Looking back on my formative years, I’m always amazed at how much my culture has changed. Ten years ago, I used to be derisively referred to as “le philosophe"—and recently a bunch of literary somethings called me an engineer. I gasped.

Robin Sloan’s latest post on Snarkmarket came at the right moment for me:

Bless the toolmakers… but I’m worried that everybody wants to be one.

(Go read the post, if you can spare a couple of minutes. Be sure to read Tim Carmody’s invaluable comment on where Apple stands in this respect, and why they haven’t done for book reading what they’ve done for music listening.)

Sloan’s piece is a personal one, written to ”figure out what [he] actually thought“. So is this one.

There goes his argument: so much of this generation’s creativity goes to building digital tools—that is, something "a step removed from the object of attention”. And so little of this talent is used for artistic creation per se. While tools enable artists, in the end, the art matters more than the tools. Sloan says he’d rather be an artist than a toolmaker—and he wishes more people with toolmaking abilities spent their time and talent on artistic endeavors too. Bluntly put, too many people would like be Apple, too few want to be Pixar.

I’ve spent most of my early twenties years between books and ideas, deep into the delicious mix of philosophy, literature, geography and history that the French system calls “les études littéraires”. I was studying culture, I was studying ideas, I was studying art. That was my world. But weirdly enough, I was deeply attracted to something that part of my education pushed me to think of as lowly: computers.

I wanted to understand the world inside my operating system. I took pleasure in the discovery and exploration of new applications and new interface constructs. And most of all, I yearned to program.

This, together with my curricular reorientation towards the sociology of technology five years ago, made me consider technology and software as another layer of human expression.1 Yes, these things are works of art and craft. Yes, there is an interface culture. And I want in. That’s what I’ve been thinking about during these three years in a PhD program.

But… But. As I delved inside the technical, as I read tech blogs and followed Mac app developers on Twitter, as I felt the thrill of typing code deep in the night, and of having people run this code, I could never shake the feeling of cultural starvation—the feeling that the technological world, with its peculiar culture and news outlets and attention span and FOMO and circularity was running me dry.

Sloane’s piece resonated a lot on that respect—

But I also wonder if there are some toolmakers out there right now who feel a bit of the same doubt. Carried along by the current of conventional (startup) wisdom and, of course, the promise of a great scalable payout, they are busy making a web-based tool for collaborative something-or-other. But in the back of their brains, something feels wrong. Some ambition is left unfulfilled.

Something needs to be done. Sloane would have the toolmakers become, well, become artists (imagine the conversation: “my latest startup is a novel”):

Here’s what I say: Come on over. Come join the side that makes books and music and movies. There are great rewards here, too, but not enough toolmakers. We need you.

(I so do picture him in Darth Vader garb, holding an inviting hand, while he visits a CS department in California, “together we will rule the Valley like writer and coder”.)

But I don’t feel that it’s enough, or that it solves the deeper problem, being the walls between tech culture and, well, culture.

Fundamentally, I disagree with his disparagement of software as tools. I believe there is an expressive potential in software—that at some point, tools become worlds, become media, beget new ways of thinking. So do books, so does music. So does every piece of art, when it expresses the world in ways that were not there before. In time, these ways become part of our perception.2 Toolmakers can be artists in their own right. I’d even argue that it’s tool readers that we need.3

The problem is not the toolness of software—it is its lack of culture.

Qualifying art and meaningful uses of language as acts of expression comes from a daily practice of Merleau-Ponty during my masters degree. We think through an established, sedimented language. True acts of expression create new meanings, formerly invisible, and extend and restructure language (and by consequence, how we think and perceive). ↩︎

Merleau-Ponty, I wish I knew who to quit you. ↩︎

Sloan and his buddies at Snarkmarket are just that, infiltrating companies and magazines like Twitter, Wired or The Atlantic to bring sense and perspective and culture in the tech world. Following them on Twitter made my literary bone exclaim “ils sont des nôtres !" ↩︎