Hi all.

I'm enjoying reading some books of the Platform Studies series by the
MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/platform-studies).

Specifically, I'm reading "The future was here" about the Amiga and
"Racing the Beam" about the Atari VCS. What I like about these books
is how they try to study the relationships between the hardware and
software design of these computing platforms and the creative works
produced on these systems. The books study these media from the
technical point of view, but also deep into their social and cultural
aspects.

I'd like this kind of critical study about the Smalltalk platform. Do
you know about any book or research in this style?

Thank you.

~ Rafael Luque

Hi Rafael,

Thanks for those provocative reading recommendations.

On the use of Smalltalk or its derivations from a more sociotechnical
point of view I would recommend Maxwell's Tracing the Dynabook, a study of
technocultural transformations [1]:

[1]
https://mutabit.com/repos.fossil/indieweb/uv/docs/es/miniwiki/grafoscopedia.html#Tracing%20the%20Dynabook

Also on alternative tech stacks as a way to inhabit alternative futures,
recently I was presenting The Weekly Package (think in a Cuban Hulu/Netflix
alike of 1 terabyte of data of media working offline across all the island)
and how we mapped it by combining it with Pharo/GT, TiddlyWiki and Fossil:

"""

Because infrastructures organize/accumulate action and embed/transport
contexts, by choosing alternative tech stacks, we are enabling ourselves to
inhabit/explore alternative futures. ie by choosing techs like TiddlyWiki
instead of MediaWiki, Fossil instead of Git, Pharo instead of Python,
HedgeDoc instead of GooglDocs, and so on,  and by arranging such
technologies on our own stacks and workflows, we are answering ourselves,
via prototyping, about alternatives to questions like:

• How to organize and empower community learning and memory, particularly
  in places with intermittent/low connectivity and diverse (mostly small to
  medium) computing/storage/processing resources?
• How to inhabit the continuum between online/offline,
  inter+personal/collective, synchronous/asynchronous,
  documents/data/software?
• How to introduce meta-systems that enable us to change the
  (media/digital) systems we inhabit?

"""

You can find a graph of The Weekly Package art metadata below and the
complete mail in [2].

[2] https://lists.riseup.net/www/arc/grafoscopio/2021-11/msg00000.html

One of the things that wonders me is how context informs the development
of technologies and the communities around them, which, in time, informs
the presents and futures traversed by such communities-technologies
tandems. In the case of Smalltalk, I have seen it deployed time and again
in the context of academic, enterprise and research institutions. But in
our case, as Smalltalk, Pharo, GT deploys in a hackerspace other concerns
and approaches are taken, which in time mean exploring "alternalities" of
technologies in the present, more related with hacktivist, civic tech and
grassroots communities. (I will try to propose a talk in that sense for the
upcoming ESUG or the Smalltalk 50 years in Canada).

Cheers,

Offray

On 29/11/21 8:46, Rafael Luque wrote:

Hi all.

I'm enjoying reading some books of the Platform Studies series by the
MIT Press (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/series/platform-studies).

Specifically, I'm reading "The future was here" about the Amiga and
"Racing the Beam" about the Atari VCS. What I like about these books is how
they try to study the relationships between the hardware and software
design of these computing platforms and the creative works produced on
these systems. The books study these media from the technical point of
view, but also deep into their social and cultural aspects.

I'd like this kind of critical study about the Smalltalk platform. Do you
know about any book or research in this style?

Thank you.

~ Rafael Luque