(2026-07-09) Taylor Media For Understanding Situations

Dorian Taylor: Media for Understanding Situations. there’s a flipside to categories, and that’s associative, analogical, that-reminds-me-of kinds of relationships. My argument, which I gave as a conference talk nine years ago, is that the physical and economic characteristics of analog media constrain its geometric and topological properties, in ways that make it extremely difficult to deviate from a pattern of information being arranged into large, opaque chunks,

the computer eliminates this constraint by shrinking the basic unit of information to about as small as it can go,

You can then invoke its interactivity to alter your path through this space, or even change its structure.

The technical term for categories is extension, and associative relationships is intension. My argument is that for the entire history of history—that is to say, ever since writing was invented—extension has been much cheaper to represent in media than intension. What computers do is make intension cost the same as extension.

People focus on computers being digital, or even electronic, but I believe the other most important feature unique to computers, that complements their interactivity, is random access

While random access was something of an engineering expedient, interactivity was not initially an obvious characteristic of computers, and people had to fight for it. A fascinating account of this history is Waldrop’s The Dream Machine. (about JCR Licklider)

we have to read way too damn much raw content—or watch, or listen, or whatever—per unit of information extracted. We also have to write too damn much, because what we’re often writing—and therefore mostly reading—is slightly varying formulations of the same basic messages

you shouldn’t have to read something if you’ve already read it. You definitely shouldn’t have to write something if you’ve already written it. And if there was a way to marshal these tiny slices of information—potentially down to the individual sentence, phrase, or word—and move them wherever they needed to go, then readers could skip over things they were already familiar with or that weren’t germane to them, and writers could stash details behind a click, and generally reuse material.

When you give an individual concept its own address, you can collate its synonyms, you can put it in relation to other concepts, and, when backlinks are automatically taken care of, you can see everything that references it.

There is the additional bonus that referencing information rather than copying it contributes to its overall integrity

I don’t really “do” fandom, but the closest I come to being a fan of somebody (who’s still alive) is Bret Victor. He is somebody who has truly mastered the computer as an expressive medium.

A little over a decade ago, Victor penned a monster of an essay, titled What Can a Technologist Do About Climate Change? In 12,000 or so words, in his idiomatic style, he steps through a carefully-organized set of domains, with interactive examples, illustrating where people who know how to make things can intervene on the problem of climate change

The prescription is straightforward: Publish data with a consistent structure and transparent semantics, and make it directly addressable on the network, so the next Bret Victor doesn’t have to burn his one brief life on earth schlepping it into a usable shape before he can perform

Victor actually devotes an entire chapter to this. It’s the one with the same title as this newsletter: Media for Understanding Situations. In it he poses the question: “what if there were an npm for scientific models?”

What I will say, though, is that it’s wild that in 2026, scientists aren’t just encoding their mathematical models into computable formats as a matter of course

Part of the reason, as he remarks, is of course the cartel of academic publishers, but another—which he also notes—is that our writing tools still largely consist of glorified typewriters. My remark here is that you can’t even begin to address a problem like this until you can guarantee a substrate of:

• arbitrarily small information resources,
• each directly addressable on the network,
• where the addresses are durable, so links don’t break,
• where links between resources go in both directions,
• where the data syntax conforms to open standards,
• with transparent formal semantics for resources and the links between them,
• and cryptographic integrity,
• and traceable provenance,
• and, importantly, fault-tolerant availability.

Intertwingler doesn’t do all of those things—yet—but it definitely does all but the last two (and a half), and the ultimate goal is indeed to do them all. You can very much think of it as an operating environment where the goal is to make it a hell of a lot easier than baseline to do Bret Victor-style demonstrations

What if it were as easy to insert facts, data, and models as it is to insert emoji and cat photos?

to pull off something like that, you’d need a uniform interface for the data. I just spent a shitton of effort determining how such an interface ought to behave, and then I went and wrote it up and called it Intertwingler. I then took a prototype I had written years before, scraped the front end off the back end, slapped it onto an instance of Intertwingler, and called it Sense Atlas. The product that will eventually be my job for the rest of my life is basically a handful of stylesheets and some JavaScript in a trenchcoat. I could not have done that without a critical level of data portability.

Deterministic systems will always be simpler, cheaper, and more reliable than artificial neural networks. It doesn’t matter how accurate AI gets, because it’s competing with perfect.

A world without deterministic information systems is a funhouse mirror of confabulation. I don’t see how anything works in it long-term.

The computer is a uniquely potent medium for understanding situations. Computers also do very well as surrogates for authority, doling out answers by fiat. People will choose the register according to what they value.

Comprehension is important to me. Understanding situations, and helping others understand situations, by making media for understanding situations, is where I excel. Make things, make sense has been my motto for the last twenty years—since before this odyssey started—and I mean it. (sense-making)