I’ve started writing my next book. Co-authored with a colleague, it’s about the Silicon Forest, a ‘tech hub’ in Oregon. We’re interested in a bunch of questions that are tangled up together: what might we learn from this place about prospects for living better together in the worlds of ‘tech’ which are also effectively permanently polluted and always breaking? What are differently situated actors doing to repair and redress the various harms entrained by the manufacturing and use of digital technology within and beyond the Silicon Forest? How might approaching these questions from the location of the Silicon Forest change broader, taken-for-granted understandings of the ‘tech sector’ that otherwise take Silicon Valley as a (or the) quintessential case?
Or, at least these are the questions animating our research and writing at this stage.
I’ve finally have enough writing experience to know more viscerally that writing is thinking. I don’t have it all worked out in advance and then just ‘write it down’. The writing is the thinking. Something else I finally have enough experience to realize about my work is that there is an animating, numinous category of question I keep asking and trying to answer in one way or another. In a nutshell: in a world that is, what ought one do? This is a very old question, obviously. But it was made acute to me the other day when I finally read Logicomix (Doxiádīs et al., 2009). If you don’t know this graphic novel it’s a historical fiction about how real logicians and mathematicians pursued a quest for a system that would offer a foundation for certain ‘capital T’ Truth. Spoiler: they fail in their quest (did I mention that this is a graphic novel in which logicians and mathematicians are the ‘heroes’? It’s really good!).
One of the ways these heady ideas get shown in Logicomix is through dramatization of how different logicians and mathematicians landed on paradoxes built into their attempts to find some certain foundation for knowledge. We see Bertrand Russell land on what now gets called ‘Russell’s paradox’. We watch as Kurt Gödel realizes his ‘incompleteness theorems’ (in plainer language, a version of the liar paradox) — the whole story has direct influence on von Neumann and Turing and their contributions to computer science.
Getting a better understanding of the links between these famous logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers is one reason I enjoyed Logicomix. But the really affecting element of the graphic novel is watching human beings struggle with perennial conditions of being human. They fail in their quest for a foundation from which to build Truth (capital T). But some of them gain some wisdom about such human conditions when, as a consequences of the paradoxes they themselves articulate, they realize that one is obligated to go on in the face of the possibility that there may be no ultimate, secure foundation from which to offer responses about what one ought to do in a world that is and which might be better if changed somewhat. Gödel comes to the conclusion that certain questions are unanswerable – not unknowable, but unanswerable. Framed in the context of the graphic novel, it seems to me that Gödel’s conclusion about unanswerable questions is not also grounds on which to claim that because certain questions are unanswerable they can or should be dismissed. Quite the opposite. It’s that such questions can, even must, be continually asked and responded to. A response is not necessarily the same thing as an answer. Whereas answers might imply a kind of certainty, responses suggest something more provisional, something that can or might be revisited if and when conditions change.
All of this brings me back to the book I’ve started writing about the Silicon Forest. It is about the tech sector in a real and imagined place. And, it’s also about possible responses to more fundamental kinds of questions: how might we – whoever that might be – learn to live well together in a world of computing devices that entrain with them all sorts of pollution and other harms? I would be surprised if the questions and whatever responses we are able to offer do not shift and mingle in ways I haven’t yet imagined by the time the book is done. The writing is the thinking.
Works Cited
Doxiádīs, Apóstolos K., Chrístos Ch Papadīmītríou, and Alékos Papadátos. 2009. Logicomix. ́Ikaros ekdotikī́ etairía.
Morgan, Steve. 2015. The Headquarters of Tektronix, in Beaverton, Oregon, U.S. This Is Building 50, the Main Administration Building, at the Multi-Building Complex. August 2. Own work. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tektronix_HQ_in_Beaverton,_Oregon_-_Building_50.jpg.
Electronic Planet Research Lab 
