Animist

January 3, 2025

/// the following is the original expansive version of the animist announcement, as posted 1 may 2024 to linkedin... ///

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on this international beltane / workers' day:

a project, already in progress & herewith announced, to remake computation by building a wholly new operating system called ANIMIST, embodying by axiom & fiat its & our spatial, distributed, collaborative, and temporal reality. also comic.

every o.s. in use today is a genetic half century old. ANIMIST seals that fifty year gap ecstatically: it is built from the hominids -- from the ui -- down. its front face deploys crucial forms (mathematic, literary, musical, tabular, architectural, statistical, cinematic, typographic, geometric, etc.) as primitives and offers direct semantic manipulation of and between objects composed of these forms.

architecturally, ANIMIST squares the universal amino-acid beauty of yesterday's lisp machines and then-and-today's smalltalk systems -- which each dissolved computation in a single lithe language and thus buzzed and glowed and spun -- by instead using as solvent a new protocol, a liquid nervous system connecting and coordinating and making interoperable programs written in every good language.

such efforts historically were the province of great industrial research sites like bell labs, olivetti, xerox parc. that work in those places remains one high-water mark for joint synthetic human endeavor. today, m. friedman et al. have these labs' parents' successors slouching toward other things; so to build at the old optimistic scales and levels of complexity -- to shrug into some of those discarded mantles and build meaningfully -- entails new structures.

it is ANIMIST's primal design to serve as amplifier-connector: of hands and minds engaging in the most urgent and fervid human pursuits. the work of building it itself echoes that intent: its carpenters and midwives and masons and bakers give ANIMIST form for the euphoria both of its ideas and, no less, of collaboration with other generous spirits.

lebbeus woods, one of humanity's greatest recent minds, held about such work that it is inevitably "at war with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms"; and then asserts "i cannot know your name. nor can you know mine. tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city."

demos, ideals, details imminent & recurring.