exhibit 1)
This is John Dee – a leading 16th C intellectual, astronomer, astrologer, devout Christian and prolific occultist. He is probably the originator of archetypal wizard “He was tall and slender. He wore a gown like an artist’s gown, with hanging sleeves, and a slit…. A very fair, clear sanguine complexion… a long beard as white as milk. A very handsome man”. He was also (occasionally) in the pay of Queen Elizabeth the first, and I’ve heard rumours that he was also a spy, who’s code was 007.
Interesting guy – the occult side is what fascinates people the most of course… he went through a phase of Angelic communication, through a medium (and quite possibly charlatan) named Edward Kelley… angels dictating long passages (enough to fill several books) in Enochian (the angelic language) which were dutifully transcribed, collected, collated.
I came across some of these a couple of years back – page after page after page of incredible detail – intricate symbols and diagrams like sudokus on acid, and immediately the computer programmer in me kicked in with something approaching recognition, and I thought “Oh my god, you poor bastard. What have you done?”
exhibit 2)
The modern Eula. Every time you buy a piece of music, a movie, software etc etc you are apparently entering into a contract… hundreds of lines of densely worded legalese will be secreted away somewhere, sometimes prominent, sometimes not. These artifacts are quite unique in the sphere of creative writing in that they’re specifically designed NOT to be read by the people who are supposed to read them.
AND NO ONE EVER READS THEM
They are still about communication though, at a different level. Here’s what I think: they are a veiled threat. They are the curse over the pharaoh’s tomb… they say “Tremble ye, for thou art bound by that which is beyonde thy reckoning, and if it is HIS will, ye shall render unto Satan that which is Satan’s”. There as been a bit of fuss recently over a report that Eulas are An epidemic of lawsuits waiting to happen... and really this should come as no surprise, if you have hundreds of millions of people regularly signing contracts that they’ve never read.
So.
Welcome to Nick Taylor’s Law of the Minimum: “Complexity arises from flawed assumptions”.
If an answer to a question is complicated, then you’re probably asking the wrong question. Poor old John Dee went off on (what was almost certainly) a wrong tangent, and having one of the most powerful minds of his era, was able to pursue it down blind alleys to an extent that would have floored a more conventional intellect far, far earlier. Today we have the collective wisdom of the most powerful legal minds that money can buy, constructing elaborate legal artifacts that no one ever reads, committing people to terms that they consistently break, and really don’t give a flying fuck about in any case.
Complexity has a fractal-like way of generating more complexity, and there is no end-point. Nothing resolves, you just wind up with endless self-generating caveats. As a programmer, you develop an instinct for this – whenever you see a mad bit of code, you generally know that in the long run you’ll need to stop asking “how?” and start asking “why?”
I think that Eulas (like DRM) are (probably) the right answer to the wrong question. The question is, what’s the right question.
The answer to that one I suspect is “do we need the copyright cartels?”
Sorry.