Aesthetic July 4 '26

Independence is a hanging word. Underneath it is the Latin dependere, to hang from, the same root that gives us the pendant hanging from a neck, the pendulum hanging from its pivot, and everything pending, which hangs over you until it is decided. To be dependent is to hang from something. To be independent is, literally, not to hang. Two months ago I wrote an essay built on may, the softest verb in English, and a month after that one built on commit, the word that stops being a pun when you type it four hundred times. The calendar has handed me a third word, and a loud anniversary to say it on: the Declaration turns two hundred and fifty this year. So this is a special, not the July essay, which will come when July is over and can be told honestly, but a day trip into one word, taken from the middle of the month it belongs to. Read the essay: https://papers.aesthetic.computer/aesthetic-july-4-26-essay.pdf More readings + papers: https://papers.aesthetic.computer

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

A reading of the essay, Aesthetic, July 4th, 26, by Jeffrey, approximately 13 minutes. Independence is a hanging word. Underneath it is the Latin dependere, to hang from, the same root that gives us the pendant hanging from a neck, the pendulum hanging from its pivot, and everything pending, which hangs over you until it is decided. To be dependent is to hang from something. To be independent is literally not to hang. Two months ago I wrote an essay built on May, the softest verb in English, and a month after that, one built on commit, the word that stops being a pun when you type it 400 times. The calendar has handed me a third word, an allowed anniversary to say it on. The declaration turns 250 this year. So this is a special, not the July essay, which will come when July is over and can be told honestly, but a day trip into one word taken from the middle of the month, it belongs to. Yesterday I shipped a song called Americomputadora. The word is a seam, America welded to computadora, the Spanish word for computer, which is feminine, so the title quietly declares the American computer to be a she. It went out through a distributor on the 4th of July, which means my little declaration spent the holiday hanging from someone else's catalogue. That contradiction is the whole essay. I might as well begin. The Declaration of Independence is the most famous example of a speech act, a sentence that does not describe the world, but changes it. The colonies did not discover they were independent. They declared it out loud in writing, and then spent seven years of war making the sentence true. John Adams saw the shape of the anniversary before the ink was dry, writing to Abigail that the day ought to be celebrated with shoes, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward, forever more. He got his wish, and one more coincidence besides. Fifty years to the day after the signing, on July 4, 1826, Adams and Jefferson both died a few hours apart. That was 200 years ago yesterday. Programmers declare things too, and the grammar is instructive. In the old languages, see among them, a declaration and a definition are different acts. A declaration brings a name into existence. It tells the compiler this thing is real, expect it, but it does not say what the thing is. The definition, the actual body, can live somewhere else entirely, and the program will not link until it exists. You can declare a function and never define it, and everything compiles beautifully, right up, until the moment something tries to call it. A country can be in that state. So can a person and so can a software project. Declared, not yet defined. The declaration is one sentence in one afternoon. The definition is the rest of your life, supplied in small pieces, at link time when something finally calls you. The machine I am typing this on descends from an independence movement. Before the personal computer, there was the mainframe, and you did not own a computer any more than you owned the moon. You rented moments of its attention in time-shared slices from an institution that billed you for the privilege. Personal computer was a radical adjective. It meant this one hangs from nothing. It boots for you alone on your desk whether or not anyone renews your account. Then the industry spent 30 years quietly reversing the revolution. The cloud is time-sharing with better fonts. The software you use hangs from a subscription. The subscription hangs from a server. The server hangs from a company whose obligations to you fit on one page of terms that can change. Last October, the reversal produced a number worth staring at. When Windows 10 reached its end of life, on the order of 240 million working laptops became obsolete overnight. Nothing happened to those machines. No capacitor blew. A dependency was withdrawn, and a quarter of a billion computers fell because they were hanging. Some of my favorite work this year has been catching a few as they fall. A $50 surplus ThinkPad, an operating system small enough to memorize the size of 89 megabytes, booting in about seven seconds into a prompt that makes art. Ivan Illich had a word for tools like that. Convivial, tools a person can use without asking an institution's permission. Conviviality is just independence wearing friendlier clothes. None of this is new, and the lineage matters to me more than the technology. Media art has always had a wing of people who, on discovering that their work hangs from someone else's platform, respond by building the room themselves. A library that answered the question of institutional dependence by buying a former church in San Francisco, filling it with its own petabytes, and keeping a mirror of itself at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, a library of Alexandria holding the backup copy of the web, which is the kind of sentence history writes when it is showing off. Folk music is the ancient case, songs with no author and no platform, maintained by whoever sings them, forked by whoever misremembers a verse, humanity's oldest open source software, and proof that culture can survive centuries with no infrastructure except people. And there is the eccentric case I keep returning to. An artwork designed to be worse when digitized is a declaration of independence from the scanner. You cannot capture what refuses to hold still for capture. There is a paper on the platter that names the five ways small art practices die: capture, dilution, anthologization, infrastructure, rot, quiet abandonment. Four of the five are diseases of dependence. Infrastructure rot is the purest one. The work was fine, but the floor it stood on belonged to someone else, and the someone else left. I want to be honest about where my own project actually stands on the 4th of July, because the ledger is mixed and the mix is the point. The first 38 commits in the autumn of 2021 are a remix on glitch. Someone else's editor, someone else's servers, someone else's kindness. Five years later, the production server is a small machine I rent by the month and administer myself. The code pulls from a JIT knot at my own domain. Identity is migrating onto a protocol where a handle is a domain you control rather than a row in a landlord's table. The operating system burns onto USB sticks and boots on cast-off hardware with no cloud in sight. Every one of those moves was a renegotiation of a hang. None of them removed it. The rented server hangs from a hosting company, the domain from a registrar, the protocol from its own small federation. Pull one thread at the bottom, and you find eventually, everyone. And this very week, the week of the anniversary, I did the opposite of all that on purpose, twice. I moved my podcast onto a hosting platform because it does the one thing I cannot do from a rented box, which is stand in the doorway of every directory at once. The first thing the platform did was list the show twice on Spotify. The clerical metosis, I cannot fix myself, because the listing hangs from the host and the host hangs from the directory. I had to write a support email, which is the modern form of petitioning the crown. The same afternoon I pointed a subdomain at the platform, and the DNS record that does this is called a C name, a canonical name record, a line in a zone file whose entire meaning is this name of mine is really that name of theirs. There is no more honest sentence in infrastructure. Every key name is a small confession about which way you hang. Then, on the holiday weekend itself, the second one, I finished the paperwork and submitted menu band, the little menu bar synthesizer, the one whose whistle spent years confidently a fifth sharp, to the app store for review. This is a landmark for a one-person shop, and I want it commemorated here, in the independence essay of all places, precisely because of what a submission is. There is no more explicit act of dependence in modern software. You place your instrument in a queue at the most powerful gatekeeper on earth and wait for a stranger in Cupertino to decide whether it may exist. I did it gladly on Independence Day weekend, with the fireworks still going, because the door it opens is every Mac in the world, and because independence was never the refusal of doors. It is remembering that you built the thing behind the door, that the source stays yours, and that if the crown says no, the synth still plays. So I do not believe in independence, exactly, not the zero-dependency kind, which exists nowhere and never has. The signers themselves ended the declaration by pledging their lives and fortunes to each other, which is to say the document declares independence from one thing by declaring dependence on the people in the room. And the fireworks Adams called for were Chinese, gunpowder, an imported technology, lighting the sky over an independence celebration from the very first one. Nobody celebrates alone with materials they made themselves. It has never happened. What I believe in is knowing exactly which way you hang and keeping the ability to rehang. That is the real property, the personal computer promised. And the cloud took back, not self-sufficiency, but portability, data that moves when you move, names you can point somewhere else, a floor that can be rebuilt under the work before the old floor rots. The healthy version of independence is a well-kept ledger of dependencies, each one chosen, each one revocable, at a cost you have already priced. May ask permission, June made promises, the Fourth of July declares, and a declaration, remember, is not a definition. It just brings the name into existence and warns the world to expect the body. 250 years in, the country that invented my holiday is still supplying its definition in small pieces. At link time, whenever something calls it, so is the software. So am I. The song shipped, the sky got its illuminations, and this morning the little laptop on my desk booted in seven seconds, hanging from nothing but the wall. Here ends the reading.