New project: Indigenous and decolonial foundations for programming

Mark has invited me to share some early thoughts about a nascent project. This is practice-based research, meaning that I can't share results, or even fully coherent motivation, until the practical work commences. The following describes a little background, in the hope that you may find this an interesting basis for discussion.

I try to justify the privilege of academic sabbatical leave by undertaking research investigations that would not be supported by conventional public or private funding, applying radically new methods to longstanding problems. As an engineer / critic, I take Agre’s critical technical practice to mandate not only properly informed theoretical perspectives on technology, but also subjecting any speculative concepts to Pickering's mangle of practice, learning what I don’t know by making different things in different contexts.

Next year will be the last time in my career that I’m entitled to take a year of research leave. I’ve done it twice before. In my first sabbatical, I spent 7 months living in a New Zealand forest, creating the purely visual art programming language Palimpsest, through a daily process of creative exploration that avoided specification or explicit functional goals (perhaps “vibe coding,” but working directly in Java). My second sabbatical asked what AI would look like if it were invented in Africa instead of the USA, a question that I explored ethnographically, working with computer scientists and local communities in Ethiopia and Namibia.

The massive surge of interest in AI since then has inspired many to reconsider the foundations of computing, and the longstanding tension between AI and programming as explored in my book Moral Codes. For this last sabbatical, I plan to undertake a practical investigation of alternative foundations. Informed by critical histories such as Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s “Programmed Visions”, and Matteo Pasquinelli’s "Eye of the Master,” I bring together my ethnographic investigations of AI alternatives with some decades of personal experience inventing domain-specific and end-user programming languages. I am making plans to work directly with creative and scholarly communities in two countries - in Lagos, Nigeria inspired both by Helen Verran’s “Science and an African Logic” and by Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, and in my home country of Aotearoa New Zealand, where mātauranga Māori does not separate people and their environment in the same way as colonial metaphysics.

In 2018, when starting my investigation of AI in Africa, computer science colleagues asked how the fundamental principles would be any different, simply by working in a different place. Yet observing the work of my graduating students as they join DeepMind, Facebook AI, Spotify and other corporations, I wondered how AI on another continent could possibly be the same. Those tensions seem even greater, in turning my attention to programming languages. Aren't the basic principles of computation mathematical laws, within which today’s programming languages represent a natural compromise of engineering practice and architectural principles? Yet Chun, Pasquinelli and others attest to the contingency of so many supposedly fundamental principles. I really don’t know what, or whether, new things might be discovered by this somewhat Quixotic project. But I hope that a spirit of playful humility and moral engagement may uncover some alternative paths into the forest.