Did you love Yahoo! Pipes and miss it? I sure did. I wrote this history of the graphical web-based processing tool that sure seemed like the future when it was introduced! https://retool.com/pipes I interviewed the core team and several other folks so we could finally have a definitive history. (And forget my words, even—the illustrations are amazing!)
This is part of a series at Retool, a visual programming tools company, that decided to make sure the past wasn’t forgotten.
This is a contribution to the publication Bureaucracktic Bedtime Stories that results from the worksession Bureaucracksy, organised by Constant, association for arts and media, between 7 and 12 December 2020. Bureaucracksy brought together art and artivist practices around the imaginative re-appropriations of rules and regulations and investigated the governance of techno-social systems through the prism of bureaucracy. The execution of rules is an essential element of computation, of digital infrastructures, and of the societies that they operate with. Critical practices of listing, naming, filtering, tool making, care and sharing require that some books are kept.
Glenn Fleishman
Indieterminacy