Pat yourself on the back if you knew that was bullshit.
Most of my friends are not part of any engineering community nor do they identify themselves as particularly technical. A few are, as am I, but we’re the exception. This means that I’m often in a situation where I might be the only participant in a conversation who regards technology as a fully knowable thing. It’s not a matter of intellect. My friends are an exceptionally bright, intuitive, articulate bunch. So what’s going on?
I wonder about this. Why is technology hard to understand? Technology arises from nature and the human experience. In order to function it must be rule-based and encapsulated, formed out of highly specific and reliable concepts that exist in a bounded intellectual framework. Technical methodology must, by definition, be replicable and predictable. On that basis, it should be far more comprehensible than something more slippery and abstract, like what it means to read someone to filth.
I think it comes down to language. Or, in many cases, jargon, slang’s asshole cousin. I think there’s a clue here in that my friends are often very good with slang and very adverse to jargon.
I believe that technologies are, fundamentally, specialized linguistic systems. Conversely, language is a form of technology - the two are inextricably linked. The methods and nature of any technological system imply some kind of unique language. Computer software does this in a very literal way: every program is composed of a series of mathematical and logical languages that allow electronic circuits to reliably read, store and manipulate data. Other types of technological systems also have languages. For example, electrical engineering has both a design language (this symbol means positive, that symbol means negative, this other symbol means ground, etc) as well as a conceptual language (P=IV and V=IR, from which P=I2R and P=V2/R can be derived).
Ok so if I’m right and technology is a matter of language, why is technical language often so obtuse? The best engineers have a gut sense of what a good design looks like: sleek, purposeful, no unnecessary moving parts. Paradoxically, I think this is the nature of the issue. Technical language seeks to remove unnecessary or duplicative concepts from its expression, and so it quickly becomes rich in symbolism, acronyms and interior references. In that way, it’s not so different than slang.
Good technical language tends to come in succinct expressions with enormous versatility, like the electrical equations I named above. The equivalent of “yo,” “cool” or “man.” Engineers get a feeling from good technical jargon, the same way some people feel slang. It’s the fondness of having a reliable tool, your favorite hammer or those scissors you always reach for. I think I’m unusual in the way that both slang and technical jargon move me. Neither feels alien or hostile, both are welcome in my mind.
It’s easy to look down on slang because of how it arises spontaneously without the sanctioning bodies that typically codify jargon. But I would argue that is precisely the strength of slang. For slang to become successful it must survive a lot of competition and be adopted organically on the basis of its true benefits. No one told us to say “cool” for decades. It just felt right, it was helpful. It described something essential we previously didn’t have a word for. Good language gives life to nascent ideas.
Again, there’s a parallel to engineering: some of our best technologies have been inspired by nature. Nature is herself a superb engineer because of her endless capacity for iteration and her ruthless willingness to discard one paradigm in favor of a better one. I know of more than a few scientists and engineers who admire nature in an almost spiritual way for this exact reason. It is telling that modern AI design programs, modeled after our own brains and iterating in a way that resembles natural evolution, are producing incredibly efficient things with an eerily organic appearance.
Literally wtf are you even talking about
That whole thing was a long winded preamble to the question of how I want to talk about technology on this blog. I’ve noticed that technical explanations tend to fall into a few categories. The first is the full fat, no compromise explanations that are only suited to experts in the field. Not going to work here. On the other end of the spectrum is the condescending babytalk usually found in big newspapers (“a computer is like a book that has special numbers written in it!”). Definitely not doing that. Both extremes disguise meaning from the nontechnical audience.
I enjoy the rigor of technical discovery. I love knowing how something works. Taking the case off of it, peering at the insides, seeing what makes it tick. Really getting specific, really understanding it. I like sharing this feeling with others. I get a genuine satisfaction out of helping someone understand something that they previously found mystifying. There’s a skill to this, to breaking down technical or scientific concepts into simpler language without diluting or mischaracterizing the nature of the thing in play.
I would like to talk about technology in this way. Clear, effective, accurate, accessible to as many people as possible without diluting meaning, based on the assumption that your audience is down to learn. I think this is probably the most difficult of all options, but it is the one that I like the most.
A notable exception
Sometimes people don’t really want to understand, sometimes they just want to bitch about how much all this shit just pisses them off. And that’s ok. Rather than sober things up with a bunch of “actually…,” the friendliest thing to do is join them. No one should stand in the way of a good rant.
Sometimes I think that’s maybe even the better way of understanding certain things. Certain types of jargon are so overly complicated or abstract that it becomes fundamentally useless to understand. I can see how that would happen for innocent reasons, how an intellectual experiment could spiral out of control until the original goal is long forgotten. There is something seductive about pure logic; it ignores externalities and uncertainties, redefines reality in a way that is comfortably predictable, absent moral judgments or the need to make uncertain decisions. But more often than not I feel that the misdirection is intentional. We live an age where bad actors try to use technical jargon to cow people into submission, preventing them from asking basic, reasonable questions about what’s happening and why. I’s absolutely right to call a con a con and get fucking mad about it. I respect that. I’ll probably do a bit of that here, too.
The more interesting part of this is specifically when this approach is correct. There is definitely such a thing as bad jargon, just as there is such a thing as dumb slang. Shade is here to stay but trust me, no one is going to be saying “fr fr” in 10 years, as tubular as it may be.
Bad jargon resembles technical language in form and cadence but contains none of the precision and impact. I don’t think this happens by accident. I believe bad jargon is designed to confuse by intentionally turning the audience away. I think it’s healthy for people to be revolted by bad jargon, a sort of instinctual intellectual immune system. The trouble is that bad jargon can thus be used to conceal meaning, to quell debate, to avoid questions. We’ve been subjected to a lot of this language in the last 20 years. During the runup to the 2008 mortgage crisis there were CDOs, MBS, CDSs and more, all of which were fancy ways of saying useless bullshit garbage that nobody needs. Crypto has introduced a whole new class of this: ZK rollups, trustless decentralized identity, crosschain composability, all of which is, again, fancy ways of saying useless bullshit garbage that nobody needs.
This infuriates me. The utter nihilism of it, the harm it promotes in defense of scams and frauds.
In practice
When writing, I naturally fall into a pattern that might be familiar to an engineer (perhaps to a writer as well, I just don’t know many of them).
I start with a sense of a problem: I want to convey something about something. I mock up low fidelity solutions. Sentence fragments, phrases that feel powerful and succinct. Anything that might contribute to the solution. I start assembling these bits and pieces together, to see how they take shape. While reading and rereading those early drafts, I am liberal about making revisions, discarding things that don’t work, rearranging ideas and thoughts, taking things in a very different direction if the results are more pleasing.
Case in point, this started as a simple declaration of intentions to write about technology clearly. It evolved into… well, whatever this is. I'm not sure if the result is ideal or even likable, but I see my fingerprints in the clay and perhaps that's enough.