NCCP 700-1016 Qwernomics Path Dependency & Semiotic Fatality (Session 1)

Hello and welcome to Cornomics, 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. I'm very grateful that hang your hand so we had a weird sort of broken confused session last week but I'll treat that on the introduction and that we're sort of already and I won't sort of make

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 if anyone wants me to put new links in I think it should be unnecessary it's The leading point is the paper by, and this is the kind of touchstone of course, at least this first module, which is this paper by Paul A. David called Clio 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 So it's not really quite happening in real time, this debate. And as far as I'm aware, there's no comeback. But the two fit together extremely well, which is the paper by Stan Leibovitz and Steven

Margolis 1990 I also just might as well stick in there so 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 there's 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 lots of relevant material not too I might talk about it little bit so some sort of I I won't go on for a long time I'll just make a few introductory remarks thing to do is to start with a question that 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 and 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 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 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're 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 don't know if 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 the Raphnid. 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 friend 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 as spiders as scorpions, basically. Cool. I remember I moved into a like a 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 ball and then like slide a piece of cardboard underneath it and and then throw it in the gutter. Like 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. Nick's one. 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 it? It's going to scare the shit out of me.

Yeah, just kidding. What are you cooking? Egg sandwich. Overslept and just got home. 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 his internet has been really good. Yeah. Has anything changed? New computer, new location, anything else? More people, class size. This is the top class size for sure. But still. It'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. Thank you.

So I'm coming up with you to run by email. Hi, Nick. Okay, it just totally collapsed.

I don't really know what's going on with this. It 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. I don't know why this is happening. We've done something without anything this cataclysmic. Yeah, I think it seems like our end is okay. I have clear audio and video of everyone else. If everyone else's bandwidth is low, that helps again. otherwise we can just continue okay let's try and right sorry I have 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 I don't know whether

I was still with people when I was quoting the 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 maddock 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 QWERTY 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 political economic controversies of the modern age and so to get back to the question I don't understand is 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 qwerty

interface that it somehow bypasses it i i don't know what the answer to that is um so yeah i think i'm going to try and open it up and come back with a sort of uh attempts to push people down particular lines if they seem reluctant to to go down them um let's see 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 turn out the Leibovitz and Margolis paper no no not that one um the David Cole one he uses the term software as and like so court

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 he 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 of typists who've become versed in the um system becomes in his narrative this insuperable obstacle by the mid 1890s that no other competitive uh keyboard standard can can overcome just because people don't want to retrain the cost of retraining

is too much um 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 pathway 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 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've sort of been too fast with this to make it persuasive but it'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 is actually using a Dvorak keyboard because I never met anyone that used one before so but but the other detail from the David paper or the Davis paper on the Apple 2e computer had a switch where you could yes the 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 um 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 bojack 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 push past it yeah 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 um tries to push the Dvorak keyboard And I think that Liglitz and Margolis 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'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 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 that

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 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 and 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 are 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 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 think you can see that at other scales too but maybe not

such public examples yeah i i don't know that i 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 uh 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 um 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 justified by

That gives 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 the phone jack 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 Oxjack 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 all this is absolutely crucial zone because obviously the She here is this thing about where do technological standards come from and and to what extent are and that's objects of orchestrated political economic critique and and the the standard I think that the

reason I think there's something really classic about this exchange between David and Liebherz and Margot 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 the 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 people 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 versus 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 the the the existing market solution is markedly and notably sub-optimal and as I say 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 expected and and this is what Dvorak the Dvorak 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 optimum that from the perspective of the of the global from the perspective of the universal is kind of blatantly inferior and suboptimal and 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 when 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. I don't know. 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. 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, and then 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 qwerty is part of the controversy um 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 Margot is saying actually that it's pretty, 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 are prepared to accept but I 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 well as long as it there's I think another interesting standardization question is mp3 versus other audio formats, the years of CV 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 clearly not for an audiophile. So at scale for a given system, what is good enough to scale into the market helps drive some of these things.

Yes. I mean, that is an interesting question. Do you think that that is what the QWERTY-Dvorak difference is about too? I mean, is it actually that there's a kind of 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 you know better again is invoking a transcendent criteria isn't it it's like saying that there is some we're just as mentally sort of implying some tribunal some virtual tribunal that is looking at these different keyboard layouts and on the basis of some the uncontroversial criteria or non

partisan criteria is able to say this is this is better than then and I mean I think that this that assumption that sort of 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 there 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 that some kind of higher level of judgment then the then the standard that is it in question um but the counter the counter 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 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 the ontologically derealized 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 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 QWERTY with any

authority and 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 quinnomic quinnomic 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 a 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 sub optimality 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. So the 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 somewhere kind of thing has already been hashed out by the market much more thoroughly and David is accepting so you know I think I think they would they would accept that as a 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 that there's a there's a list isn't it to do with the left and right hand action and the amount of keys on the middle keyboard yeah in the Margulis article yeah I think they both they David and

uh lebritz and margolis both accept this same set of these technical criteria about how you would judge the efficiency of a of a keyboard layout um i think they they're sort of responding to david and accepting those three points isn't it sorry i i'd like to call up the article I'm slightly worried that I'm going to do some computer disaster if I've got a whole bunch of tabs open. I'm going to read this again. 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 only because the keyboard itself 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 to 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 I 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 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 so you're saying lock-in actually no I think so I think 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 I might understanding I think that's exactly it so I'm looking at it rather than and maybe the problem is we're looking at it as well at least in my head this one thinking is the um that we're treating the keyboard as though it's like a

synecdoche 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 gonna be some actual materials with constraints and things like this if we look at it on a very pragmatic scale just in terms of just the production of it 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 um maybe maybe a way to look at it is that all those are symmetrical rather than then subordinate in modifying the usability yes I mean that's it that's a 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 mugger is accepting that would that would prevent them having taken that option I guess partly it is this thing that they

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 is not worthy of intrinsic of intrinsic defense like no one Lieberman 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 pro the approximation of global optimality that that part 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 to usability that that are involved in staying on the path. Am I... Yeah, I think... Yeah, I think that's it. And I think the other problem I have is... I guess I'm not entirely sure it's even, I guess, appropriate or possible. Maybe it's possible.

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 no 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 that's good 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'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 there's a whole normative structure that is that is equivalent to the 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 transcendence superior law that overrides and judges

from beyond the law and this is like you know is therefore is path dependency is the path taken itself extremely 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 but if there's almost no 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 resource or 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 vantage point that isn't that doesn't have an interest at stake if that makes sense yes it totally makes 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 it the courtroom scene of you know in a zone of debate and say did we go direction did we take the right path and i think i agree with you

strongly that that is at least questionable um and and it's interesting to me you know that 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 Lieberts and Margo is and neither of them are criticizing in principle that the role of a transcendent tribunal in this question and so you know to put in 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 horizon that is that is captured by that dispute what what they agree on 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 but is it reasonable to say that QWERTY is not the closest thing to God that we could have. Is there something

that we can point to that is a God above QWERTY? You know, is 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 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 saying that at least in some hazy implicit way there is a global frame positioning and locating it and from which we're able to kind of you know give it this designation

well i think a local maximum i think i'm suggesting that even if there was one how would you how would it be accessible or or rather it wouldn't it wouldn't necessarily be accessible um in terms of 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 predictive terms and in terms of movement of the system itself like through regulation like in any cybernetic sense of regulation And which is like levels of simulation essentially 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's because we know that like the behavior of this plane in which this like particular state is occurring achieved where 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 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. Right. 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? Yeah, you can just assume very strange topologies, right?

Yeah. I think that that's 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 subscribed to wouldn't you say Jay I'm sorry I 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 more rules 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 jeremy i think is a definitely it's not like a resource allocation like how much of different things do you have to be able to get to build this thing but in terms of like material traits i think it's a good example that it was preventing a particular mechanical failure the truth sorry to interrupt jake but can i just because there's three there are three of these criteria actually i'm sorry i'm not looking at that right area i guess 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 yeah exactly where I was going with this is I just kind of find fascinating that this recapitulates sort of the chiral

organization, chiral and frontal organization of the brain that's controlling the hands and is doing this sort of semiotic work or training the hands to coordinate this kind of semiotic work in a way that has a thing, I mean, 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 like, you know, forward ocular focus. And so like, yeah, so to bring that back to like the global standard, the criteria for devising a global optimality standard not being accessible, I think you can almost sort of tie this back to 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, absolutely. I mean, I think you can also... 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 criteria like maximum typing speed and efficiency and things like that 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 just through hands and eyes essentially. 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 this point 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 the valley I'm sorry people ask me to elaborate on relative transcendence in the sidebar and I'm having to kind of yeah a little

bit of taking a little bit 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 sidebar I would encourage people to try and drag them forward into that on to send this a stage as well because it would be nice I mean other

people please jump in especially ones who haven't already been discussing but um like what jake put is relative transcendence reminds me of more like um uh component optimization and then viewing systems at different scales so like when you put together a machine um you can you can optimize and sort of define the specification around a particular component of the machine and other components and you can define sort of engineering benchmarks around those components but then how those components fit together into a larger system or machine to achieve something else you

know 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 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 there's a puzzle to solve there which which doesn't become sort of a massive dispute you can you can I objectify criteria and

achieve them but where the complexity sort of comes into it is when you have our system so complex that it involves multiple teams or people even just multiple people is enough but even like one person over multiple periods of time can sometimes be enough and and then you then you inherently get these questions of well yeah okay what's your benchmark criteria and are they are they even explicit are they hidden in some way you know 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 yeah 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 this link 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 uh he said a number of interesting things about the way that um the machine that an organization creates what the design of that machine will mirror the organizational structure of the organization. So if you design a compiler and you give it to three teams,

then you'll end up with a three pass compiler, he says. 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. And I think, and so I, 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? Because we could agree 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. better or worse. That's about, 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 that's when it becomes this inherently tangled process.

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, 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, 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 if I'm looking at a system of a keyboard in hands as one system to for for typing speed I can just as easily complain about the dependency of having force requirements that fit within whatever the you know the the strength of human fingers are and pointing at that is kind of the 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. Of course, the layout of the actual symbols is, but in terms of, like, for

example, the other material aspects of it, you know, 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, I guess what are the parameters of what we're calling the QWERTY layout? Does it also include this 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? binary 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 that that can't be reduced to this kind of a boolean question about is it or is it not still a quote a quote to keep or that is what

I'm thinking and I guess what I guess what I was trying to go with that which maybe maybe that's not very interesting but what I was trying to go with that is what's the um is it 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 qualitatively different or is it quantitatively different? Yeah. So I think you guys are making some really interesting points

and 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 written a book, and the book, he wrote the entire book without a keyboard. He used 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 speaking in a certain way. sort of thinking a little bit about that and um so the 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 like 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 be 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 Mike 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. So Richard Powers did an interview. 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 this these ideas is of how the software of your mind is Influencing your communication and 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 guess that in terms of this initial question about why the the the QWERTY the QWERTYnomics controversy or QWERnomics controversy has petered out this it's not an answer to 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'd have to think about what... on 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 in Richard Powers was sort of indicating that he felt in some way it was limiting what he could say It was limiting him. He felt that the keyboard itself was limiting his creativity and 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 the sense that 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 QWERTY 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, an optimal language. And that is, you know, the kind of reason why it should displace the systems that we have. And, 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 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 makes a very sort of theatrical dismissal of the common law tradition, all of these kind of spontaneously systems 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'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 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 bad or pressurizing the the established norms of the internet 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 there 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 this 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 there'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 everybody's 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 say 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, don't please do because I'm babbling so that's good

So like to answer your rhetorical question from before If quality is not God Then where is where is God? It's a will you know it according to the critics quality is not God But it is an imminent kind of God. I mean it's here, right? It's kind of yes, 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 Then 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 from the uh from from the entrenchment of qwerty and 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, 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? it and my only suggestion was um perhaps the laws of just the 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 sense that that the law of QWERTY Is the economic law manifest you know I mean that that's really what's protest of this is isn't it? David's protest is you know that we have QWERTY because of a certain market-oriented model of economic process 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 economic process so it's not in a way yes but doesn't that in a way make you know that 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 we can see this economic process or this economic authority in in any other way You know when we look at it. How does this how does the the economic? express itself then we see QWERTY you know QWERTY is the kind of manifest of this economic law is that is that not right that's that's kind of what I'm thinking I think

it was brought up earlier too that again we're 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 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 that make it appear to be really durable yes I think so I'm not I'm not

trying to think what the stakes are what what that 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 All of these are the kind of manifestation of the process of spontaneous order and QWERTY would belong among those type of phenomena as a kind of a beneficiary, a kind of outcome of a process of spontaneous order.

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, 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 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 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 um 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 and 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

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 the city 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 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 it has no ground outside itself at all it's grounds for significance and and um 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 pretense 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 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, I think it's 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 talk 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

the imprinting on the cultural side, on the human side, and the... I think without a doubt, right. ...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 of, or an entire generation. And I think that you could probably segment technological adoption or technological dominance by generation. You know, the number of young teens that are using Snapchat

or texting or whatnot versus, you know, 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 120 years old I think 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 10 minutes to one right now about just a little over So 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 And that Google classroom as well Yes, I mean sorry that I again Won't go into this kind of splenetic apology thing about it, but I really do I'm sorry for keeping it on waiting today and is it that we want to be doing this at half past nine rather than half past ten? I think if from so on Like the consensus is 1030 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 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 due in 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 I don't think I should be holding a whip over anybody yet at this stage and saying that. All right, perfect. In terms of, because we do now have another, we have an extra week 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 similar terrain that we've been on 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 it feeds into a lot of the background to this as you can see from the remarks in the David paper especially is like to Brian Arthur the Santa Fe Institute 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 quality 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

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 So next week we're going to meet at 10.30 a.m. EST. Now, is that my 10.30? You know, I think actually, you're in Shanghai. Shanghai? 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? Today 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? When's the daylight savings in Eastern time?

That's November 6th. Oh, gotcha, okay. So let me just... That's actually the day after our class, so then the next week after that would be 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. Yeah, I don't think the sidebar... I think the sidebar's 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'd like to, 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 another wave to things? I'm happy to go on with things. Do you want to offer a story where?

Maybe where? We should hop back in. It looks like a couple of people are going to head out. yes I honestly I think I think it might be okay if if if if no one's feeling that they're being shut off right now it might be a it might be a good opportunity to to disperse what what do people think sounds okay I think my momentum is dispelled okay so any also any if people have suggestions of things

people could use really look at or or points they find especially just all of that 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 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 add broadcast now. Okay, cool. Thanks, everyone.