Some thoughts on why I'm creating for a smaller audience, particularly for my friends.

#Feeling at Home

What reminds you of home?

For me, not an app—until I read Robin Sloan's note: an app can be a home-cooked meal.

Sloan begins with a familiar anecdote: when his family's main communication app shut down, they had to decide on a replacement. Dreading the idea of resorting to WhatsApp, he spent a week making his own app.

They use it every day! (so wholesome)

Reflecting on the process, he laments at the incidental complexities in modern development—code-signing, identity provisioning, and other jargon that seem like magic incantations. He dreams of a world where such apps could be created in a day.

Sloan critiques how programming is often framed as a path to wealth (learn to code) or survival, contrasting it with the more personal and less economically-driven act of cooking. App as business over app as meal.

Despite the slog, the spirit of the open source components used to make the app imparted a tug to give back. Yet the personal nature of his code—with its hardcoded credentials and lack of abstractions, made submitting to GitHub an ordeal.. It's specific, unique, without scope creep. This leads him to identify himself as "the programming equivalent of a home cook."

While his story doesn't aim to spark a revolution in computing, to me it showcases what technology could be otherwise: an act of love. Rejecting the utilitarian, corporate software model, Sloan created something that feels like home—an intimate solution born out of necessity, not outsourced to an institution.

What gives me hope is that viewing technology through the lens of love and personal agency can reconnect me back to our shared roots, what it means to be human. To the radical, whether it's the arts of techne (technology) or household of oikonomos (economics). What's inspiring me isn't the shortsighted futures of another unicorn startup, grand manifestos of building, or even tech optimism, but acts of personal agency.

This story shows me it's still possible to reclaim a different ethos, offering new metaphors for how to live with technology and each other.

#Entirely Itself

There's a world of difference between personal software and personalized software, tool and system, file and app. The -ed in personalized signifies the past, that it's been predetermined. The tool incorporates the user's intent while the system itself determines the rules of engagement. Can the focus of personal software be the person, not the software?

BoopSnoop, the name of Sloan's app, inherently leaves out the unquestionable concern of modern-day, industrial development: scalability. It's reflected in the name itself!

A user isn't a helpful category. It's solely for his family! No further thought needs to be given to authentication and managing passwords. Hosting it on TestFlight avoids unsolicited complaints and eliminates the need for onboarding, moderation, or migration. The interface isn't minimalist by a design aesthetic; it just fits—a video with two buttons: one to record, one to view.

BoopSnoop isn't a "personalized" app, made for you. Not a For You Page. There's no need for a settings page or defaults. Just as each homemade meal stands on its own, Sloan emphasizes, "This app is Entirely Itself — not a framework, not a template — and that’s inseparable from the spirit in which it was made". It stands on its own, not within a pre-defined category.

Let there be tools
that do the work of ten or a hundred,
yet no one will care
to use them.

There's a unique joy and power in creating for specific people rather than an abstract entity (everybody), especially creating for its own sake. So I don't mean to create a desire to destroy what is industrial. I'm wondering what it would be like to simply disregard it, to focus my attention elsewhere. How would I feel in committing to other ways? To recognize that even as a technologist, I forget the power of making my own software: for myself, for my family, for my communities.

---

Feels like this desire for escalation (scale) isn't just pushed in creating an app, but to creation in general, to every decision I make.

When I started getting back into music a few years ago, friends would wonder whether I'd become a pianist on the worship team at church. When I was playing around with Ableton and watching Youtube videos about music theory, friends would wonder if I wanted to become a musician and put it on Spotify. I have nothing against anyone asking or even the particular question itself, but it is frustrating promoting in a culture that expects any action to turn into a Thing™. I get it. But non-traditional work doesn't seem to be able to escape categorization: now everything gets compared to being an influencer.

It's not unlike the default question of "what do you do for work?", where work is defined by what is professional, what leads to career growth, what counts for GDP. The desire for legibility and classification is understandable, but it feels more like compartmentalization, a kind of objectification that I'd expect a bureaucracy to care about, not a person.

I was honestly overjoyed when someone I met at a meetup said, "Henry! You're the one with the podcast about faith with Nadia right?". I might not be stuck with the label "the Babel guy" or what company I worked at.

Maybe it's the similar. BoopSnoop isn't just another messaging app, it is itself. I'm not just a software engineer, podcaster, resident, friend, etc.

---

It's clear that an industrial mindset monopolizes from a market perspective (Big Tech buys out startups), but it also limits what's possible. The resonance of Sloan's approach in me reveals how deeply ingrained the industrial, de-personalized mindset is in tech culture, shaping the conceptions of what software is for. The image of the machine.

Computers have always had a capability to be a tool for freedom and agency, yet what happens when even those who know how to code lose that social imaginary in a corporate world? What happens when attention is placed on the artifact, the device itself over the personal connection it creates? Or when programming is viewed the production of code over the production of a theory, personal to the creator? It's no wonder the conviviality of the original computer's ideals gets lost. A computer is a feeling!

#Limited Software is Personal

What are possible directions of computing? The scalable doesn't determine a direction on its own.

Sloan mentions "situated computing" where software is contextualized in a specific environment. For BoopSnoop, there is no need to personalize a login screen with usernames because the only people who can use it are his family - thus there's no need to create a product sprint for it either.

Carl Mitcham speaks of convivial software, which takes from Illich's notion of convivial tools: tools that we work with, not work for us. His three criteria are stability (no pressure to upgrade, migrate, re-learn, non-SaaS), transparency (open source, open process, debuggability), simplifiability (against feature float/creep, unix-like). For desktop software I think of VLC for videos, OBS for streaming, Rectangle for window management. Or a single-purpose websites like title.sh to capitalize some text.

End-user programming attempts to enable the end-users themselves to engage in programming, so that a user can be a producer. The common example of this is spreadsheets!

But it is monopolizing technology that attempts to create a totalizing system, one that imposes its own sensemaking.

Clearly you foresee that machines which ape people
are tending to encroach on every aspect of people’s lives,
and that such machines force people to behave like machines.

The logic of the machine overrides the logic of its human users. Google trained a generation to speak in terms of keywords to get better results.

It still remains to be seen how it goes with LLMs. But within software creation, many see the opportunity: a future home for home-cooked-software and folk interfaces thanks to the help of AI, allowing for re-imagining of end-user programming, of a kind of just-in-time programming that allows for a good kind of disposability. (though I don't lose hope that people continually seem to find ways to express themselves within the confines of another's system.)

Convivial (living together) technology leaves room for the "logic" of its user. In sense, it could have as many uses as people that use it, an expression or extension of the tool-user.

This is how Lee Felsenstein conceived of the personal computer, as a playground: "If you encourage people to tamper with the equipment, you will be able to grow a computer and a community in symbiosis".

When they finally met, Illich asked him, “If you want to connect people, why do you wish to interpose computers between them?” Felsenstein replied, “I want computers to be the tools that connect people and to be in harmony with them.”

May a new kind of software be a medium that can cleave us together, not apart.

#Working With

My proposition, following Illich, was that
a computer could only survive
if it grew
a computer club around itself

Where are these clubs? I know they exist!

What I see online are the maintainers of communities that have burned out, tired of working in a stadium. I'm tired of feeling like everything must escalate in the direction of an influencer. I want to go back to a club.

	High User Growth	Low User Growth
High Contributor Growth	Federations (Rust)	Clubs (Astropy)
Low Contributor Growth	Stadiums (Babel)	Toys (ssh-chat)

Didn't I always want to be part of a band, a podcast, a magazine?

In my experience, open source hasn't really acted as a club. A majority probably think that it is GitHub. There's a correlation on the one size fits all nature of GitHub that allows it scale, starting with it's unified interface. I'm just realizing a parallel between this form of organization and the convivial tools which Illich describes as "working with us, not for us".

I've mostly worked on projects that got a lot of attention: JSCS/ESLint, Lerna, Babel/TC39. In maintaining a large project, it always felt like I was working for someone, rather than working with a friend. It's in this large system that it feels like the relations are inverted.

And it'd usually be someone I didn't even know. A random person across the globe in the middle of the night for me. What made me feel the desire to help was my problem (putting my identity in being helpful).

I'm reminding myself that helping an individual or group digitally across the globe is what can make open source so impactful to begin with. But it's also what can alienate me from the task.

Both a maintainer and user are abstract entities hiding behind GitHub handles and profile pictures, not persons, so it's no wonder maintainers are treated inhumanely, and unfortunately respond in kind. It's why I'd always felt a tug to at least do a video chat vs. talk through GitHub issues or meet in-person, to make things a little less efficient and remind myself of the humanity of the other.

In this case, it wasn't feelings of home, but wanting the feelings of community.

Looking back, it's why I wanted to leave my job to work in open source full time in the first place. Not so I could just write more code, let alone code I wanted to write, but understanding the importance of people themselves in the whole process of this phenomena called open source.

My go-to explanation of open source is usually Wikipedia for code, but the main picture in my mind is of a library or community garden. There's a shared sense of responsibility among all attending (whether it's silence, labor, or food). There's a limited "audience" in that everyone participates more or less equally as the producers of the event, no one is just watching. I don't want to think of it as different instances of the same thing, each event is a unique, particular arrangement of people invited or that end up showing up.

So I'm back to wondering, why can't an app be a club? A app where we mutually participate? An app as potluck?

#Side by Side

I don't know
whether I first made friends
or was made one

If the center of a home-cooked meal is my family,
then the center of a potluck is my friends.

But how can an app be for friendship??

I turn to Ivan Illich for guidance, particularly his early work, Tools for Conviviality. Man as homo faber is maker of tools, or artifacts. In introducing this notion of convivial tools, Illich attempted to analyze technology as "determinants of the possibility of friendship, of being really face to face to each other". In contrast, most analysis focuses on what technology does to a society (polluting the environment, polarizing society).

Over time, he felt that "increasingly people live in an artifact and become artifacts themselves, feel satisfied, feel fit for that artifact insofar as they themselves have been manipulated." If the fundamental concern is relation, then it makes sense that what can be lost is the relation between one another when it's replaced with the relation between people and their tools. The tool must not overwhelm the harmonious relation between people.

The new electronic devices do indeed have the power to force people to ‘communicate’ with them and with each other on the terms of the machine. Whatever structurally does not fit the logic of machines is effectively filtered from a culture dominated by their use.

Illich is right in correcting me that it's computers that communicate, but people talk. Things may relate, but it's people that can have friendship. Though subtle, the changing of my language is still a changing of my thoughts. Words transform me, my perceptions of myself and others.

The loss of the sense of proportionality, the loss of the sense that our friendship is not Jerry plus Ivan and some interaction between them as if they were two screens, two programs, two machines, but an irreducibility which is beautiful in itself.

The key word for him here is proportionality. Different parts making up a greater whole. Friendship in this sense has a certain "fit" and moves according to an appropriate scale. In solidarity and reciprocity, each party self-imposes certain limits. There's a mutual bond, not uniform (impersonal) nor domineering (coercive). Friendship is human scale.

#Chosen Neighbors

What really is friendship?

In the vein of a potluck, I think of being offered to stay at the house of someone I met for just a few hours while he's on vacation with his family. I think of letting a friend of a friend stay over on our air mattress for the weekend. I think of being greeted and asked to lunch when visiting a new church for the first time.

Illich describes it as the cultivation of hospitality, the cordial receiving of a guest.

However the xenia of Ancient Greece was primarily directed towards other Greeks (other Hellenes not of your polis). Meaning that it wasn't necessarily towards complete strangers but others of the same group. What shaped each person's ethics was their adherence to this ethnos. Classical hospitality was limited to the in-group; non-Greeks were often referred to as barbarians, culturally inferior aliens.

Occasionally, a true stranger might benefit from theoxenia, where a person may receive blessings or curse depending on how they host a disguised deity, creating hospitality out of a sort of cultural obligation.

But Jesus reverses everything. Did you see that coming? Illich shows this by reframing the story of the Good Samaritan.

For context, a lawyer asks Jesus what must be done to inherit eternal life. He knows it's to "love God and love your neighbor as yourself". But naturally, a self-centered question arises, one that any of us might wonder. Who counts as my neighbor, anyway? How large is the scope of my neighbor? Where should I draw the line? Is it a certain number of people, a certain kind of person, everyone?

Illich argues that Jesus explains the story to answer this question of boundaries. Not to show how one should respond to a neighbor, but to break the limits of who a neighbor could even be.

As the story goes: a man is beaten up and left half dead. Both a priest and Levite pass by him. But a Samaritan (an enemy) has compassion on him (this would be a complete surprise to the lawyer). He bandages his wounds and pays for a place for him to stay. It is this man that has "acted as a neighbor."

Illich interprets Jesus' teaching to mean that a neighbor is whom I choose to be my neighbor. In the culture of that time, helping was reserved for family (blood relations) or those of the same city-state (tribe relations). It was justified in order to keep a community safe from harm from outsiders. In that time, one could also justify not helping a dying man because maybe it was a punishment from God or to keep oneself clean and maintain purity laws.

Jesus uses the story to illustrate that anyone could be a neighbor, even your enemy. He calls us to transcend previously defined groups and old definitions of the idea.

This breaking of the limitation of hospitality to the ingroup, to the broadest possible ingroup, and saying, you determine who your guest is, might be taken as the key message of Christianity.

He opens up the possibility to create the relation of a graph (where each individual is a node forming links with other people), rather than a categorization (my family, my tribe, my religion, my people). He means to say that there is no way of knowing ahead of time who his neighbor will be, it is something that is based on contingency, almost a surrender to be open to whoever comes your way (even as the one lying in the ditch). Friendship is this emergent possibility of affection, not a top-down tree.

The threshold of hospitality has been completely broken by Jesus in this story. Previously that boundary was limited by one's culture. Jesus, as the exemplar, shows each of us the freedom to choose whom we want to be in the group, outside of any particular culture or previous classification. He does this not just in word, but in his very life. Any choices of friendship only seem so arbitrary from the outside because each connection is so unique: each relation is a specific moment of saying yes to the Other.

#Prolonging the Incarnation

Let's rewind again. Sometimes I try to visualize The Good Samaritan in a scene. Luke 10:30 is doing a lot of work to set up the story. What is reasonable for me to extrapolate? Was there only one person on that road? It's likely there were many others along the road that also needed help. What kind of place was the road? Was it known for being a place where one could get attacked? If the priest, Levite, and Samaritan traveled on that road, it's likely a well traveled road that all kinds of people use.

To me, leaning into the personal nature of this story means recognizing that the Samaritan didn’t (in this instance) set up a system to help everyone passing through. But what responsibility and duty does he have to the dying person, who is even an outsider to his culture, an enemy? Shouldn't someone else step in (government, non-profit, or company)? One solution could be to just deem the road as dangerous and prevent anyone from using it anymore due to this incident, and create a road blockade. Maybe one could have hired police to patrol the roads. This neighbor wasn't trying to "solve" the problem, but to be a neighbor to the one who calls. To do otherwise, is to think in systems, in abstractions.

I can't think that Jesus meant for us to erect systems of hospitals and surveillance based on this story. I don't mean to say there's nothing good with creating a system, there clearly is. I also have no confidence that we should go back to a past when things were less legible, chaotic, unorganized.

My goal is simpler: recovering the surprising notion of what Jesus meant to be a neighbor, particularly in my own life, in my own work with technology, which has long been used to create systems of unimaginable control.

To be a neighbor begins with learning to see myself and others as people, in the flesh. Not generalizations.

This is not a spiritual relationship. This is an act which prolongs the Incarnation. As God became flesh and in the flesh relates to each one of us, so you are capable of relating in the flesh to that other man who has been beaten up. Take out this fleshy, bodily, carnal, dense experience of self and, therefore, of the Thou, the other, from the story of the Samaritan and you have a nice, liberal fantasy which is something horrible. - Ivan Illich

Most translations say that the Samaritan had "compassion for him", but the word splagchnon means the "inward parts (heart, liver, lungs)." What we'd consider the gut. The Samaritan's feeling was visceral, not intellectual. It was embodied, in the sense that Jesus himself was incarnated. To see the other as a person, not as an object, a machine, an "it" that has needs or requirements, parameters, inputs.

	Categorical/Bounded Relationships (culture)	Contingent/Serendipitious Relationships (choice)
Limited Hospitality (human)	Pre-modern Ethnos (Ancient Greek xenia) only within culture	Jesus' Teachings (Good Samaritan) open to all, limited
Unlimited Hospitality (god)	Modern Insitutions (Hospitals) obligation to help all, within a system	Theorectical Ideal (God) unconditional love of the divine

Here's a 2x2 to explore this question, "Who is my neighbor"? The x-axis refers to the basis of relationships in a culture. Is a neighbor bounded by a limit? The y-axis refers to the scope of who to be hospitable to. A select group, or should it be everyone?

Pre-modern hospitality meant helping your own kind. Jesus teaches that to be a neighbor is to remove these pre-defined categories, like one's ethnic group.

But the embodied view of neighbor has become corrupted. It has morphed the freedom of friendship into an obligation. The limits have been broken beyond what is fitting, such that there is no limit at all. It's not that everyone can be a neighbor, but that everyone is, or has to be. This obligation to be a friend may be no friend at all.

This story depicts how this institutionalization of hospitality led to the creation of the first hospitals, the first Samaritan corporations. It's not too difficult to see how the ideas lead to the creation of modern institutions, welfare states, and even SaaS. Facebook's motto was to "make the world more open and connected". Google's goal was to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." Both imply a world of disembodiment, abstraction, and ultimately a contempt of limits.

What occurs is that systems revert hospitality back to categories, bounded relationships that ultimately only fit within the terms of the system. Systems can't realize the categories that they create. For example, one is only treatable if it fits within the definition of sick defined by the medical system, or employable if defined to be educated according to the credentials of the educational system. The claim to be universal by institutions is precisely what hides an inherent bias to extend it's own lifespan, possibly preventing it from realizing how it bounds relationships to a culture that it itself creates.

The corrupting difference is such that hospitality becomes unlimited, due to a moral duty to help everyone. Whereas before, people didn't think it was their place to help the world (whether lack of power, or desire, or understanding their place in the world), modern people feel the responsibility to take care of everything due to newfound powers of science and technological advances. This kind of thinking ultimately loses the point of Jesus' teaching not because it isn't doing good, but because it bulldozes over the nature of friendship, one that is freely chosen, unexpected.

Unlike human nature, it is the system that leaves no room for chance, mystery, surprise, even failure. It must gurantee a product, result, outcome.

#A Future and A Hope

I'm remembering when I encountered Jeremiah outside of Union Square in 2017. My friend had wanted to meet up early to catch up and pray together on the upper floor of Whole Foods before church started. On my way out I heard a familiar tune. Jeremiah had been playing worship music through his speaker, and I noticed a favorite verse of mine (and his) on some cardboard. My friend whispered for me to invite him to church. I hesitated at first, but felt a connection I didn't usually have. I just went for it and followed the flow.

Asking myself how I should respond brings up notions of rules and outcomes. I could call authorities to bring him to a shelter or send him to a hospital. I could join a homeless ministry, get involved in the amazing efforts at places like Father's Heart in East Village. But sometimes I'm just myself (not a student, a software engineer, a church member, a person of a certain standing, not an employee, not a member of a non-profit) and the other calls out to me.

Over the next months, I kind of just started sitting with him after work, as I'd see him while walking home. I didn't really have any goals, no plans on how to really help honestly. I didn't know where to begin to solve anything. He was one of the few I actually got to know as a person. Not just someone just on the street, someone I'd give money to, or someone I could buy some food for. Most of the time, it's someone I just pass by. Or I tune out with my headphones, preoccupied with my troubles, not even noticing those next to me.

But it was difficult to continue. I learned more than I'd want to know. It got uncomfortable; I was forced to think about my own boundaries. How much time should I be giving to him after work, chatting, helping him apply for a school or get a job, keeping company, watching his stuff while he went to the bathroom. Should I let him stay at my place? Hitting these boundaries and limits were like similar limits I was facing in open source: why am I staying up late fixing reports of random bugs from random people around the world? Am I just trying to make myself feel good, or to "work off" some kind of guilt or burden?

#Nothing Special

An extreme version of this is described in Larissa MacFarquhar's wonderfully written Last Call, a bio of Ittetsu Nemoto, a Zen priest (who joined after a motorcycling accident) who found himself counseling suicidal people. He explains his struggles with the burden of helping so many people.

They didn’t care that he was sick: they were sick, too, they said; they were in pain, and he had to take care of them.

He had spent seven years sacrificing himself, driving himself to the point of breakdown, nearly to death, trying to help these people, and they didn’t care about him at all. What was the point?

...what remained with him was a strong sense that he wanted to do the work anyway... he would have to stop thinking of his work as something morally obligatory and freighted with significance. Helping people should be nothing special, like eating, he thought—just something that he did in the course of his life.

He thought about all the e-mails and all the phone calls and how those conversations could go on and on for years in circles with no progress at all; and he also thought about how strange and disorienting it was to swallow into himself terrible emotions from people he had never even seen. He decided that from then on he would not communicate with people until he had met them. If they wanted his counsel, they first had to come to his temple.

A cycle of desiring to help is beautifully told. I similarly wanted to help, but helping invariably leads to more work until you hit your emotional/physical limits. Nemoto realizes the need to impose certain boundaries: no emails/phone calls, but for them to come to him and to meet face to face. He didn't scale up his operation in that way, but to make it personal again.

#Pretending to Care

What does it mean to care for someone?

Illich thinks modernity turns care into a commodity that each of us produce, which leads to the belief that a professional should ought to produce it. What is producible can be made more efficient.

---

I experienced this tension firsthand while volunteering at a 24/7 prayer event at church. Because there's an elevator to get in, someone needs to call people up. I offered to be there most days that week, but having gone up and down the elevator so much caused me to immediate start thinking of solutions of how to automate it, to save my time. I spent way too much time seeing this as a problem to be fixed, figuring out that I could buy a bluetooth button pusher. I found someone that reversed engineered the API, and made a simple site where I could push a giant button which would call the elevator down (instead of walking a couple steps across the room). To further remove myself from the equation (so I could get my work done), I setup a phone number where someone could text to get the elevator working. It all worked! I had made a system!

Reflecting on the way home (and as I greeted folks coming in), I felt a bit of horror at my own inclinations and action. What was I really doing? Was I treating others as an object, or even myself as one? Of course, it wasn't a big deal in the grand scheme of things to allow someone to self check-in. But then again, I actually like welcoming people. I enjoy greeting them even for a second during that short moment where I let someone in, those brief moments of silence in the elevator ride. It's an opportunity for conversation, for hospitality, for pause admist presence, that I had been thinking of as a time that was wasted. Is an elevator ride just a liminal space between getting to the point?

It's possible even the people coming to pray might feel the same way as me, whether it's the subway ride, the walk to church, the elevator ride, talking to me, to get to that destination to "pray." Should I try to remove the in-between from A to B? What do I gain when I save a couple of steps, spend the time to devise a plan to remove them, and view this process as as an obstacle to this time of prayer? It calls to mind another false dichotomy of the sacred and secular.

The faithful are called to more than compartmentalize: everything can be done for the glory of God. My life is to be a living sacrifice. Why distinguish "holy work" when all work can be sanctified? Prayer doesn't "start" at a prayer meeting, a church service on Sunday, or when praying for a meal. It doesn't end there either. Prayer isn't just an event, a ritual, but a lifestyle, a way of living.

I had to catch myself, remembering that hospitality is also like that. Automation of my actions can turn into an outsourcing. An unintentional removal of possibility. My good intentions to save time, save effort (that I'm sure people would even appreciate) may well just reveal how fragile hospitality can be.

---

Commodities create standards, which allow the power to diagnose what is defined as need, what is considered minimal care, who should provide it. This can scarcely be called love, if love is to be a volunteer act of compassion. Services are designed to help, but they can only do so within its own terms, which have to be completely specified, documented, standardized. But there are always externalities (the out-group).

A system will always be myopic, Seeing like a State. The name of those that are missed is just the system's out-group: a dropout, undocumented, uninsured, unemployed, uncivilized, homeless, etc.

...So having become very suspicious of care, which is the banner of the caring professions, considering caring professions as intrinsically disabling, when somebody says "Don’t you care for the people, for the bloated belly children on their sticky legs in the Sahel?" my immediate reaction is I will do everything I can to eliminate from my heart any sense of care for them. I want to experience horror. I want to really taste this reality about which you report to me. I do not want to escape my sense of helplessness into a pretense that I care and that I do or have done all that which is possible to me. I want to live with the inescapable horror of these children, these persons in my heart. I know that I cannot actively really love them...

Is he delusional to eliminate his sense of care? Or am I, who wants (maybe needs) to help everyone? I believe he means to say that this "mask of love" I put on when I have these feelings may be the same feeling that stops me from truly loving a person. The love that he desires to give to another is of a different kind than that of only money.

What does soberly acknowledging our limitations look like in an age where it feels like anything and everything is possible?

#Candles in Darkness

I am not endorsing the past. It’s past, it’s gone. Even less am I endorsing the present. I am subject to it. I am in it.

I keep circling back to the same ideas: of the good over value, freedom within limits. Of living with technology, with images, with one another. It's the art of living as Illich calls it, which usually includes an art of suffering. I'm looking to be as people say, "in the present moment." Being present here means not being nostalgic for a past that has passed or even a past I didn't live in. I want to assume a reality that I can participate in, not prove it.

There's no escape from time, whether I'm nostalgic to a time when things were "great", or to build a utopia of the future, real or simulated. No plane of neutrality by which to throw away my personal bias, experience, history. No purity to mend all wrongs. No system without flaws. No perfection.

Illich calls me face to face, in the pupil of another. As a candle in the dark, I can still aspire to create beauty that brings others closer. He doesn't want to deceive himself, and I don't either. He attempts to be like the Samaritan in the story, and believes that by fully experiencing how powerless he is he might be willing to break the illusion he can be the savior of all, and begin to have the conviction to help those near him.

Why pretend that I care? Thinking that I care impedes me first from remembering what love would be; second, trains me not to be in that sense loving with the person who is waiting outside this door; third, stops me from taking the next week off to go to demonstrate in front of some industry which I with my intelligence could identify in New York, chain myself to the entrance door so that there’s one little step more made against their shares being bought, by which some ecological disaster in the Sahel is supported.

From my observation, he truly felt this way, living a life of surprise. As a young priest, he wanted to "get away from Rome" and the bureaucracy of the Church and chose to start a post-doc on alchemy in Princeton. But the first evening in New York he overheard some conversation about all the Puerto Ricans moving in. After two days in the neighborhood in Harlem, he pivots to be assigned to work in the Puerto Rican parish there. Who completely changes the course of their life on a whim like that?

There he embeds himself in Incarnation parish and stays in NY for 5 years. It's clear he understood "needs": he asked for libraries and schools to start adding Spanish books, and became one of the most important figures to fight for the Puerto Rican Day Parade to help with a real sense of integration.

John McKnight describes Illich's willingness to drop everything for a him: "He is a person whose capacity to be a friend is absolutely unequalled among everybody that I have ever known, and every once in a while, he"ll say to me, if you ever need me, I will never be more than 24 hours from you, just call. And he’d come."

This is the kind life I want to live, the kind of technology I want to create. One that encourages an openness to faith in the unknown.

#Someone was Here

C.S. Lewis sees friends as lights. Maybe as other lights in the darkness. And each friend isn't just seeing a different part of me—each is a new light that brings out a hidden aspect of me. So in a sense, neighborliness and hospitality is a surrender to self. A friend is someone whom I can lose myself in and find myself as a gift.

In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald’s reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him “to myself’ now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald. Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend.

So while BoopSnoop instilled a sense of home, I've made an app for my friends.

But this project was oddly personal, in a way that I never felt before. Especially since I was defined by, shaped through the opposite sort of projects (working at Adobe, maintaining Babel).

I sort of dreaded the idea of sharing it online, especially with people I don't know. Why subject myself to all that it entails? I still had a desire to tell my friends. I started wondering (in the sense that BoopSnoop worked), what if it was only for my friends?

What if I framed it more as an art project than startup, side hustle, or even hobby?

Art is about how it presents a new way of seeing. Sometimes it's said that art gives insight into the view of the artist. Creation, an insight into the mind of the creator. After all, we create in our own image.

But the artist also defamiliarizes. The artist creates an anti-environment. Then the art doesn't show the artist's own view but actually the viewer's view, which was hidden. It reveals. If the environment is invisible, an anti-environment is required to be able to see it. What's revealed in BoopSnoop is just how industrialized and corporate the tech scene can be, and how different it can become.

So what do I do with all this code? All these thoughts? I guess it's why I ended up writing all of this, as a dump of the why. I'm uncomfortable that the ideas feel more real than any app. It's like I'm simply trying to get across a certain feeling. Part of it relates to letting go, so why not let go of what I think an app should be too?

---

And what specific potluck had I started making for my friends?

It started with a question about the nature of surprise. I had a desire to explore the physical world in new ways. Could I use an app to create an environment for serendipity? What about helping me go outside? Creation has become about what is makeable (particularly in our image), not gratitude for what has been made. Can I make something that helps me appreciate what has been given?

I began to ponder thoughts about physical space, and the joys that its limitation could bring. What if that could be brought back into the digital? A sense of place, not just infinite, uniform space.

So what sense does my app create? Maybe one of longing.

The app lets me leave geo-located voice notes in the world. I'm able to get a notification of a discovered note when I pass by them. It's a sort of memory palace, a time capsule. Digital sticky notes placed the real world. What if I can only view them again only when I come back?

What if I could send them to my friends? What if they have to find them, almost like a scavenger hunt or geocaching? And what if there's no notification at all? I'd be a wonderful celebration of friendship, entirely created by me and yet genuinely serendipitous.

How might that change how I think about the other, when I'm about to send a message that may never be found? It's not urgent, otherwise I'd just text. It's a message in a bottle, an "I'm thinking of you." The note is only a wish for the physical presence of another, a desire that we will meet again, soon. Not unlike the idea that I might never release this app (or even this post) publicly! There's a freedom in being able to let go of fixed expectations, and to hold unto a uncertain hope.

The initial scenario I was thinking of: if I stumbled across an event going on in Central Park. Say it was a performer juggling, and it reminded me of a friend. I'd record a voice note (maybe a picture) and send it to her. Maybe they don't go to Central Park often, or don't go to that spot. Maybe she moves to another city. But 7 years later, she's visiting for vacation and we'd already lost touch by then. One day my note is found, and now there's an excuse to catch up all over again. (I don't expect a friend to have my app for 7 years, or for available to be there still, but this is just an imaginary scenario ☺️)

A note should leave me with a desire to be together. That someone was there before me, and maybe another after me. A yearning for the physical presence of the other. To be known incarnationally by the other. Not to just know of or about the other.

Maybe friendship is this hodgepodge of notes: strung together, unfound/found, missing in action. Sometimes together, sometimes apart. Each reveals a different light in one another. So if we're friends (or will be soon), leave me a note!

---