales too but maybe not such public examples yeah i i don't know though that's i think that's a great point adam because i mean that's like that's apple much further across the board even their whole motto that hardware and software are better when they're together is like, I mean, it's basically a statement of promoting lock-in at a high level. They do that all across the board, like, you know, produce situations in which by producing lock-in through having your entire, all of your files on an ecosystem that doesn't readily want to give them back, all of your devices work together.

And then this allows them to push, like creates the locked-in market to which they can push new standards to which people are further. And it seems like it shows up pretty much across their design strategy. business and design rather right and then they always justify it by that give they're able to give a total design solution that as a system is more optimized right that's that's what they will always come back to we have a test with this happening right now because they just eliminated the um the phone jack the headphone jack on the iphones and it's to be seen if you they just announced a new MacBook last week that still has the headphone jack so you know I whether whether they're able to push this idea that all phones remove the

headphone jack or all devices is to be seen yeah I mean there is obviously there's some pushback isn't there against that to say the least but whether it's efficient pushback or just widening I guess, to be seen. Yeah, I don't know. I have a broken aux jack and have to use Bluetooth headphones, and it gets really fucking annoying to have to charge those things all the time. Like, I'm with people. Sorry, random. It's kind of random, but I do think this is the, this is absolutely crucial zone. Because obviously the issue here is this thing about where do technological, standards come from and to what extent are and that objects of

orchestrated political economic critique and the the standard I think that the reason I think there's something really classic about this exchange between David and Lieber vets and Marco this is that it captures the terms that we're all familiar with I mean it's like that you know it's like is there is the market a transcendental horizon for the testing of standards such that every attempt to provide a kind of rational Archimedean point of criticism

that criticizing the market outcome is a kind of transcendent illusion or on the other hand and I think it's probably right to say the dominant hand that you know I think David is that is the winning party in this discussion like is it that implicitly there can be some appeal to a global optimum which the market outcome can be contextualized by and therefore subject to critique? And I don't think it's unfair. I mean, I'm sort of inviting people to come back at me on this if they do think it's unfair.

But I think that the... sense of the left accelerationist its moment of self-definition is totally tied up with this question basically wants to say that we can criticize sub optimality of market outcomes from some implicit position versal rationality and you know there's some perspective there's some more globalized universal frame of reference that we have access to that we can say that the the the

existing market solution is markedly and notably sub optimal and as I say I I think this is already you know the whole of Keynesian the Keynesianism comes from making a similar claim that you know you can identify a low employment equilibrium that you can from some implicit superior frame say that you can see that this is a an inferior outcome to one that can be be expected and and this is what to watch out the divorce at keyboard is just kind of crystallizing that claim you know it's standing in for as a as a kind of avatar of the universal sort of arriving

at the historical outcome from outside and saying you know i can see that you have gone wrong that you've become trapped in this in this local uh optimum that that from the perspective of the of the global from the perspective of the universal is kind of blatantly inferior and suboptimal and that is the the core of the of the critique so you know I think in talking about this this stuff with particular businesses and the standards they're trying to impose one of the things that that is happening there is that there is

this kind of specter of the universal that is looking squinty-eyed at these particular conclusions on standards and saying that you know there is some frame that we can access where we can see the inferiority of this there so I think if you can if you can criticize QWERTY on the grounds David wants to push through you can criticize the whole thing it becomes a utterly generalized critique of political economy you know it becomes the it becomes the definitive I'm going to just go totally as usual to the grandiose point it becomes the

definitive critique of capitalism you know is that if QWERTY is wrong then all of this stuff pours in you know and and the communist hordes flooding enthusiastically from her eyes and with it hearts inflamed with utter confidence but if if QWERTY is resistant to that mode of criticism then that is the same is the same thing as kind of a sabotaging these lines of just profound all-encompassing socio-economic critique so I don't sorry I've slipped a bit from I don't know in terms of Steve Jobs is

saying I don't my problem with them is only I'm just not confident that they succeeded in establishing themselves the standards and they seem to me very fragile and contested compared to tea with the you know compared to QWERTY does anyone seriously think that jobs is plug design is going to still be around than 80 years time. Yeah, I mean, it seems like it's very dependency on a particular private entity that can go bankrupt and fail or can stop selling its stuff, and that its vulnerability to that, like if it was designing things that were sort of universally compatible in one way or another, even if it failed, those devices could still get used.

But by pursuing this sort of proprietariness strategy for owning their locked-in standards, it means those standards can't accede to the QWERTY level by nature. If they ever fail, those standards will no longer be supported by anything still being made. No. I mean, it seems intrinsically fragile, doesn't it? Because it is subsumed in principle under the Apple brand. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't have any ambitions beyond the Apple ecosystem. them it's so it's not like QWERTY or even you know all the PC standards that came in that were based upon the fact that you would have a different brands

locked into the same set of technical standards right so it's not it's not dependent on the success of a particular company you know Remington typewriter company can go fast and the QWERTY is not going to be brought down by that I'm assuming that that all the Apple standards that are not insensitive to the fate of the Apple company I want to raise another example that it has I've that hasn't been brought up yet, I think. But VHS versus Betamax as a video standard is interesting because no one argues both standards were so similar. No one argues that, oh, Betamax was more efficient

or a better solution. It should have gone that way. They were so similar that when VHS went out, no one cared. but in the case of Cordy versus Dvorak there's a clear efficiency trade off and are there more of these cases to where one standard is one not necessarily based on some efficiency point where people just don't care other cases to where the efficiency argument matters but it's really not a question of efficiency it's just a question of exactly what we're talking here which is the path dependency I mean obviously the question of whether Dvorak is intrinsically superior to Qwerdi is part

of the controversy. And I think it's interesting to ask well how important is it as part of the controversy? Like you know David assumes that Dvorak is superior. and my god they say actually that it's pretty there you know there's a lot of very flaky argument about this and it's very dubious whether there's substantial superiority keyboard if we granted that it was superior well I think a lot more would still go through even if we granted a lot of David's points than

Leibovitz and Margolis are prepared to accept but I think the point is it's you know we can't assume I think we can't assume that this superiority is something that's been firmly established. There's a question of good enough, right? As long as it, there's, I think another interesting standardization question is MP3 versus other audio formats. The, you know, years of CD quality and highest quality sales around technologies with the highest quality audio, then getting to a point where for our digital devices we're compressing things as much as possible into a format that is good enough for

the average person but you know clearly not for an audiophile so at scale um for a given system what is good enough to scale into the the the market helps drive some of these things yes i mean that is an interesting question but do you think that that is what the qwerty dvorak differences about two? I mean, is it actually that there's a kind of super optimized, there's a super optimized keyboard that we just didn't settle on because QWERTY was good enough? Or, you know, is that the argument you think there? I think the argument is it's a mix of first to market

that's good enough. And with Dvorak may be better, but if QWERTY is good enough and you have this reflexivity kind of thing happening where both the software and hardware play off each other, the memory, then it becomes the better solution given the network effects. Right. Yes, it definitely becomes the dominant solution. Well, yeah, better is not the better. And then the question, well, better is really interesting, because better, again, is invoking a transcendent criteria, isn't it? It's like saying that there is some, we're just mentally sort of implying some tribunal,

some virtual tribunal that is looking at these different keyboard layouts. and on the basis of some uncontroversial criteria or nonpartisan criteria is able to say this is better than... and I mean I think that this that assumption that sort of an implicit sort of view of it being some global tribunal is the ultimate stake in this whole question you know it's like it's something that I as I say I think that

Leibovitz and my goalies are still sort of deferring to that notion classical economics is still deferring to air and you know it's still the notion that ultimately there is a kind of coherent notion of a globally optimum solution that we can conceive and therefore that that structure of conception that structure and structure of judgment that's that that tribunal system is at some kind of higher level of judgment than the than the standard that is it in question um but the counter the counter

to that is that the standard that that comes to dominate achieves genuine transcendental status that's to say it it actually um eliminates the the coherent possibility of transcendent judgment let me just let me just take another example which is a slight sideways thing but it's like um um it's a in take the case of Bitcoin where you have a within this Bitcoin system you

have a criterion for what is a real event guarded as a as an unreal event so anything that that involves double spending is just de ontologically de-realized this the Nakamoto consensus builds into history the only things that really happened I really get accepted into the blockchain are things that past Nakamoto consensus and past that that tick criterion of the blockchain itself now there's no way it seems to me that someone from outside Bitcoin can say oh consensus made a bad decision in that case you know there's no there's no

leverage there's no point of second guessing there's no there's no sort of courtroom that stands above Bitcoin and say oh you know in that case it was wrong it made a good decision I made a bad decision there you know let's see whether generally it's doing a good job of making a good decision because it just simply eliminates that possibility of there being a transcendent authoritative position and I think the radical question about QWERTY is whether it's like that you know is QWERTY a sort of cultural destiny for the

world such that there is no position outside QWERTY that can that can judge quality with any authority you know what yes sorry I think that I can see that there's some pieces that would need to be added to this that not already inclined to quinn omic quinn omic religiosity but but at a certain point a standard consumes the horizon like the notion that we have a horizon that

exceeds a completely system is surely itself a kind of problematic like where Where is that? Where is that outsideness being drawn from? So if we were to kind of put this into the things that people do tend to judge quarter your keyboard layouts on terms of the optimality and suboptimality of sort of like this implicit recourse to a transcendent standard. Something like typing speed, for example, which is therefore economic efficiency and so on.

The translation of that here would be that the particular keyboard layout that emerges and gets locked in drives these sort of inputs into the formation of the system later, of the economic system later, of who profits by it and how fast things happen. there's a relationship of bodies and economies is driven by something that emerged prior to it which is QWERTY rather than it being standards by which that can be judged against alternatives that don't exist something like that um that there's there's some system of economic logic that can be sort of I mean obviously this this type of criterion is the one that leave it

someone going to sing has already been hashed out by market much more thoroughly and David is accepting so you know I think I think they would they would accept that as a good candidate for a transcendent criterion or anything that kind of is internal to the culture that QWERTY produces and in that way they they are on the same plane as David they both accept that it's quite a reasonable question to say is QWERTY optimized according to these sort of characteristics

yes typing speed efficiency you know there's a there's a list isn't it do with the left and right hand action and the amount of keys on the middle keyboard yeah in the Margulis circle yeah I think they both they David and leave with some Margulis both accept this same set of these technical criteria about how you would judge the efficiency of a of a keyboard layout and I think they sort responding to David and accepting those three points isn't it so I I'd like to call up the article I'm slightly worried I'm gonna do some computer disaster I

do if I've got a whole bunch of tabs open So maybe while that's being pulled up, I had a question too. Yes. It seems that the articles all do assume that essentially the usability of the keyboard and the typing speed and whatnot is taken for granted, transcendent criteria. But is there any reason why we would accept that as the only one? because the keyboard itself, you know, existing as it does in some material form, functionally

bleeds out beyond that a little bit. In other words, you could talk about it as saying which one has been optimized for, you know, resource usage. In other words, like the size of the keys and talking about how much material it actually takes to print or to backlight keys, things like this so in other words they're both talking about it as though usability is kind of you know the the primary relevant criteria right I'm not sure that's necessarily needs to be the case yeah yeah I mean I'd be interested in hearing more because what I'm hearing in this question I think is really

interesting but I'm not sure I'm fully getting where you're going with that as a sort of what the alternative what the alternative criterion is that you're suggesting here and I think it goes back a little bit to the the satisficing idea that if we're looking at the usability as being compromised maybe a wrong way of looking at it because it's still kind of asserts that the usability is kind of the primary where if if all the criteria are somewhat have a different type of relationship then the usability may be optimized given what those other criteria are for example how much you know access to resources you have to make something that kind of profit that you can get your distribution network

your supply chain things like that no no in saying that let me just make sure I'm following you these other criteria are exactly the criteria that produce lock-in as far as David's concerned is that right like when he's when he produces these these three these three different lock-in drivers economies of scale and quasi-reversibility of investment those are the things that you're saying should be taken, should be respected as part of the criteria. Right, right, because it seems to me like right now it seems as though there's a default idea that the usability is the primary criterion and the rest are things that cause compromise.

Whereas if we make it completely symmetrical, then we would see, I'm thinking, that you would say well okay usability is compromised because of these other criterion or I could say as a material specialist well no my material use is compromised by the usability so the lock-in might come from the opposite angle yeah nice so you're saying lock-in actually no I think so I think you you're in a way defending lock-in as optimal when you have a wide enough set of criteria in play and the criteria that you're wanting to add to the

critical criteria that David concentrates on are precisely those that he is seeing as the as the causes of lock-in am I understanding I think that's exactly it I'm looking at it rather than and maybe the problem is we're looking at it as Well, Lisa my head this one thinking is the um That we're treating the keyboard as though It's like a synaptic key right so that the keyboard layout Defines the keyboard when actually the keyboard is going to be some it has to be a real thing So it's going to be some actual materials with constraints and things like this Um if we look at it in a very pragmatic scale just in terms of the just the production of it But yeah, I guess what I'm saying is all those criteria that are relevant,

that account for the actual thing you're investigating, like if you're actually looking at an actual keyboard in front of you, maybe a way to look at it is that all those are symmetrical rather than subordinate in modifying the usability. Yes. I mean, that's part of what makes that a very interesting argument, is it's strange it's strangely absent from the go list criticism isn't it I mean it they they they don't they don't go down that road at all which is which means you're opening up a very different line of attack against the against the

David claim in a way by saying that I think I mean we so so why why wouldn't it's a margolis accepting that would that would prevent them having taken that option I guess partly it is this thing that they're not contesting this general frame that David has that there is this there is this standard of global optimality that can be defined in the absence that should be defined abstraction from the actual path dependent process itself and that the process of path dependency is something

that's like accidental and and is not worthy of intrinsic of intrinsic defense like the no one Leibovitz and Margolis are not defending the path as such just because it is the path they're defending it only because they think actually David is misconstruing the the approximation of global optimality that that path takes but you're saying well maybe the path itself you know once you're on the path itself it becomes a criteria because the costs of going off the path should be taken as seriously as the costs to um to usability that that are involved in staying on the path am i am i

yeah i think yeah i think that's it and i and i think the other problem i have is um is i guess I'm not entirely sure it's even, I guess, appropriate or possible. Maybe it's possible or I don't know the word. It does seem like still David and Margulis are still talking about it as though there's a normative aspect to it. And I don't know if there's, I don't necessarily know, would know and maybe I'm just you know I don't know if that's if how appropriate that is I should say so I don't know valuable that then scared this language I think definitely because obviously you can talk about this whole thing strongly

normative terms as a self installing law you know I don't think that it it's not hyperbolic to use that QWERTY becomes it lays down the law about how a how a keyboard should be arranged most minimally you know what you need to learn in order to type you know in a minutiae which letter comes after which other leg there's a whole normative structure that is that is equivalent to their kind of hegemony of quoting and so so there's a there's an implicit

contestation is there a higher law is there a kind of transcendent superior law that overrides and judges from beyond the law and this is like you know is therefore path is path dependency is the path taken itself creamly legislative like it can you say can you look at that path from some external position and say it was the wrong path you know this is obviously what David is there and I wonder if you if you can't but if there's almost no I

I mean, not to be too relativistic about it, but I wonder if there's, so for example, let's say I'm looking at it not from the usability path, but let's say I'm looking at it from just, let's say I'm just a materials resource manager or whatever. and for the amount of steel or plastic that it takes to actually make keys that are ergonomically viable and can fit lettering and things like that, I might bemoan the usability and say that this is, now I'm looking at it path-dependent in a different way and saying we're locked into this path that a keyboard requires X amount of material. The problem with that is this damn usability that has locked us down this road. In other words, I'm thinking any angle you look at it,

Is anything that's path dependent or I'm thinking any angle that you look at it Is going to appear to be suboptimal in other words. I don't know if there is actually a Advantage point that isn't that doesn't have an interest at stake if that makes sense Yes, no, but I totally make sense to me for sure to say that I think that this is you know i'm sorry i'm just being repetitive here and just repeating that i think that that is the is is there an archimedean point of evaluation beyond the path taken from which you can actually hold this kind of implicit the courtroom scene of of you know in

in a zone of debate and say did we go direction did we take the right path and I think I agree with you as strongly that that is at least questionable and and it's interesting to me you know that I think it is very very informative about where we are a bit very very generally in political economic terms that when we look at this exchange between David and Liebherz and Margo is and neither of them are criticizing in principle that the role of a transcendent tribunal in this question and

And so you know to put in a nutshell what they're saying what they agree on despite the fact that dispute encompasses almost everything That that is our whole horizon of political and economic Dispute in the modern world despite that despite the vast To horizon that is that is captured by that dispute what what they agree on is in a nutshell is that QWERTY is not God. They agree on that. And I think even if we say, okay, you know, that's reasonable, perhaps, to say QWERTY is not God,

but is it reasonable to say that QWERTY is not the closest thing to God that we could have? thing is there something that we can point to that is a god above QWERTY you know it's QWERTY at least the only god available to us that strikes me as sort of part of the difficulty of being in a local maximum Because if you are there, then how do you know that the local maximum is not the global optimum, right?

Because the global optimum might not have any actual path that's accessible from your local maximum if you're trying to get there through iterated sort of cost function developments of generational improvement. there just might not be any path and you might not even know that the path you're on is has a ceiling no but in calling it a local optimum you're already kind of implying a an implicit position of of transcendent criticism aren't you you know like in in saying it's a local optimum you're

You're saying that at least in some hazy, implicit way, there is a global frame positioning and locating it from which we're able to kind of give it this designation as a local maximum. I think I'm suggesting that even if there was one, how would it be accessible? Or rather, it wouldn't necessarily be accessible in terms of knowing that you had arrived at a place that wasn't the optimal one. So even if you could construct some sort of transcendent criteria that had some, I don't know, commonly agreeable basis,

then unless you have access to, I don't know, some kind of, I guess, outsideness, then you won't know that you've hit a wall. Yes. I think it's also the point, depending on sort of how rigorously or what area you're talking about, that you have to start just distinguishing between paths and access in computational or predictive terms and in terms of movement of the system itself, like through regulation, like in any cybernetic sense of regulation, which is like levels of simulation essentially. It's like in a mathematical context when we talk about something being like knowing that something is a local specifically local optimum It does know that like the behavior of this plane in which this like particular state is occurring

Achieve we're in it these other things and then the calculation of whether we can get from here to there And the calculation of how sure we can be of this you know data We have about the larger plane around us are both just kinds of access Yeah, it's interesting. I posted the wiki article for gradient descent, which is an optimization algorithm which tries to find a local minimum, but you can think about it as finding a local maximum. And it's very good, and it's an iterative process, but it doesn't guarantee that you'll get to what's actually the global minimum or global maximum. them right i i mean i would be surprised i mean at least in some areas i would think it's got to

be provably impossible to know that you found or defined the global maximum even if there is one i would say you can just assume very strange topologies right yeah i i think that that's a a point probably everyone will agree on but it seems to me it's like massive implications of agreeing with it are slow to take root I mean you know once you do access that access to a kind of frame evaluation of global optimality is not accessible it it has huge consequences I mean it's like a well I

mean the impact of it I think it kind of washes over both of these two excellent they're both of them fall short to me of accepting this principle that you've just subscribe to wouldn't you say Jay I'm sorry say that again well it's it's a it's a it's a it's a massively consequential thing to say that over global the question that a framework for the evaluation of global optimality is not accessible yeah I think it I mean it's in the specific case of QWERTY I

mean what I think if we can eliminate let's see so like in the Margulis paper I was looking and so it was not typing speed it was actually like distribution even distribution from left to right that was the actual guiding criterion because of this sort of contingent mechanical failure issue which actually um, sharing I think is a definitely is not like a resource allocation like how much of different things do you have to be able to get to build this thing in terms of like material traits I think it's a good example that it was preventing a particular mechanical failure that drove it. Sorry to interrupt Jake, but can I just because there's three, there are three of these criteria actually. right area right that's one of them if I can just read them out because because

you're totally in the grain of this loads on the right and left hands that equalize be the load on the home middle row is maximized and see the frequency of alternating hand sequences is maximized and the frequency of same finger typing is minimized so that's what was settled on lineage as being a criterion that was be used to judge that relative performances of these different yeah and I guess still exactly where I was going with this is I just kind of find fascinating that this recapitulates sort of the organization the chiral organization chiral and frontal organization of the brain that's

that's controlling the hands and is doing this semiotic work, or training the hands to coordinate this semiotic work in a way that has a link initially, or once touch typing in particular evolves is not through looking at the hands, but is literally based on semiotic content and responses that you're producing, and that is being used to coordinate these two lobes at a pre-conscious level, that the focus on the home row recapitulates forward ocular focused and so like yeah so to bring that back to like the global standard the the criteria for devising a global optimality standard not being accessible I think you can almost sort of tie this back to to um blind brain theory and sort of it's not available because

it is what our brain is already doing or what we've been trained to do is what is supplying this the standard for how it's used right yes it does make sense so so I mean the this set of criteria then becomes an object for orchestrated critique doesn't in the sense that it a claim to transcendent authority that becomes extremely flaky on except upon examination quickly betrays its own in locality yeah I mean I think

It's just it's okay. I don't know. If any, you have particular contingent sub optimalities, like we can say that there is a criterion for optimality of the keyboard and it is typing speed, like there is such a criterion, right? And the question is sort of one of relative transcendence to me, because that great criteria like maximum typing speed and efficiency and things like that versus these ones that have to do with the morphology of the user and the way like the semi-omorphology like the way with the morphology of how the user interacts with semi-activity which is through hands and eyes essentially um but that sort of divorce between two different kinds of criteria or two different systems of them could be part of this destiny rather than

just the question being like like it's definitely at the top that there is no global there is no availability of an actual transcendent global optimality one but in terms of this particular issue of the things that we have claimed to be transcendent ones like yes typing speed it's more an issue of this conflict in relative transcendences that's driving its destiny pattern I guess yes I mean this is I think it can it's not quite the same as just you spot I think it's a slight oblique to this but you say this typing speed for sure with which can easily pass as if it's completely neutral and uncontroversial absolute criteria but what are what are the other possible criteria for performance that it is that they're

involved one of them there's all there's all of the things Joshua saying about the actual sort of network economics itself and and that one of the things you're doing when you're typing on a QWERTY keyboard is you are in the culture of QWERTY you know you are you're we know from taking the argument the other way around but that's what's happening like in you know there's a certain set of QWERTY rituals QWERTY practices QWERTY habits that are actually producing a QWERTY culture now is we can obviously say oh well that the

entrenching of a QWERTY culture is itself of no value it's and you know we have some position of global global estimation that tells us that it could be anything it could be for act it could be any other system so there's no there's no particular benefit to the fact that you are producing a QWERTY culture through this through this process but that's an extremely arbitrary judgment you know trying to pass itself off as something universal like if it is the case that QWERTY is a kind of techno social destiny then you

know the entrenchment of that destiny is not for any kind of obvious uncontroversial reason of no value or of no use or not itself a form of kind of effectiveness and functionality that should be your estimated or invested with Ali I'm sorry people ask me to elaborate on relative transcendence in the sidebar and I'm having to kind of work

I mean I should I sort of feel duty-bound not to get too lost in a sidebar but I think if there's all right structures of organized dispute going on in a site but I would encourage people to try and drag them forward into that on the set of stages as well because it would be nice to know what's going on there. I mean other people please jump in especially ones who haven't already been discussing but But what Jake put as relative transcendence

reminds me of more like component optimization and then viewing systems at different scales. So when you put together a machine, you can optimize and define the specification around a particular component of the machine and other components. And you can define sort of engineering engineering benchmarks around those components, but then how those components fit together into a larger system or machine just to achieve something else, that can have a different benchmark, which means that that component is not appropriate or it's limiting the overall performance of the system.

Right and I think you know when we can talk about it purely in terms of engineering trade-offs within machines that we we dig apart and engineer Then it's fairly It's fairly it's more like a mathematical or a scientific exam problem. You know, there's a puzzle to solve there, which doesn't become sort of a massive dispute. You can objectify criteria and achieve them. But where the complexity sort of comes into it

is when you have a system so complex that it involves multiple teams or people, even just multiple people is enough. Even like one person over multiple periods of time can sometimes be enough. And then you inherently get these questions of, well, okay, what's your benchmark criteria? And are they even explicit? Are they hidden in some way? Is this system working? you know what and you know you can rapidly get up the transcend I thought this one of the extraction tree to the good or what's better sort of thing right I and yeah what I did sort of political essentially right so and and

what I want to bring back is um just think Conway's law no Conway is a software engineer in the 60s worked on compilers and he said he wrote a paper called how committees invent it's a very short paper and he said a number of interesting things about the way that the machine that an organization creates what the design of that machine will mirror the organizational structure of of the organization so if you you design a compiler and you give it to three teams then you'll end up with a three pass compiler he says um and this sort of hung around as mainly

folklore for about two or three decades but in the 90s and over the last 15 years there's been actual studies where people have sort of found some empirical evidence for this sort of concept. Yeah. And I think, and so I think, look, it comes up in my professional life all the time, this sort of effect. So I would just, like they seem very related to me because we're talking about, you know, QWERTY, okay, we're defining some optimization criteria around it and we're optimizing across different local systems but it's really how large is the system you're trying to optimize and how many subcomponents you know because we could agree some

other some some alternative objective criteria for keyboards right and their performance as machines but that's not actually the main problem that makes people's lives better or worse that that's about you know are you able to type out your letters quicker and communicate your information and manage your information better within your business or your organization or your hospital or whatever and and that's when it becomes is inherently tangled process right in a sense I agree what I'm thinking though is if you look at

and I like where you're going if you look at some of the engineering requirements that it seems to be some of the requirements like the amount of force it takes to push a button whatever that bandwidth is and it varies but it varies within some kind of constraints, seems to be really uncontroversial path. Whereas focusing on the layout seems like it is a controversial path. And I guess what I would want to maybe interrogate a little bit is why that particular bit of criteria you know just the geographic layout of the switches um why that is more or less a controversial path where the other ones aren't so for example if I were looking at um if I'm

looking at a system of a keyboard in hands as one system to for for typing speed um I can just as easily complain about the dependency of having force requirements that fit within um whatever the you know the the strength of human fingers are and pointing at that is kind of the weak link that prevents me from designing a better system unless I'm unless I'm very confused here I'm just thinking that it seems like of all the different criteria that make a system usable QWERTY seems to be the controversial one where other ones we could conceivably look at it as controversial and I think we're maybe just deciding not to. Are these other

criteria standardized? Yeah right it's a good question. Within a bandwidth I guess in a sense it is but if you mean standardized in the sense that it's a well I guess it depends on what your talent I guess what your tolerances are so and to be honest i'm just unfamiliar i'm not familiar how much of qwerty is standardized i mean of course the the layout of the actual symbols is but in terms of like for example the the other material aspects of it you know um maybe not so much so it sounds like we're pointing to the one aspect of qwerty that is standardized but it's still going to fit within some tolerances i mean there may be you know extremely tight tolerances but it's the tolerance is

nonetheless the kind of dimensions you're pointing to if some keyboard manufacturer decided that they they could play with those in an effective way they could you know for instance just make the keys more sensitive or less sensitive or on some other dimension that isn't to do with keyboard layout the way a keyboard works my sort of original assumption is that there is not much of a kind of obstacle to them just bringing out such a keyboard you know like a super responsive or a more robust or however you're varying it on

these other dimensions keyboard and putting into the market and if any people it will work and it just I mean I'm just wondering is that this other do they face the cut the same kind of lock-in obstacles let's say to put it that way around that someone would have if they wanted to to put a keyboard out out with an alternative layout. Well, and I'm thinking that, and I guess what I'm trying to push on, and I could be totally wrong in thinking this, I guess I'm just kind of playing a bit, but if we look at it as not necessarily a binary distinction, but just one of tolerance. For example, if you look at like a large cell phone or like a tablet, you can split the

QWERTY keyboard to a right and left hand side for using your thumbs. I mean depending on how you look at that order, it's a completely different muscular model of how to engage with it. So I'm just wondering how much of that can be altered or what are the parameters of what we're calling the QWERTY layout? Does it also include the spatial dimension of how close or how far away each letter is? And then how much of that can we change? So even if you change the actual graphic for the letter by using different fonts or whatever, At some point, it's going to be a gradient and not completely binary. And then if we look at it like that, then is it just that there's a certain tolerance that makes QWERTY lock-inable? I shouldn't say, well, I don't know.

I guess at least that's where I'm looking at it. It's just that it's still a gradient, even though we're talking about it as though it's binary. Can I say something? The binary thing would be whether it was or not QWERTY, and you're saying that there are ways in which you can mutate QWERTY or sort of modify or stretch it that can't be reduced to this kind of a Boolean question about is it or is it not still a QWERTY keyboard? That is what I'm thinking, and I guess where I was trying to go with that, which maybe that's not very interesting, but where I was trying to go with that is, what's the I guess challenging the idea of what is or is not a standard so that

when we're talking so is it is it admissible to talk about other things like the amount of force it takes to press a button or the size of a graphic to make it legible things like that are those admissible as these things that are relevant standards and are they standardized or is QWERTY kind of unique in it being a standard in a way that those others are not or is it just come is it is a qualitatively different or is it quantitatively different yeah so I think you guys are making some really interesting points and it's some incredibly intelligent individuals and I really like what everyone's saying one of the things I keep thinking about though too is I read this really interesting interview with Richard Powers a few years ago and he had wrote a written a book and the book he wrote the entire book without a keyboard he

used on dragon speak software or something like that so he was kind of talking about how just sort of like the mechanics of typing itself sort of limit his way of speaking and so you know while we might have a really efficient keyboard that allows us to type quicker and produce more communication perhaps that communication itself is conditioned in a certain way that prevents us from from speaking in a certain way. Sort of thinking a little bit about that. And sort of the importance of speech as an act that is defiant and free. And sort of releasing itself from the shackles of this sort of mechanics. And limitations to thought that are sort of influenced by productivity of communication that might not

in itself be meaningful. So that line of criticism, I'm assuming, would for conceivable keyboard layouts. It's not something that's distinctively QWERTY-phobic. It's on a whole other dimension again. It's a different other dimension to the one that Michael was just talking about. Yeah, it definitely is. And I mean, the path that our conversation is going in is extremely interesting to me. And I think you guys are all raising a lot of really interesting, extremely interesting points about QWERTY specifically. But yeah, that point is definitely way, I guess it would be like all possible types of keyboard and how these different types limit ways of thinking and speaking and sort of relegate speaking to a mechanical process of production.

as opposed to like the act of speaking with your voice through some sort of like voice recognition software. But so Richard Powers did an interview. I don't really I don't have the interview in front of me, but he talked about how I think it was the Echo Maker, which is a really interesting novel about sort of a traumatic brain injury and memory and communication. And so it involves a lot of these ideas of how the software of your mind is influencing your communication. You're thinking and yeah, he sort of just talked about how he was he wanted to Just divorce his writing process from the keyboard specifically. He wanted to just do it all through speaking your voice recognition software, right? Yes, I mean I I guess that in terms of this initial question about why

the the the quality the QWERTYnomics controversy or QWERTYnomics controversy has petered out this it's not an answer this because it's too recent but this this technology is obviously going to be totally prevalent really soon as now I mean I just know anecdotally people who have some hand problems and just do everything through a voice interface and it's totally practical now to do that so yeah I mean that whole aspect of things is obviously part of the context which I yeah I'd have to think about what bond about that in terms of this course like

does just there is the hegemony of QWERTY completely historically limited to a technological phase that is its end I don't know I think and Richard Powers was sort of indicating that he felt in some It was limiting what he could say It was limiting him. He felt that the keyboard itself was limiting his creativity in his ability to speak and realize his vision Yeah I mean

this whole axis of as i say it's a whole other dimension to this thing that i sort of feel almost we're likely to come back to in a sense that sure of qwerty is something that is actually legislative if it's actually you know if it shrugs off the prospect of a of a transcendent law and it itself is you know escapes any framing tribunal becomes becomes a transcendental then obviously it enters into a

dramatic potential antagonism with the kind of impulses you're now raising you know it becomes a kind of demonic historical event that that that that triggers some kind of I don't know what the you think would be the appropriate banner for this you know whether you think it would be kind of a straw manning thing to say it's a kind of humanist against the against the mechanization of language in the keyboard as it becomes historically condensed in the quality keyboard so it's not something it's again it's not something that the debate that is

between the two papers we're looking at what you're saying is a completely orthogonal question I think Yeah, I think so too, yeah. It is an orthogonal question. And I think that it sort of, I think the keyboard itself sort of relegates communication to a certain regime of politics, and it partitions speaking within a specific space and time within a specific partition of productivity but yeah that's that's something I probably have to go into some other time yeah I think if it's something you're attached to I think we

can be confident it will it will come back Does anybody have something from the sidebar that they would like to bring into the video? That was also my question. It's descended into Urbit Talk. Oh yeah?

I was just posing the question about how you'd think about this in relation to Erbit because it seems like that project is trying to do exactly what this dynamic that we're talking about is prohibiting and that's a complete re-grounding of the internet and I mean Jeremy's made some really good points actually in terms of these dynamics the bigger risk you take the bigger the payoff but it still seems to me like um the internet that we have is so entrenched more so than than the quality system in its sub suboptimal state um and it's more universal universally used that it seems kind of unbelievable that um that kind of displacement of the dynamics that we already have will happen

So, I mean, I know you mentioned Bitcoin too really early on as a kind of example of this actually happening. So, I mean, this is just the discussion that we've been having, but it seems to me, I mean, some of the ways that Yavin talks about NOC is as an objectively optimal system and optimal language. And that is the kind of reason why it should displace the systems that we have. you know the market will decide right but is that kind of within the terms of this particular discussion an example of trying to inject an idea of a transcendent

value as this kind of like simplicity equals optimality yeah that he makes no I think that's a really extremely relevant question to ask and always my problem with him is I think that he does have this you know for instance he he makes a very sort of theatrical dismissal of the common law tradition all of these kind of spontaneously systems he he says he wants to sweep aside he has a certain kind of imaginary sort of despotic rational planner that he thinks you know I don't know how much

of this is just rhetorical but in the rhetoric it's extremely strong this this this kind of vision for sure and I agree but it's definitely there in the rhetoric around the whole orbit system for sure and my my only sort of immediate i i'm not going to try and pretend i've got something really sort of conclusive to say about this at all except that just these things are things that are being added peripherally um and as you say like whatever the market will decide they're not actually he's not you know he can talk all he likes about

rebooting the internet but the internet is not accessible to reboot it all you can do is is tag something on the edge of the internet and if it works well enough then you know you can start building things around that or pressurizing the the the established norms of the internet from this from this position. Yeah, there's almost a geological sedimentation of technology, even in the case of Urbit, right? Because all of its systems are just layered over the existing ones. Like he doesn't propose laying new cables. Right.

He doesn't propose using completely different interchanges. everything is still at the base level TCP IP but it's just a it's a it's a stratification a layering so I think it's worth raising Gibson's quote William Gibson's quote of the future is here it's just not evenly distributed oftentimes you see systems as they grow or new techniques as they grow they don't entirely displace another method or another technology. The other technology just minimizes and scales. One expands and scales. Sometimes they exist side by side.

For as many text messages and emails that we're sending, people still send paper letters. I still get spam mail in my paper mailbox. So there are these layers of technologies that, And I think it's worth discussing how technologies can exist side by side versus completely displacing something. Yes. No, it is interesting. And I think there probably is the need for some sort of typology of standards like this. i mean what the the thing that to me makes qwerty especially interesting is that it has such a such

extraordinary hegemony you know i think the only thing there are a few things to me that obviously exceed i mean decimal numeracy is one you know like the the the hindu arab numerals as they're called you know there are places I guess where they're not used but then they have been just like it's complete sweep and QWERTY is really close to that I mean it's you know I know different countries have some minor keyboard and all of these kind of things but it's like there's a certain sense in which the the standardization of QWERTY exceeds that

even of these extraordinarily deeply rooted technological infrastructures partly because it is in a sense cultural you know it's not actually I mean it's installed in hardware every time someone stamps out a keyboard but it's not that it's not that the standard in here's as we going right back to the start of this whole session the standard doesn't in here in the fact that people have made investments in certain types of hardware production that is locking it and it in here's in the fact that it's become a cultural convention um so you know in terms of what you're saying about these kind of parallel

these parallel things i think that works really well for things like a bit and bitcoin and these new the attempts to innovate new standards and you know they're sort of added at the edge of a of a of a kind of ecology of standardized technological processes but it seems to me there's something about qwerty that goes uh sort of beyond that um you know and if you try to think well the dvorak keyboard is the model i'm taking it of something that would try to contest it and so the failure of dvorak is is again this really

iconic sort of cultural historical event and I don't you know it's an interesting question but it seems to me it's not really just easily translatable into the kind of you know it's other examples we've had the kind of beta max and and these particularly technological standards that are tied up up to a large extent with well maybe the beatamax example is okay I should probably stop at that point so is the point kind of like that the particular um irresistibility of it it's its potency is because it lodges itself so

deeply in a kind of unconscious social memory and then it proceeds to produce itself from that point rather than from a kind of external like you said hardware kind of structure in the way that uh dave paul david say his name distinguishes between hardware and software and software is precisely memory or habit yeah body habit but want to go i would want to say i would want to compare it to a religion more than a set of technological hardware investments you know i i think it's like it it's hegemonic in a way very close to the way that the great world religions are

but to but more more broadly than any of them you know i mean that it's got to be that there is a greater global cultural acceptance of the qwerty keyboard layout than there is of any of the great world religions um but it's still there is a level that there there is a certain point where they're on the same plane of cultural cultural commitments rituals like you know it's like you it's memory it's habit but but I think it's a it's a it's a it's a sort of cultural catastrophe in the positive the neutral positive sense of that of that

term that occurs in the 1890s with the with the arrival of of QWERTY and so You know, I guess. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. I didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, no. Please do because I'm babbling. So that's good. So like to answer your rhetorical question from before, if QWERTY is not God, then where is God? It's, well, you know, according to the critics, QWERTY is not God, but it is an imminent kind of God. I mean, it's here, right? It's kind of like... I think it's only it's God purely in the critical transcendental sense that it's not answerable to a superior legislative Authority and in so far as it lays down a law

There is no higher law to which we have access than the law QWERTY reveals to us and The higher in the sense well is that the case or is it still subject to to in a sense an economic law that it is with sufficient resources overturnable well I don't know I mean is it um you know it is we could we can hypothetically say that it is but is there any do we really have

any strong reason to think that QWERTY is less than an absolute planetary destiny you know that I mean what what would overturn it some alternative some alternative arrangement that would just be backed by massive amounts of capital and entrepreneurial enthusiasm. In a way, the whole of this QWERTY debate is tied up with the practicality of that, isn't it? And David's whole use of the Dvorak thing is to say, look, turn something, if you could overturn QWERTY by pure sort of economic rationality then we wouldn't have QWERTY in his argument well right but that

argument might just be false just because he's not accounting for again he's looking at there there's one function for a keyboard yes sure and so in your previous argument factors that you're that you invoked as having sort of a dignity that was to be respected alongside the narrow ones to do with typing speed or whatever all are all uh slave to the entrenchment of qwerty aren't they i mean is there is there a conceivable a conceivable scenario in which those other drivers would somehow detach themselves from the entrenchment of accordions

to start taking things in another direction. Well, I wonder, you know, to be honest, I haven't thought a ton about that, but just different input modalities, though, might recommend different layouts, whether or not they're used with your fingers or not. So you could go away from the very idea of a keyboard. Sorry, I'm sort of trying to think about it. Yeah, no, no, I guess I'm thinking that, and I guess going back to what I was saying, that with sufficient capital, I'm wondering, so the question was, is there a law to which QWERTY is subordinate? Yes. And my only suggestion was perhaps the laws of,

just the economics laws themselves would be have some kind of uh reign over qwerty only because conceivably if you were to design some some compelling um interface that was not with your fingers um qwerty would again it's hypothetical but would cease to dominate yes i know it's an interesting question because you know you could obviously say this is that in a certain sense that that the law of QWERTY is the economic law manifest you know I mean that that's really what the protest of this is isn't it is David's protest is you know that we have QWERTY because of a certain market-oriented model of economic protests and production has expressed itself

through the dominion of QWERTY. And so the criticism of QWERTY becomes this much more wide-ranging criticism of a certain type of economic process. So it's not in a way, yes, but doesn't that in a way make, you know, the economic process is in a way imminent to the triumph of QWERTY, isn't it? It's like it's expressed through the triumph of QWERTY. It's not really that we can see this economic process or this economic authority in any other way. You know, when we look at it, how does the economic express itself, then we see QWERTY.

you know QWERTY is the kind of manifest of this economic is that not right? that's kind of what I'm thinking I think it was brought up earlier too again we were talking about the Keynesian versus the Hayekian perspectives, it was brought up earlier that one of the problems with that kind of line would be that everything is a manifestation of that as long as you define utility broad enough. I'm thinking that was, I mean, for Mises, that was precisely his point, right, because it was not an empirical science, that it was a tautology. In which case, QWERTY would be a manifestation of the economic law as much as anything else. There wouldn't be anything necessarily

unique about it, just that it happened, just that it has the constraints that make it appear to be really durable. Yeah. yes I think so I'm not I'm not trying to think what the stakes are what what this last twist of what you're saying I mean for the Phillies Austrian types obviously languages current currencies there's always a third one isn't it I think common law systems all of these are the kind of manifestation of the process of spontaneous order and QWERTY would belong among belong among those type of phenomena I say as a kind of a

a beneficiary a kind of outcome of a processor of spontaneous order and I guess if it Yes, sorry, go. Well, no, I guess, and I mean, this may be not very fruitful, but I'm wondering if what's interesting about QWERTY then, and maybe, again, I'm repeating myself, where maybe the David and the Margulis piece are talking about it, again, in normative terms, is what's unique or interesting about QWERTY that it is dominant or that it has some kind of relationship to a transcendental standard.

So if we jettison the idea that there's any transcendental standard, then is the issue just impressiveness of the scale and how embedded it is. As opposed to... As opposed to the fact that what's interesting is it's scale and that it's suboptimal. So in other words, if we completely reject the idea that it is either optimal or not, that it's just descriptive, it's just what it is, then, which it seems like that's not what David and Margulies are talking about. But then is what's interesting about QWERTY just that it's attained this pervasiveness, but independent of whether or not it's pervasive and good or pervasive and suboptimal.

Yes. I mean I'd be reluctant to say it's just because it's pervasive but I'd be inclined to turn that around and say because of the fact that it is a manifest cultural destiny that that is the reason why we would then be interested in further examination of its properties and its characteristics and and you know it's like i mean i'm sort of jumping ahead a little bit here to stuff that i was kind of really i want to talk about mostly in the second module of this thing but it's it's um in various sort of kind of occult traditions where you say uh you know the classic example

more than the greek alphabet the hebrew alphabet you know the specific characteristics of the Hebrew alphabet, the particular numerical values given to a particular sign, these kind of arbitrary features of a particular cultural system. And you say, well, you know, why should we be interested in that? What kind of, you know, what claim to our attention and fascination do these arbitrary structures have on us? and the kind of sort of overt answer to that obviously is then a theological answer you know like God God is speaking to us through this through this system

we should trust it for various reasons to be some kind of transmission channel for divine revelation and that's why it's important and interesting to us and you sort of strip that down a little bit the authority of that of that cultural system is just coming from the fact that it is successful you know it's just you know there could be all kinds of other kind of possibilities for how Hebrew might have been structured or how it might have allocated the alphabetical numerals or all of these kind of these these features

within some imaginary global frame that there could have been all these alternatives but in fact you know this is this is what we've got this is the tradition um you know this so so its claim upon us is just the fact that it is the thing that is happening um he is like it's very much like that i mean it's like it has a claim significance rooted has no ground outside itself at all its grounds for significance and you know the compelling feature of QWERTY has just come out of the fact that it has achieved

this extraordinary position of vast resilient global cultural dominion um so i think you know this is sort of the actually just restating your point but in a with a kind of slightly different spin on it the fact once you once you go past dependency in a certain way and you abandon the you abandon the pretend to be making past dependency an object from some position of transcendent evaluation then

the path that has happened is just intrinsically imminently authoritative it's authoritative just because it is the thing that has made itself occur and there's nothing there's no appeal to anything beyond that you know these hypothetical alternative outcomes are alternative outcomes and you only have access to them through these in a way fantastic delusive constructs that that make it seem to you that you're you're able to achieve this position of kind of superiority over the

over the actual historical outcome. The role of culture in the adoption of these technologies is vastly, vastly underserved or underestimated. I'm coming at this from working in the tech industry and I think that there's a constant, at least from some of the investors I talked to, there's a constant discussion of just because you create a technology or just because you create something doesn't mean it's going to catch on. It's all about timing. It's all about both getting the product itself right as well as the culture and the timing.

But I think it echoes this point that the layers of QWERTY's dominance is not in the hardware side itself, but is really in the imprinting on the cultural side, on the human side, and the writing this factor for that technology. But the reason I'm kind of raising this point is in the discussion of some of these other technologies and why they are not as dominant as QWERTY is or haven't replaced entire – you almost would have to wait for an entire wave

or an entire generation. And I think that you could probably segment technological adoption or technological dominance by generation. and the number of young teens that are using Snapchat or texting or whatnot versus 30, 40-year-olds using similar technologies, it's constantly grouped by generation. But this idea of it, so just to kind of make the point even greater, the fact that it's persisted down generations is even more remarkable. yes yes I mean on this thing it's about a hundred and twenty years old I think

it's not as a if we accept David's judgment about when it locked in so Nick before we go any further I just want to give a time check we're ten minutes to one right now about just a little over so if we can we can either go a little further past one if people prefer that but we should definitely talk about next week meeting time and assignments yes and that Google classroom as well yes I mean sorry let I again won't go into us kind of splenetic apology thing about it But I really do, I'm sorry for keeping everyone waiting today.

Is it that we want to be doing this at half past nine rather than half past ten? I think if, from the honest, the consensus is 10.30 EST is a good time. But perhaps we can arrange some sort of way to make up for last week's class that wasn't able to happen due to technical difficulties. Yes, I assumed we were just running an extra week on that. Is that right? It seems like there were a couple people in the class that had Availability issues for the week after So right perhaps another way to do it is to have it on a different day Right if we were going to do that. I would have to

Talk with Mo and Jason about that just to confirm Okay that but that would be the final week of the second module yes yeah okay I might also have some rescheduling issues with that one okay but I definitely would treat it if it's okay with everyone else treat the default thing that we will be having that week and shunted along and we just have to be we just have to get sorted what's a good day for that final session so for for next week do do you do we have assignments that are doing a course room I don't think I need to formalize anything very strong about

that I I don't have a classroom for this this course yet I don't think okay I can I can send you that so I mean I would just say I promised to you to look there and you know it's a good communication channel and anyone who's who wants to put something that will be making a valuable contribution but I don't think I should be holding a whip over anybody yet at this data and saying that very perfect in terms of because we do now have another we have an extra week in this in this module because of the disaster last time and so I'm assuming

in terms of what we said last time we could probably spend another week on on similar terrain that we've been on uh today like i think if i if i throw in right away i think i've already put the link to that krugman article i think it's quite good um um it it feeds into the a lot of the background to this as you can see from the remarks in the david paper especially is like to brian arthur of the santa fe institute um and so i think sort of just thrashing a little bit deeper into these questions of past dependency evolutionary economics the role of complexity in economic theory and their

relations to this QWERTY topic is is a good place at least as a default to take off from next week if that's cool with everybody that sounds good to me Hmm Is everyone there's the sidebar sir blowing up right now yeah It's become it's become slightly cryptic actually if you're not following it so because standard for the class Sorry, did we settle on a time for next week? Yes, so next week. We're gonna meet at 10 30 a.m est Now is that my 10 30?

you know i think actually you're are you in you're in uh shanghai banghai let me just double check it likes to say is it the time i actually turned up or the time i should have turned up oh today you you showed up at 10 30. right okay and so that would if i did the same thing next week it would be okay or should i be trying isn't when's the daylight savings in eastern time that's November 6 no gotcha okay so let me just that's actually the day in the day after our class so then the next will week after that the would be the the 12th is when we'll have the time shift but we won't have to deal with that next week great does anybody else have any questions I'm not

following the sidebar right now um yeah I didn't think the sidebar I think the sidebars wandered off in some chaotic directions all right well I'll pass it off to you and if you want to go for 10 more minutes or however long you you'd like to that's that's fine um yeah I'm whatever people want to do at this stage do you does it seem to people like a kind of natural termination point or is anyone wanting to throw in a wave to things

I'm happy to go on with things. Do you want to offer a story where, maybe where? We should pop back in. It looks like a couple of people are going to head out. So. Yes. Honestly, I think I think it might be OK if if if if no one's feeling that they're being shut off right now. It might be it might be a good opportunity to.

To disperse what people think. Sounds OK. I think momentum is dispelled. okay um so any also any if people have suggestions of things people could use for the lookout or points they find especially in just all of that um this classroom space is a good it's a good forum to share all that stuff great and I will I'll take the sidebar here too as well and post the video from this course into the sidebar I also have the sidebar from last week's conversation but that most of that was chaotic yeah yes okay okay well thanks so much

for dealing with this so so well my last apology for keeping everyone waiting so long I'm sorry about that. Turned out really well actually towards the end. So it seems like the signal. All right, I'm going to end broadcast now. OK, cool. Thanks, everyone.