Status Report 2024-04-23
Content Warning: Some Personal History
On Poverty, and Poverty Enforced By Violence
A long time ago, before this one existed, before Locria is used as a name and before Cyber has anything to do with cyberpunk, there was a friend who we frequently discuss about the world around us with. Let’s call Person A. One of the topics we talked about often is social stratification. We talked about how our country was founded, the social structure solidifies, and then the country dies.
To this day, having been through all the social strata we discussed about with Person A, and we still don’t know how to define it. What we do observe, is poverty. Poverty has different causes. Sometimes, poverty results from a mindset (from the book Understanding Poverty). Sometimes, poverty results from not having the means of production. Sometimes, poverty results from discrimination. Most of the time though, poverty results from poor birth, and the social structure that differentiates between “poor birth” and “rich birth”. This is still very much a over-simplification. Knowledge is essential in social mobility, and knowledge is transferable from person to person.
For most of the history of humanity, the line between life and death is fine. For some places today, this is still the case; not caused by nature, but by a different part of humantiy. For other places though, the line stands between poverty and non-poverty.
The phrase “poverty line” to too vague. Let’s use a different line, the reproduction line, the line above which one can afford to have kids. This is not natural selection. What is this selecting? What does this say about a species who have to afford to reproduce? I need to stop thinking about this and focus on poverty.
On Computer-Human Interaction
The current state of HCI always felt abysmal to us. There was the invention of the typewriter, and the invention of the two button mouse. Capacitive display is somehow not often used as a standalone input device. Then, there was… nothing? Nothing? Really? We should do something about this, if not for others, for myself, so that I don’t have to be alone anymore.
E-ink+stylus has potential.
Why Do We Exist - Still No Answers Yet
The engineering answer to that question I already know. We are never given any aspirations in life. We have looked through the entirety of Computing, and, so far, we haven’t found what we want to do. After our next and last article project about conventional computing, we will travel to see what Internet has become.