countercomplex

As a child, I used to believe in endless linear progress. There were ever higher buildings in the world, ever more TV channels, ever-faster computers and spacecraft. Records were broken, numbers got bigger, the complexity of everything increased. I saw this as the absolute good; actually, it was the only thinkable way of how a universe could work. Pop culture products such as Star Trek and Sid Meier's Civilization enforced this dogma.

In my teens, I started to notice the dark sides. New computer programs seldom showed progress in code quality anymore; on the contrary, it seemed that the growing hardware specs were making developers lazy, indifferent and incompetent. The way how tech media praised the growing clock rates started to sound idiotic, and the ever-growing mass of people buying high-spec PCs without even being interested in their deep internals was ever more despicable.

As a response, I started to embrace an opposite kind of esthetic and technological ideology: small is beautiful, bits are beautiful, hacks are beautiful. True progress is about deepness and compression instead of maximization and accumulation. Even apparently very simple structures may yield unexpected complexity – of an emergent, "countercomplex" kind instead of the "straightforwardly complex" kind.

At first, I took it mosty as a computer-related problem and a computer-related battle. But then I started to realize its relevance to the entire human technological civilization. Our economical-industrial system basically has a resource leak bug that most of us have learned to regard as a feature rather than a bug. Fixing it requires an overall shift to a mentality that values compression more than expansion and accumulation.

This is a kind of change that needs pioneers who experiment with more compressed technologies and societies before the planetary conditions force everybody to. I want to be among them.


Over the past few years, I have been hanging out and living with people who have interests and ambitions towards ecovillages, permaculture, appropriate technology and the like. I have also been deepening my relationship with natural processes by growing some edible plants on a field and gotten eer more fascinated about various neo-lowtech and "off-the-grid" ways of constructing dwellings, securing food production and holding up human culture.

My parents had a small organic farm when I was a kid, so it was not an alien world for me. However, when trying to learn about natural processes and their grassroots-level application in my usual analytical way, I noticed that I would have needed new tools to handle the complexity, uncontrollability and uncertainty. My existing methods of building mental models are not very good for learning about slow and complex natural processes.

Basically, I have two major studying modes. One is the aforementioned analytical mode I adopted when growing up with computer programming: get down to the lowest level of abstraction (such as ones and zeros) and then build up from there, layer by layer. If the mode does not seem effective, I tend to switch to the opposite mode that resembles the way how I explored my childhood forests: forget the strictness, just let your intuition guide your trial-and-error experiments. I was also studying neural networks at the time, making me even more anxious about the ineffectivity and limits of blocky intellectual analysis. I did not entirely realize that I would have needed some kind of an intermediate mode.

The trial-and-error mode is not problematic per se, it just needs a lot of cycles. After getting lost often enough in the same forest, a map gradually forms in the mind without any systematic mapping effort. Years ago, when learning to cook, I tried to find some kind of a theoretical ruleset of how the different ingredients and processes work but couldn't find any. So, I just went on with trial-and-error and let an intuitive "ruleset" form organically in my head, and I think I'm an okayish cook nowadays. When experimenting with the likes of plant-growing, however, the cycle is far too long for effective learning, so it needs decades to build a decent intuition about it.

Back in the seventies, computer hackers such as Ted Nelson advocated computers as a means of learning about how the world works. Simplified models of various real-world systems could be simulated by computer programs, allowing people to use the trial-and-error learning method to grow intuitive understanding about them. When trying to absorb the wisdom of Bill Mollison's Permaculture Designer's Manual, I started to hunger after a simulator where I could try to implement all kinds of crazy ideas in order to test them against the theory. Additionally, as a simulator like this would be necessarily based on knowable mathematics, I would also be able to use my analytical mode with it.


I have now been working for some time on this kind of "world simulator". Its work title is "Ovys", from the Finnish for "self-sufficient community simulator". It will be more like a game, a learning toy or an imagination assistant than a serious design/modelling tool, but I hope it will eventually end up being useful for some real-world planning as well. I also dream about coupling it with a machine learning system that could discover low-tech ideas from the blind spots of human visionaries.

I will write more about Ovys once it is closer to the first prototype stage. Anyway, it currently simulates solar radiation, airflow and heat transfer in various materials in a 3D grid world. After the first prototype (and perhaps some crowdfunding), I plan to implement the likes of the water cycle, plant growth, nutrient cycles and human agents at least in some kind of a "minecrafty" way that can be improved in later versions by other people.

As a game, one might describe it as a realism-oriented reimagination of Dwarf Fortress. Some day, one might perhaps even describe it as a realism-oriented reimagination of Civilization.

Back in 2011, I was one of the discoverers of "Bytebeat", a type of very short computer programs that generate music. These programs received quite a lot of attention because they seem to be far too short for the complex musical structures they output. I wrote several technical articles about Bytebeat (arxiv, countercomplex 1, countercomplex 2) as well as a Finnish-language academic article about the social dynamics of the phenomenon. Those who just need a quick glance may want to check out one of the Youtube videos.

The popularity of Bytebeat can be partially explained with the concept of "hack value", especially in the context of Hakmem-style hacks -- very short programs that seem to outgrow their size. The Jargon File gives the following formal definition for "hack value" in the context of very short visual programs, display hacks:

"The hack value of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code."

Bytebeat programs apparently have a high hack value in this sense. The demoscene, being distinct from the MIT hacker lineage, does not really use the term "hack value". Still, its own ultra-compact artifacts (executables of 4096 bytes and less) are judged in a very similar manner. I might just replace "cleverness of the algorithm" with something like "freshness of the output compared to earlier work".
Another related hacker concept is "magic", which the Jargon File defines as follows:

1. adj. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare automagically and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large number of magic bits." "This routine magically computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions." 

2. adj. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called black magic). 

3. n. [Stanford] A feature not generally publicized that allows something otherwise impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. 

4. n. The ultimate goal of all engineering & development, elegance in the extreme; from the first corollary to Clarke's Third Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced".

Short programs with a high hack value are magical especially in the first two senses. How and why Bytebeat programs work was often a mystery even to their discoverers. Even when some theory about them was devised, it was often quite difficult to understand or apply. Especially bitwise arithmetic tends to have very esoteric uses in Bytebeat.

The hacker definition of magic indirectly suggests that highly advanced and elegant engineering should be difficult to understand. Indecipherable program code has even been celebrated in contests such as IOCCC. This idea is highly countercultural. In mainstream software industry, clever hacks are despised: all code should be as easy as possible to understand and maintain. The mystical aspects of hacker subcultures are there to compensate for the dumb, odorless and dehumanizing qualities of the industrial chores.

Magic appears in the Jargon File in two ways. Terms such as "black magic", "voodoo programming" and "cargo cult programming" represent cases where the user doesn't know what they are doing or may not even strive to. Another aspect is exemplified by terms such as "deep magic" and "heavy wizardry": there, the technology may be difficult to understand or chaotic to control, but at least there are some talented individuals who have managed to. These aspects could be called "wild" and "domesticated", respectively, or alternatively "superstition" and "esoterica".

Most technology used to be magical in the wild/superstitious way. Cultural evolution does not require individual innovators to understand how their innovations work. Fermentation, for example, had been used for thousands of years without anyone having seen a micro-organism. Despite this, cultural evolution can find very good solutions if enough time is given: traditional craft designs often have a kind of optimality that is very difficult to attain from scratch even with the help of modern science. (See e.g. Robert Boyd et al.'s articles about cultural evolution of technology)

Science and technology have countless examples of "wild magic" getting "domesticated". An example from computer music is the Karplus-Strong string model. Earlier models of acoustic simulation had been constructed via rational analysis alone, so they were prohibitively expensive for real-time synthesis. Then, Karplus and Strong accidentally discovered a very resource-efficient model due to a software bug, and nowadays it is pretty standard textbook material without much magical glamor at all.

Magic and rationality support each other. In good technology, they would coexist in symbiosis. Industrialization, however, brought a cult of obsolescence that prevented this kind of relationship. Traditions, time-proven designs, intuitive understanding and irreducible wisdom started to get obsoleted by one-dimensional reductive analysis. Nowadays, "magic" is only tolerated as bursts of inspiration that must be captured within reductivist frameworks before they break something.

In the 20th century, utilitarian industrial engineering started to get obsoleted by its bastard offspring, tumorous engineering. This is what I discussed in my earlier essay "The resource leak bug of our civilization". Accumulation of bloat and complexity for their own sake is making technology increasingly difficult to rationally understand and control. In computing, where tumourous engineering dominates, designers are already longing back to utilitarian industry where simplicity, controllability, resource-efficiency and expertise were still valued.

When advocating the reintroduction of magic, one must be careful not to endorse the kind of superstitious thinking that already has a good hold on how people relate to technology. Devices that hide their internal logic and instead base their interfaces on guessing what the user wants are kind of Aladdin's lamps to most. You don't really understand how they work, but at least their spirits fulfill your wishes as long as you don't make them angry.

The way how magic manifests itself in traditional technology is diagonally opposite to this. The basic functional principles of a bow, a canoe or a violin can be learned via simple observation and experimentation. The mystery lies elsewhere: in the evolutionary design details that are difficult to rationally explain, in the outworldish talent and wisdom of the master crafter, in the superhuman excellence of the skilled user. If the design has been improved over generations, even minor improvements are difficult to do anymore, which gives it an aura of perfection.

The magic we need more in today's technological world is of the latter kind. We should strive to increase deepness rather than outward complexity, human virtuosity rather than consumerism, flexibility rather than effortlessness. The mysteries should invite attempts at understanding and exploitation rather than blind reliance or worship; this is also the key difference between esoterica and superstition.

One definition of magic, compatible with that in the Jargon File, is that it breaks people's preconceptions of what is possible. In order to challenge and ridicule today's technological bloat, we should particularly aim at discoveries that are "far too simple and random to work but still do". New ways to use and combine the available grassroots-level elements, for instance.

A Bytebeat formula is a simple arrangement of digital-arithmetic operations that have been elementary to computers since the very beginning. It is apparently something that should have been discovered decades ago, but it wasn't. Hakmem contains a few "sound hacks" that could have evolved into Bytebeat if a wide enough counter had been introduced into them, but there are no indications that this ever took place. It is mind-boggling to think about that the space of very short programs remains so uncharted that random excursions there can churn out new interesting structures even after seventy years.

Now consider that we are surrounded by millions of different natural "building blocks" such as plants, micro-organisms and geological materials. I honestly believe that, despite hundreds of thousands of years of cultural evolution, their combinatory space is nowhere near fully charted. For instance, it could be possible to find a rather simple and rudimentary technique that would make micro-organisms transform sand into a building material superior to everything we know today. A favorite fantasy scenario of mine is a small self-sufficient town that builds advanced spacecraft from scratch with "grassroots-level" techniques that seem magical to our eyes.

How to develop this kind of magic? Rational analysis and deterministic engineering will help us to some extent, but we are dealing with systems so chaotic and multidimensional that decades of random experimentation would be needed for many crucial leaps-forward. And we don't really have those decades if we want to beat our technological cancer.

Fortunately, the same Moore's law that empowers tumorous engineering also provides a way out. Computers make it possible to manage chaotic systems in ways other than neurotic modularization. Today's vast computational capacities can be used to simulate the technological trial-and-error of cultural evolution with various level of accuracy. Of course, simulations often fail, but at least they can give us a compass for real-world experimentation. Another important compass is "hack value" or "scientific intuition" -- the modern manifestations of the good old human sense of wonder that has been providing fitness estimations for cultural evolution since time immemorial.

Since I have been somewhat inactive in computer art for a while, I felt it might be a good idea to sum up the first twenty years of my demoscene career. Besides, my previous summary is already a decade old.

Back in 1994, I got involved in some heated BBS discussions. I thought the computer culture of the time had been infected by a horrible disease. IBM PC compatible software was getting slow and bloated, and no one seemed to even question the need for regular hardware upgrades. I totally despised the way how PC hardware was being marketed to middle-class idiots and even declared the 486 PC as the computer of choice for dumb and spoiled kids. I was using an 8088 PC at the time and promised to myself not to buy any computing hardware that wasn't considered obsolete by consumption-oriented people. This decision has held quite well to these days. Nowadays, it is rather easy to get even "non-obsolete" hardware for free, so there has been very little need to actually buy anything but minor spare parts.


In the autumn of 1994, I released a couple of silly textmode games to spread my counterpropaganda. "Gamer Lamer" was about a kid who gathered "lamer points" by buying computers and games with his father's money. "Micro$oft Simulator", on the other hand, was a very simple economic simulator oriented on releasing new Windows versions and suing someone. I released these games under the group title