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The virtues of standardization are evident enough to everyone-so much so that even the proprietary sort has its defenders. In a story about Microsoft, the New York Times quotes Mike Campbell, CEO of Campbell Software in Chicago, about the difficulty of supporting his software on sixteen different operating systems. "I hate it!" he says.

So what's Campbell doing? Helping the monopoly. He tries to persuade retailers to go with Windows and make it a common platform. "I'm begging for it", he says. (Mar. 5, 1998) Of course, truly open standards might further Campbell's cause even more than a proprietary standard. But what most needs recognizing today is the way standardized software in general constrains us. The most crucial antagonism is not between monopolistic, proprietary standards and open standards-important as that tension may be. Rather, it is between what you might call frozen intelligence-the kind we embed in fixed standards of any sort-and the fluid, re-visioning intelligence that is required in order to avoid being imprisoned by those standards. Yes, we need standards, but the more thoroughly standardized our lives, the greater the re-visioning and standard-escaping powers we require if we are to retain a degree of expressive freedom.

Incidentally, I see no vivid distinction between software standards and software itself. Every piece of software is already a kind of standard, providing a set of procedures designed to be executed over and over. More generally, such standards are continuous with the entire range of specifiable forms and structures that shape our activity, from organizational procedures to legal statutes to fixed mental habits.

* * * * * * * * *

Software lends a definite logical structure to our activities, however finely articulated and multi-layered that structure may be. The strands of this logical web, like Lilliputian threads, can bind us equally well regardless of whether they are spun by proprietary or open committees. But within a healthy context where imaginative re-visioning is active, the threads can play their part in liberating us.

When the Renaissance painters discovered the precise, mathematical methods of linear perspective, there was an unleashing of tremendous creativity. The rules of perspective were, at first, inseparable from a new way of seeing the world-a way that inspired artists like Piero della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci to lay the observational foundations for modern science. Over time, however, the fixed algorithms of linear perspective began to feel mechanical and inhibiting, inadequate to the new visions that were stirring artists. (This was true of the greatest artists almost from the start. Michelangelo scorned the standard, geometric methods, preferring the "compasses in the eye".)

New structures, new forms into which we can pour our personal expressions, often do provoke a surge of creative energies. But these forms always become straitjackets with time. Such is the essential movement of the human spirit. One generation's wildly unexpected expression is the next generation's staid and stifling form-until we somehow manage to break out of the form. That's why the fame of great poets is so often posthumous:

They have, as Shelley said, to create the taste by which they are appreciated; and by the time they have done so, the choice of words, the new meaning and manner of speech which they have brought in must, by the nature of things, be itself growing heavier and heavier, hanging like a millstone of authority round the neck of free expression. We have but to substitute dogma for literature, and we find the same endless antagonism between prophet and priest. How shall the hard rind not hate and detest the unembodied life that is cracking it from within? How shall the mother not feel pain? (Owen Barfield, "Archaism", in Poetic Diction)

* * * * * * * * *

The worrisome question today is whether the rind of silicon and logic we are now secreting at such a furious pace will, in the end, allow any life at all to crack it from within. The Renaissance artists never became unalterably dependent upon tools embodying the algorithms of linear perspective. As their needs changed, they did not have to layer new software upon the old, or go in and revise millions of lines of code in order to pry open a few degrees of freedom for themselves. They could simply discard the entire apparatus of perspective and go on to other things-such as, eventually, impressionism and abstract art. At least, they could do so if their own ability to re-vision the world was strong enough.

But in many spheres of life today, realizing a new vision of the world is not so easy. Even if we have the necessary inner powers, we immediately find ourselves confronting the entrenched silicon logic that so many people liken to an external nervous system. Objective and enduring, ramifying with remarkable ease, penetrating every corner of society like the filaments of a fungus in rotting fruit, this global syntax extends itself automatically. Not only that, but there is always strong pressure to keep the extensions consistent with the previously established logic.

"Previously established"-this conservatism needs reckoning with. The more we build upon a standard-for example, the more software we erect upon it-the more entrenched and immovable the standard becomes. We enjoy our new efficiency and freedom above the standard only by reducing our freedom in the lower domain embodied by the standard. So as we layer one standard vertically upon another, codifying ever higher levels of human activity, the question arises: how do we preserve a balance between form and freedom, between the crystalline clarity and fixity of ice and the dissolving fires of the imagination?

It is vastly simpler to impress algorithms upon silicon than upon the living dynamism of human institutions. But the more the institutions have already adapted to the silicon, the greater the pressure to yield still further. We have already learned how the relatively fixed network of roads and highways becomes a constraining factor in the evolution of communities. But if the highway system becomes a brute given, limiting future choice, we have hardly begun to reckon with the infinitely more far-reaching ways computerization can hedge in and close off our potentials for social expression.

Look at the world of modern finance. Once the computational structures have been elaborated to a certain point-with trillion-dollar money flows traversing those structures-it is not so easy to toss them blithely aside and take up other forms of financial expression. We are already finding that as "simple" a matter as changing the New York Stock Exchange from an "eighths" system to a decimal system can turn out to be a major headache.

* * * * * * * * *

Or look at the cockpit of a jet airliner. As the plane becomes more software-driven and as the standard operating procedures followed by the pilot and air traffic controller specify the pilot's actions more minutely, the plane begins to "fly itself". The pilot becomes more and more superfluous.

In other words, the plane's flight increasingly becomes a strictly technical matter. This is possible because the pilot and passengers are not engaged in some sort of Lewis and Clark expedition, exploring a new landscape. There is no need for conferring, for re-evaluating priorities and purposes, for assessing the progress and value of the trip to date. The pilot will not even ask the passengers whether they would like to swoop down for a closer look at this or that sight. All of which is just as well, since most passengers, with their tightly structured lives, would object to such unscheduled adventures anyway.

Just as well, yes-although we may occasionally want to ask ourselves whether too much of our passage through this world is taking on such a purely technical character. We may want to ask, that is, whether the tight structuring of our lives has encouraged us to forget what it means to explore, or to seek those dimensions where exploration is so essential.

We may be thankful for the rule-based, predictable, and instrument-bound flight of commercial airliners, but when we see, for example, the classroom becoming a highly structured, merely technical undertaking- one that can "fly by itself", without the teacher-surely we have cause to worry. And here I'm referring not just to the growing role of the computer in the classroom, but also to the close specification of the curriculum by bureaucrats.

If there's any place where the spirit of exploration and the spirit of re-visioning should reign, it's in the classroom. Teacher and students should encounter what for both of them holds something of the unknown- on the teacher's part because he is engaging the subject matter "live", right there before the students, rather than presenting what has already been completely structured by bureaucrats, textbook authors, software, or his own memory.

Knowledge that we've already given a definite form to-knowledge that can be stored and routinely transferred from one place to another- scarcely matters in education. Far the most important thing the students learn from the teacher is the art of re-visioning itself (which happens to be the one lesson it is most difficult to harness the computer to). The most essential act of understanding, scientific or otherwise, is the metaphoric leap-the "liquefaction" and unexpected re-crystallization of the structures of knowledge, rather than the recapitulation of existing structures.

* * * * * * * * *

Or, again, look at the visual arts. I suppose most artists are working in such fields as advertising and marketing, magazine design, and film. It is nearly impossible to pursue this work today without using powerful computer software, and anyone who spends five minutes looking at magazine ads or the graphics on the evening news can see how the tools have directed and hemmed in the artist.

This narrowing has to do with the peculiar "vision" of the software: a work of art becomes a set of pixels and mathematically defined geometric constructs, which can then be subjected to various logical transformations. The computer is remarkably facile at performing these transformations, and so the most image-saturated generation in history is endlessly assaulted by every possible visual distortion, every possible permutation of pixels, simply because it can be done. Little thought is given to the intrinsic lawfulness or meaning of the image in its own imaginal terms. Certainly the true artist can still try to live into the qualities, say, of the color green, and can seek the essential expressive gesture of a plant or rock or tool. And certainly schoolchildren can learn something artistically deeper than the manipulation and weird deformation of clip art. But, meanwhile, there's a massive graphics industry, with a huge investment in computer equipment, software, and professional training, and there's a popular culture hooked on the ever increasing shock value of the latest graphic sensations. How can we gain the inner strength to flee the torrential output of the entrenched computational algorithms? Where can we find the repose that would enable us to rediscover the image as a source of fresh revelation rather than arbitrary manipulation?

An aside: the graphic artist's pixel is a close analog of the scientist's atom. Both serve in practice as a prison for the imagination, discouraging us from attending to the irreducible and always non-discrete, non-atomistic qualities of things. These qualities are the only possible basis for a true science and a true art, because they are the only way the world we explore scientifically and artistically is given to us.

* * * * * * * * *

I mentioned highways as a constraining factor in the evolution of communities, and then suggested that the constraints of software may prove still more onerous. I'd guess many readers immediately reacted with "No, software gives us much more flexibility. It is easier to change bits than to re-shape concrete."

There's a misunderstanding here. Software does afford us greater flexibility in the sense that, given a particular vision of some task, we can reduce the vision with wonderful fineness of detail to a set of formal structures in software. But what I've been talking about is how we grow, how we change, how we re-vision things. On this score, it is exactly the thoroughness and fineness of detail that is the problem.

Think of the difference between an extremely crude and bulky set of body armor, on the one hand, and the most finely wrought, close-fitting suit of chain mail on the other. An elegant software package may be more like the chain mail. It's certainly nice to have such naturally fitting armament, and I am in no way arguing against acquiring it. But then we need to ask ourselves what happens when the person inside the suit begins to grow? The crude armor might actually allow more room for growth than the (once) perfectly fitting mail.

However it may be with an isolated, first-try piece of software (which we can readily discard in favor of a new try), the steady accumulation of one software layer upon another, millions of lines upon millions of lines, is bound to make us think twice before saying, "Gee, maybe our original analysis wasn't the best and we need to rethink matters." It may prove easier to cramp our own growth in order to accommodate the billion-linked suit of mail we have already forged for ourselves.

In many domains, I realize, it may seem forced to set software and standard procedures against the possibilities of human growth. Just think of that airliner's cockpit. Who (beside pilots) would complain about the pilot's life being reduced to boring routine? But it's well to remember, at least, that the places where we've reduced something to strict technique are the places where we've excluded the human being.

I think it's easy to overlook the significance of these ever widening domains where everything functions mechanically, without any apparent human implications. The packet-switching architecture of the Net, for example, might seem to be another such domain. And yet, I can hardly believe that this architecture is wholly disconnected from our increasing willingness to conceive all human exchange as essentially a matter of information transfer-the movement of discrete, objective packets of data from one place to another. It stands to reason that the more we become conscious of a mechanical and meaningless flow of symbols through the world (as given in our technical visions), the more readily we conceive our own communication in the same terms. The influence doubtless flows both ways: our habits of mind take on objective form in technical artifacts, and the artifacts in turn reinforce our habits of mind.

* * * * * * * * *

What is often not realized is that the possibility of genuinely new vision always hinges upon our ability to let the old logic of our thinking and seeing "go fluid". If, having written a sentence, I decide that it doesn't express quite the right shade of meaning, then-no matter how slight the shift of nuance I am after-I may well end up having to restructure the entire sentence. And if my meaning is genuinely new, I will have to rely in part on metaphor to suggest it. But metaphor is, among other things, the employment of words in violation of the previous rules of use. The old words and their syntax dissolve, reconstituting themselves as a new reality. That's just the way it always is between the living and the frozen- between my current effort to grasp meaning, and the structures into which I have previously poured my meanings. Even if I use many of the same words in my new phrasing, they will actually be different words, with their meanings subtly altered by the new context.

This tension between logic and the play of meaning, between the syntax of our existing vision and our powers of re-visioning, is fundamental to human activity and thought. And it is part of the essence of this tension that every seeing with new eyes puts all existing syntactic structures of understanding at risk. We do not just juggle fixed parts on an existing latticework of logic; rather, the parts themselves are re-imagined along with the latticework, and reality no longer submits to analysis according to the old scheme.

One of the symptoms that re-visioning is losing out to frozen intelligence in the computer age is the widespread attempt to conceive change as the mere rearrangement of existing elements. In all true change the elements themselves are transformed. Merely to rearrange what already exists-a task the computer performs so well-is to accept an underlying logical structure as unalterably given. It is to remain imprisoned within one particular way of viewing things. By contrast, re-visioning may well leave no underlying level of form or logic completely as it was.

* * * * * * * * *

A computer program, considered strictly from a technical standpoint- that is, from the computer's standpoint-is syntax pure and simple. There is a bedrock level of logic that just is what it is, without possibility of re-visioning itself and the world.

To reach a place where you can talk about re-visioning, you have to widen your view to embrace the human context: first, there are the programmers who develop and successively revise the program, based (possibly) on new ways of seeing the world; second, there's the society of users, who may (within greater or narrower limits) alter the way they relate to the program; third, there are the non-users who nevertheless must decide how to adapt themselves to the various ways the program shapes society.

If there's a single, dramatic fact about this human context, it's that, within the high-tech corporation, new generations of software get cranked out with almost no attempt at re-visioning society in any deep sense. Technical feasibility and the extension of existing technical logic are the overwhelmingly dominant considerations. The next generation emerges automatically-the fulfillment of the dead imperative laid down by the previous generation.

The ramification of logical structures and standards can proceed in this automatic fashion. Re-visioning cannot.

And, of course, it's easy to understand why re-visioning is de-emphasized. As we've just seen, to re-vision is to let a standard syntax "go fluid". But when that standard syntax is as expensive and as intricately articulated as a major system of software, how can one even think of "morphing" its bedrock structure? By the very nature of things, there can be no algorithm for this. Often the only realistic alternative would be to start from scratch. Far easier to take the existing structure as given and build on it.

* * * * * * * * *

Our tendency to call software "user-friendly" (or not) indicates, I think, an unhealthy confusion. At least it does if we take user-friendliness to imply more breathing room for the human being-more room to grow and re-vision our shared world. As we've seen, software and standards *by themselves* always become something of an oppressive element, something we must learn how to transcend. Their very nature-especially when they are thought to be intrinsically valuable-is to constrain us.

To discover user-friendliness in any deep sense-to discover the place of software and standards in a truly liberating context-we have to look at that context. That is, if we want to see a healthier balance between frozen intelligence and fluid, re-visioning, expressive intelligence- then we must find it within the broader field upon which the software is evolving. Are we teaching programmers to engage in serious re-visioning of the world when they modify their programs-or are they just fixing bugs and extending the logic of the original in an ever more fine-grained and broadly reaching way? Are we teaching users to re-vision the tasks structured by the software-or are they just hoping to rid themselves of the awkwardnesses in the previous versions of the programs?

* * * * * * * * *

J. William Gurley asks,

How do you differentiate your product if your core mission is to ensure that your product operates exactly as your competition? The bottom line is that you don't .... Theoretically, you could have a better sales force or better service and support .... Yet these are the assets of the larger, entrenched companies. Open standards allow large entrenched companies to mitigate the innovation and market share leads of hot young start-ups and easily move into their markets. (*Above the Crowd Dispatch*, May 26, 1998)

You can see this in their products. Look at finance again. This may be the field most thoroughly in the grip of software. It is also a field where the expression of value is extremely difficult. Any investor who wants his investment to mean something, anyone who believes that every financial transaction is an expressive gesture helping to sculpt the kind of family, community, and society he lives in, and who wants at least some of his transactions to be part of a responsible and enduring connection to the party on the other end-such a person may well conclude that the only reasonable course is to abandon the current, global network of millisecond cash flows in favor of the various small, alternative institutions. The prevailing structures are too straitening, too reduced to a pure syntax of number, to become a vehicle for anyone's qualitative, personal vision of social welfare.

Much the same could be said about the production of goods lacking in qualitative distinction and artistic quality. But that's a topic for another essay.

* * * * * * * * *

Whether we will allow new visions-new expressions-of the human spirit may be the decisive question as we set chink after chink of our global information structures in place. The virtues of open standards are real-and I strongly support them. But with another part of ourselves, we must fight against all standards, struggling to preserve the potentials for meaningful change in the future. This requires us to cultivate the kind of mental flexibility that allows us, first in our imaginations and then in reality, to change everything, however subtly. I suspect that only in the impassioned defense of such living, imaginative powers will we find the resources to limit the siliconification of our lives and leave a few cracks for whatever tender shoots the next generation, beyond all prediction, sends toward the light.

- Steve Talbott (stevet@oreilly.com)
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