Notes
2026/11/06
It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books—setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend that those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them.
— Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths
If composing vast books is a laborious madness, then so is building a new operating system or computing stack, one that reimagines how we interact with computers. Even attempting to build a new web browser certainly counts as an “impoverishing” madness these days.
So what if we borrowed from Borges and started pretending that this new vision of computing already exists and summarized it, commented on it? For example, as a series of reports on a programming language and its operating system?
UX demos and explorations are hints of that idea: Instead of focusing on building entire systems, we merely sketch out a few specific interactions and then pretend that it extends beyond the confines of the stage, even if we can clearly see the strings on our puppets.
But UX demos still feel more like the equivalent of writing short stories, they don't go as far as Borges did. What is the computing equivalent of merely commenting on fictitious books, the equivalent of one-paragraph short stories that aren't afraid to start with an ellipsis?