I watched The Humane Representation of Thought several times, and what spoke to me most was the part describing how language is poorly adapted to talk about the complex systems that have emerged in contemporary society. And that a new technology must amend the way we communicate if we hope to understand and direct them.
Dynamicland is the current implementation of that discussed technology, acting as the medium for a new kind of language, Realtalk. It is the use of code not for engineering but for person-to-person communication of ideas.
I started chatting with the team at Code Park about it, and tried to arrange a visit to Oakland to see it, but none of us could make it. We tried Paper Programs instead, and started considering extending their curriculum to integrate this somehow.
Through preparations, I realized that the programs were inaccessible, and that the magic of this medium required the Realtalk language for the fluidity to work. I spent a couple months building a Realtalk implementation by filling in the blanks of what is publicly known from videos, photos, and articles. I tested it by rendering a virtual space of programs on a browser canvas.
Amanda and I then worked to integrate the Realtalk parts into Paper Programs, and it worked, with some problems here and there—the main one being a massive memory leak from the methods I used to publish claims.
We thought about publishing this work, but decided this would undermine the Dynamicland team’s efforts to slowly grow their audience to ease adapting to unforeseen cultural effects. I voiced my concerns here when inevitably another person began working on the same thing we had.
Our own experiments have paused for the time being.