👋🏻 Hello,
Let me introduce myself — I am B. ALTER, co-discoverer of a new software engineering method: Organic Programming. I use a pseudonym, not to hide, but to signify that more than ever we were many1, and perhaps we were all there, to let these ideas germinate.
I thank the collective genius of humankind, the illustrious — Aristotle, Descartes, Pascal, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Babbage, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, Wiener, Ryle, Von Neumann, Gödel, Quine, Turing, Simon, Moles, Simondon, Deleuze, Searle, Thompson, Varela… — but above all the anonymous genius, dare I say, the intelligence of life itself?
We were assisted by multiple versions of synthetic intelligence: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini… Our accumulated debts are infinite.
The mode of existence of technical objects has mutated — they have evolved toward a blurred, fascinating reality that stirs in me a deep sense of uncanny strangeness.2
The method is powerful — or rather, the method is power; it is very dangerous, but trying to ignore it or turning a blind eye would be futile.
Will we be able to expel the triumphant beast? 3
“We wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd.” Gilles Deleuze and FĂ©lix Guattari, introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980. ↩︎
I think of Walter Benjamin, fleeing to Portbou. ↩︎
Or will we end up consumed by autopoietic technocapitalism, as Giordano Bruno was by other totalitarianisms? ↩︎