Computation is at its most base, most crassly uninteresting, in its detail of cleverly solving narrow problems, and yet somehow that is what is so thoroughly valorized that churning out these vast quantities of microstatements has become indistinguishable from a fulfillment of larger ambition. A truckload of nails is not a single girder or a yard of cable. A thousand truck loads of nails is not a girder or cable, a million of them will not build a bridge. This is not why we are here.

Computation in its techne, the deep understanding of a space that is math given verbs, somehow both utterly imaginary and the foundational underpinning of everything that is. Computation in its metis and the knowledge that can only come from a step beyond sight, earned in hours of hands on the machine. Me standing in a room with a thousand first-year CS students, saying, this together is the path to your episteme. For the gnosis you will need, look left, look right. See who is with you, but see.

But if you can see what I see, standing here yelling on the sidewalk at the corner of Silicon and Spinoza, then you can see the enclosing of that aspiration by people who want to sell a dripfeed of adulterated and corrupt techne back to us for who they are. You can know the people trying to lock the hours of metis behind pentalobe screws, paywalls and glass by what they're taking from you. You can name the theft and refuse to worship your own lonely, isolate, convenient one-click subjugation.