Replying to Avatar Cory Doctorow

A prolonged study of *Open Circuits* reveals something important about the #HackerAesthetic, a collection of graphic design, fashion and industrial design conventions that begins with this realization: that the crisp lines of digital logic can be decomposed into blobby, probabilistic lumps of metal, plastic, and even wax.

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

It reminds me of #GeorgeDyson's brilliant memoir/history of computing, *Turing's Cathedral*, where he describes how he and the other children of the scientists building the first digital computers at the #PrincetonInstitute spent their summers in the basement, hand-winding cores for the early colossi their parents were building on the floors above them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/12/george-dysons-history-of-the-computer-turings-cathedral/

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Cory Doctorow 2y ago

You can see my hacker aesthetic photos in my #Defcon31 photo set:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=defcon31&user_id=37996580417%40N01&view_all=1

In this video, Eric Schlaepfer illustrates the painstaking work that went into decomposing these tiny, precise components into their messy, analog subcomponents. It's pure hacker aesthetic, and it's mesmerizing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byKyJ0b04Lo

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