This smells a lot like "Script X" - a 90's era collaboration between IBM and Apple, but for end-users.
Back in the early-mid 90’s Apple Computer and IBM and I seem to remember some other tech nonsense peddlers formed a joint venture (I'm not looking this up, all from memory), with a name something like Talagent, forgettable.
But their product was supposedly this uber-duper new non-language that was going to completely take over software development. Named “Script-X” it starts with each programmer defining the language they want to use, the syntax and whatnot of the language itself, and then they work in blissful joy writing code in the style they prefer to write code.
I cannot believe they actually managed to create a joint venture, mount a huge industry PR campaign, and start selling this utter shite without thinking this pure idiocy through…
No two programmers working on the same project could read one another’s code. The developers spent a large amount of time changing their minds’ on the specifics of the “optimal language they wanted”, which caused previous work to be incompatible to the language and that programmer who chose to change their programming mental model. Not a single project using their Script-X shipped, it was a total and complete failure.
I was at Philips Media while this was taking place, and being a little software language author myself, I watched this playout with dismay these participants could be so short sighted.
It is really too bad that "Slack" (the application) is the antithesis of "Slack" (the SubGenius philosophy):
In the satirical Church of the SubGenius, Slack is the ultimate goal: a state of blissful, lazy freedom from work, responsibility, and societal pressure, achieved by rejecting "Normal" conformity and embracing conspiracy, self-delusion, and "Bulldada" (bullshit) to attain personal liberation, money, and effortless success, with the mustachioed avatar J.R. "Bob" Dobbs as the ultimate guide to this spiritual laziness.
Key Aspects of Slack:
Anti-Work/Anti-Conformity: Slack means escaping the "compulsive urges" of modern life, like working, saving money, and trying to be "normal".
Effortless Achievement: It's the ability to get what you want (wealth, status, love) without effort, often through bizarre, pseudo-occult means or by exploiting the system.
Conspiracy & Weirdness: Slack is tied to uncovering hidden truths (aliens, conspiracies) and embracing abnormality, separating believers from the "Normals".
J.R. "Bob" Dobbs: The iconic, pipe-smoking, suited figure is the living embodiment of Slack, a shortcut to financial heaven and a life of ease.
"Hour of Slack": This is the name of the SubGenius radio show, broadcasting their anti-establishment message and teachings on achieving Slack.
How to Get Slack (According to the Church):
* Join the Church of the SubGenius and pledge allegiance to Bob.
* Use "Bulldada" (bullshit) and "Morealism" (more bullshit) to overcome problems.
* Learn "occult technology" and incantations for financial power.
* Reject mainstream pressures and embrace your inner weirdness.
Essentially, Slack is a satirical take on the American dream, promising ultimate success and happiness through utter laziness and rebellion against the very systems that create the need for such a shortcut.
...and it being "the season" - if you live in any city larger than 30K, look for an announcement of the "drunken Santa pub crawl". That is a global annual event the SubGenius put on every year, where mobs people in Santa outfits swarm bars for a 24 hour period, often over a hundred Santas.
People don't learn history, and I'm not talking about the wars and battles BS that they use to glorify going to war. I mean real history: biographies of the lives of real and ordinary people. Not the history makers, the people that lived through and had the mind to record their lives for prosperity.
Case in point, this notion that the past as "more real" and the present "more fake"... the amount of fake doctors, fake medicine, religious revivals that were actually fleecing entire towns into destitution was out of control. The "wild west" it truly was, and the law was owning a gun because everyone was desperate.
Actually the history of real people is my main area of interest :-). I stand by what I said, but I way understand you have to sort of blur your vision and take the bigger 60%, this is not the 99%, also the article was specifically about aesthetics, which is inherently a more rose colored glasses approach. I’m not sure that there’s any era I’d rather live in than today (though this is a nuanced question, since you wouldn’t know better, and I do think we’re in sort of a local minima so for sure I’d rather live in like the early 2000’s and maybe before, probably no earlier than auto-bill pay, digital banking and modern dentistry lol.). But there are many eras I would like to travel to for the aesthetic.
Even the so-called "history makers" are the product of imagination, of myth, and of hagiography. If you met these people today, you wouldn't recognize them if you went by the expectations built up by the images we're fed. The same holds of so-called celebrities.
20% to 25% of the cowboys were Black, and that aspect of history has been erased. Hollywood, propagandists and media's efforts to glorify, White wash, and profit off the American West Frontier has 100% distorted our history. It was much closer to this "the past was not cute", and then add in rampant corruption, criminal and religious criminal activity and you art starting to get there.
We are a propaganda nation, far better at it than any other on Earth.
Somewhere, I am not the historian to say, teaching people the basics of an education, that being “reading, writing and arithmetic”, failed to recognize the critical role that communications play in everything people do, and try to do. That phrase ought to be “reading, writing, arithmetic, and conveying understanding” because that would include why one reads and why one writes, and connects that to the goal of conveying an understanding you have to others. However, this is the root issue.
General society being generally poor communicators is caused by this lapse in our understanding of education. The understanding that the purpose of an education is to both use it and to help others understand what you may and they do not, as well as understand how to gain understanding from others that they have and you do not.
Because we do not teach that an education is really learning how to understand and how to convey understanding in others, the general idea of an education is to be an owner of a specialized skill set, which one sells to the highest bidder.
This has caused education to be replaced by rote memorization. Which in turn created a population that is only comfortable with direct question and answer interactions, not exploratory debate for shared understanding. This set the stage for educators, nationwide, to teach students to be databases and not critically analyzing understanders of their vocations.
Note that the skills for conveying understanding in others, additionally carries the skill how to recognize fraudulent speech. Which, as of Dec 2025, is the critical skill the general population does not have that is potentially the death of the United States.
When a population of people do not have an emphasis on critical analysis, but rote memorization, as the basis of their education that then creates a population that has heightened sensitivity to controversial lines of reasoning, lines of reasoning where there are no clear answers. Life itself has a large series of mysteries based on faith, religion being chief, which in a population that is comfortable with debate to convey understanding is perfectly safe to engage in discussions about mysteries within these areas requiring faith. But a society that is not comfortable with such discussions, one that thinks debate’s purpose is to "win, at all costs" then such discussions are taboo. They get shut down immediately. When people cannot debate to understand, but as a combat, learning is not accomplished. And useful critical analysis skills are not taught.
I have no idea if such a national situation can be manufactured, but I believe this is where we are at as a nation. We no longer produce enough adults with developed critical analysis skills to support democracy. Democracy depends upon an educated population with active critical analysis capabilities, a population that can debate to a shared understanding and accomplish shared goals. That foundational population is not there.
This can be fixed, but it may take more than a generation. Our educational system needs foundational revisions, which include additional core subjects, chief of which being how to communicate and convey understanding in others. Which lies at the roots of our demise, this lack of this basic skill.
>General society being generally poor communicators
period dot.
Don't insinuate there was a golden past where humans in general were great communicators, it didn't exist. Furthermore the need to communicate in the modern world has increased network sizes many times over what humans developed in the 'monkeysphere'. For all most of all human evolution the number of people you interacted with and communicated with was relatively tiny, like 150 or so.
Before we developed radio communication to crowds was a rare thing done by few people. Radio itself lead to massive crowds but few communicators themselves (Propagandists quickly realized its power for example). And really TV was much the same. But in the last 40 years we've had a geometric explosion in the ability to communicate by the average person. In terms of societal growth, this is a tiny sliver of time. Now your 'average idiot' can communicate with the world, poorly, and still garner a huge audience, and or work requires much less 'doing things' and communicating.
Nowhere do I claim that such a "golden past" existed. I am saying that the critical skill of communication to convey information, to gain information, to learn via one-to-one communications is rapidly being lost. It is not respected by education, it is not taught, and it is truly one of humanity's greatest skills: conveying understanding. Which has the side benefit of teaching one one how to identify illogical speech.
I have an ongoing and endless debate with a PhD that insists consensus of multiple LLMs is a valid proof check. The guy is a neuroscientist, not at all a developer tech head, and is just stubborn, continually projecting a sentient being perspective on his LLM usage.
My wife, as a teen, had the job of being Vince Guaraldi's chaperone / guide for a series of concerts during the 70's. She's got great stories of hanging out and partying with his people.
You have forgotten your child mind, Peanuts speaks fluently in the mentality of 7 year olds. It resonates childhood logic and contradiction. It's a masterwork of literature, as that child mindframe would not survive written as traditional prose, but is perfectly suited to a 4 panel comic strip.
That's a bold diagnosis to make about someone over the internet. As a kid, I used to buy a magazine that included various translated comic strips, including Calvin & Hobbes, Garfield, and Peanuts. Peanuts was by far the least interesting to me and didn’t resonate at all, while Calvin & Hobbes completely blew my mind. Even Garfield left me better memories because it was plain silly and not pretentious.
I've pitched to VCs a lot, and you touch upon a key aspect: they really lack imagination, and are extremely prone to group think. These days, I tend to think of VCs - the people - as frat boy bullies that never grew up.
Back in the early-mid 90’s Apple Computer and IBM and I seem to remember some other tech nonsense peddlers formed a joint venture (I'm not looking this up, all from memory), with a name something like Talagent, forgettable.
But their product was supposedly this uber-duper new non-language that was going to completely take over software development. Named “Script-X” it starts with each programmer defining the language they want to use, the syntax and whatnot of the language itself, and then they work in blissful joy writing code in the style they prefer to write code.
I cannot believe they actually managed to create a joint venture, mount a huge industry PR campaign, and start selling this utter shite without thinking this pure idiocy through…
No two programmers working on the same project could read one another’s code. The developers spent a large amount of time changing their minds’ on the specifics of the “optimal language they wanted”, which caused previous work to be incompatible to the language and that programmer who chose to change their programming mental model. Not a single project using their Script-X shipped, it was a total and complete failure.
I was at Philips Media while this was taking place, and being a little software language author myself, I watched this playout with dismay these participants could be so short sighted.
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