Notes on The Early History Of Smalltalk
Smalltalk is a recursion on the notion of computer itself. Instead of dividing "computer stuff" into things each less strong than the whole—like data structures, procedures, and functions which are the usual paraphernalia of programming languages—each Smalltalk object is a recursion on the entire possibilities of the computer. Thus its semantics are a bit like having thousands and thousands of computers all hooked together by a very fast network. Questions of concrete representation can thus be postponed almost indefinitely because we are mainly concerned that the computers behave appropriately, and are interested in particular strategies only if the results are off or come back too slowly. - Source
I take away is if applying this to the Internet of Things, IOT, boom from recent years then there should be a distinction between connected sensors and computers. Where the Smalltalk example feels like the collective set of sensors and logic is the computer. But today we tend to see the computer as the single device we are on which talks to a lot of other things not as the whole.
For the first time I thought of the whole as the entire computer and wondered why anyone would want to divide it up into weaker things called data structures and procedures. Why not divide it up into little computers, as time sharing was starting to? But not in dozens. Why not thousands of them, each simulating a useful structure? - Source
This feels like one of the biggest defects of the computer we have now. My iPhone, iPad, and Mac are all isolated, although networked computing devices. When in principle they could be a single networked computer.
A twentieth century problem is that technology has become too "easy". When it was hard to do anything whether good or bad, enough time was taken so that the result was usually good. Now we can make things almost trivially, especially in software, but most of the designs are trivial as well. This is inverse vandalism: the making of things because you can. Couple this to even less sophisticated buyers and you have generated an exploitation marketplace similar to that set up for teenagers. A counter to this is to generate enormous dissatisfaction with one's designs using the entire history of human art as a standard and goal. Then the trick is to decouple the dissatisfaction from self worth—otherwise it is either too depressing or one stops too soon with trivial results. - Source
"This is inverse vandalism" is interesting, but giving agency to anyone to build with technology is powerful. Although a lot of the trendy tools you see popup day to day are mostly all just new clones of older tools and principles. For example just this week (2021-05-08) we are seeing a bursting of LinkedIn comparators. But they are not improvements in the networking and work aggregation methods used to help with job placement.