I propose a first foray into the uncapped threadosphere to explore the relationship between @RoamResearch and #ChristopherAlexander.
I may need to write this in stages 🧵..🧵
I may need to write this in stages 🧵..🧵
2/ Why does #ChristopherAlexander recur in #roamcult @RoamBrain @CultRoam @RoamFm? (Provoked by )
I have initially four propositions:
I have initially four propositions:
3/ 📜 [[History]] #ChristopherAlexander’s idiosyncrasy seeded the pre-history of @RoamResearch - the philosophical godfather of Object-Oriented programming he's a muster point for intuitive/ideological computer scientists, and a key catalyst for software-development-as-a-religion
4/ 🌱 [[Epistemology]] #ChristopherAlexander’s epistemology is as @RoamResearch’s - his mode of organising knowledge is gardening via unfolding / bricolage. A Pattern Language is the OG digital garden. Gardening presumes access to the world & enshrines ornament as a common good.
5/ 🪆 [[Ontology]] #ChristopherAlexander’s ontology is as @RoamResearch’s - his reality is innately symbolic: a metaphorical-essentialist realism. Ideas have [[thinghood]] and accrue a hierarchy of symbolic depth through bi-directional linking fact ↔️ meaning, salt ↔️ saltiness.
6/ 📱 [[UX/UI]] #ChristopherAlexander’s aesthetics suggest enrichments to the future of @RoamResearch’s UI/UX. Particularly Nature Of Order’s codifying geometric primaries that are symptomatic-of and conducive-to, the sort of unfolding living structure of knowledge Roam aims for.
7/ Caveating, I’m a digital novice and a Roam newb and muchly an over-extended philosophical charlatan. Here is, I hope, learning in public.
8/ For a spin through what’s-so-great-about-Roam. I recommend @nateliason’s intro ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ nateliason.com/blog/roam
9/ For a brave and brilliant intro to #ChristopherAlexander’s total opus (!) including (unusually) Nature Of Order and Battle for Life and Beauty see @rjs’s recent video ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
10/ My thinking here in the following thread leans much on my otherwise unpublished architectural thesis on #ChristopherAlexander - I’d love any advice on where to take this: drive.google.com/file/d/18Apl3f…
11/ I’ve lectured via these slides for a similar introduction covering some history/context re #ChristopherAlexander - again, love to chat more on that with anyone. drive.google.com/file/d/0B4pkBA…
12/ 📜 [[History]]
The debt owed by Object Oriented Programming to #ChristopherAlexander is widely acknowledged: gist.github.com/atduskgreg/579… - @atduskgreg @ibogost
The debt owed by Object Oriented Programming to #ChristopherAlexander is widely acknowledged: gist.github.com/atduskgreg/579… - @atduskgreg @ibogost
13/ #ChristopherAlexander’s journey in search of quality-without-a-name and that influence on the software community is attested at length in: dreamsongs.net/Files/Patterns…
14/ Berkeley Prof Alexander inhabited the role of West Coast contrarian rallying DIY revolutionaries & bleeding edge bodgers. His charisma, mysticism, beef memes & embattled crusade have the psychological fit of a cult leader but decentralised without coercive power. So @conaw 😉
15/ *A* Pattern Language is credited (+ Whole Earth Catalogue) with inspiring Wikipedia and a culture of networked thought. Misunderstood as the textbook on rustique, rather, the indefinite article of *A*PL intends to be a template by its form and less by its content. So Roam.
16/ A Pattern *Language* - so understand APL primarily as a Language, where language is the paradigmatic non-rivalrous commons. Roam is that language, or at least the syntax of that language. Thanks
17/ For more on Roam as Language as Commons (as Revolution) - see @conaw thread on Benkler then @jgreenhall re #gameb anchor.fm/emerge/episode…
18/ #ChristopherAlexander’s A City is not a Tree is also an obvious foundation for Roam. See: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=214402… If I’m feeling very brave, I’ll advance a theory of Roam Graph as Rhizomatic in the Deleuze/Guattari sense, but then I might be completely underwater.
19/ Synthesis of Form, City is not a Tree, A Pattern Language ~ these can all be harmonised as chapters within #ChristopherAlexander’s long project to articulate the DNA of *living structure* - a battle against a form of modernism which renders a mechanical universe.
20/ The antidote to modernism is a generative living universe. *Nature of Order* is at first glance a cheaply muddled mysticism. I commend it's long observed *information architectures* found in the emergent complexity of natural systems. See: natureoforder.com
21/ Nature of Order argues for a morphology for all forms (+ideas) as centres growing by emergent unfolding [[Gardening]] and he makes a case for for 15 atomic diagrams in the behaviours of objects (+ideas) in relation.
22/ Nature of Order is about Information Architecture, nascent in the web at large, foregrounded in the Roam Graph. See @greg_bryant’s 2005 gestalt dream about a hierarchy of topics, weighted linkages and fields of centres. natureoforder.blogspot.com/2005/01/center…
24/ People confuse #ChristopherAlexander as a nostalgic librarian or a hippy architect, when he should be classed as a gardener. Indebted to @anthilemoon for this taxonomy applied to note-taking apps
25/ #ChristopherAlexander is not an architect.
26/ He is a bottom-up Aristotelian interested in the haecceity of matter’s miniutiae as he finds it: inductively reasoning from the many instances towards a general generative principle. A remixing bricoleur warring against the Cartesio/Platonism of Architectural Engineering.
27/ In @vgr’s rubric. #ChristopherAlexander is more Explorer than Architect.
Allowing bricolage as a subset-of or creative-tension-within Architect is the best I can do not to pejorativise “Architect” altogether.
monoskop.org/images/9/91/Le…
Allowing bricolage as a subset-of or creative-tension-within Architect is the best I can do not to pejorativise “Architect” altogether.
monoskop.org/images/9/91/Le…
28/ “Gardener” offers not a middle ground but a third way - and the key difference is that they deal with living matter with a time-dimension - perhaps there’s mileage in engineered-trellis-as-analogy?
Cue images of his farmers market in Fresno! californiathroughmylens.com/vineyard-farme…
Cue images of his farmers market in Fresno! californiathroughmylens.com/vineyard-farme…
29/ I commend Head Gardener @Mappletons who is tending a formidable garden of gardens here: github.com/MaggieAppleton… and in this thread
30/ A speculative taxonomy of Gardening Tools:
An aggregation of Gardening Techniques hugely enriches this: maggieappleton.com/roam-garden
An aggregation of Gardening Techniques hugely enriches this: maggieappleton.com/roam-garden
31/ 🌱🌱🌱 I’ll have to pause there - BRB soon for ~ How digital gardens are Alexanderian for being unfinished/Timeless; legibly civic; public/private; playfully Living structures; and alchemically inter-objective.
Then Ontology.
Then UX/UI - I promise
Then Ontology.
Then UX/UI - I promise
