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# System prepended metadata

title: Abolishing Apps

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# Abolishing Apps 2

### Sources
- [A world without apps — Michel Beaudouin-Lafon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntaudUum06E)
- [Software as Computational Media — Clemens Nylandsted Klokmose(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-aGF-47hqI)
    - software is not soft at all
- [If What We Made Were Real — Antranig Basman](https://www.ppig.org/files/2017-PPIG-28th-basman.pdf)
- There’s a History for That: Apps and Mundane Software as Commodity
    - global app sales estimated at $25 billion in 2013

### Quips
- Apps are software as commodity, i.e. software under capitalism
- Software is not soft

### What is an Application?
- information appliance
- commodity
- information silo, walled garden
- mass-manufactured, 1-size fits all, designed
- rigid, solid, opaque

### Where to?
- digital/information substrates
    - e.g. spreadsheet, musical staffs, image layers
- dynamic/computational media
- matter/materials
- protocols/grammars
- shared representations
- instrumental interfaces (Lafon), tools that can go between contexts, move across apps. more generic, independent
- end-user programming / authorship environments

### past and active research
- XEROX UI (first GUI had no apps, just documents)
- computational media
    - webstrates, codestrates, videostrates

### What entrenches apps?
- the means of (software production) — apps are the easiest path
- OSs and windowing systems *assume* apps
- The document/app-based web (web3 doesn't escape this, just makes it p2p)
- App stores, supporting the commodity form of software

### paths not taken
- XML was meant to be an interoperable substrate for the web, it never manifested
- OpenDoc was meant to be a common representation for documents independent of tools acting on it.

## action items
- get a pipeline going for 'putting stuff out' ATM it seems:
    - hackMD community instance --> radicle (p2p git) --> pandoc script to turn markdown to html --> website


## Outline
** keep concepts in terms of UI

- what would you do if all of your apps dissappeared?
    - most of your daily computing tasks would be mostly app-oriented
    - you would basically be fucked
- why is this like this?
    - software for profit — protecting intellectual property
    - depriving you of agency in the tools that you use (compared to say, a kitchen, a lab, or a garden, or a studio)
- how could we arrive to a world without apps?
    - point to some research areas
        - ie Photoshop layers
        - spreadsheets — the cell structure and the directional computation — it's actually crazy that you don't have interoperability — ie you can't paste in cells from one spreadsheet environment to another. more importantly, you shouldn't have to bring your data in and out of these closed, priopriatary software worlds to "do the compute"
        - information substrates
        - instrumental interfaces (rooted in ui)
    - imagine some scenarios
    - point out the alternatives that already exist
- malleable software / compostable software
    - a situation in which the communities that you're in dictate the way that these systems work to meet your needs
    - the foss movement does this in the legalistic sense, but hasn't created a meaningful alternative
    - countering — isn't this technically hard ?
        - nothing will ever be attempted if...quote
    - what we're advocating for is not technically trivial, but also the reason we don't see more work in this area is because of the way this market is set up
    - in videogames, we actually want stuff to not be interoperable (whearas game designers would benefit)


## 20.12.23 Notes with Orion / cath call

- not committing to a solution, but instead providing good evidence for projects that are hard to understand as "apps" but allow people to do basic app things
- what would happen if we abolished apps tomorrow? a lot of things would be fucked up.
- why do people use apps? there aren't alternatives.
- instrumental interfaces — reorienting the tool to something you can compose with other elements
- bring your own client model
    - what would more granularity look like?
    - ie if you wanted to make an email client, could you compose it from your favorite text renderer and favorite spam filter and favorite ui...
- big burden of imagination on how to use the meta-tool — how would you compose this software
- here's a scenario, and here's a place where the research is happening
    - information substrates: the environment that the tools are acting on. ie layers in Photoshop or tldraw canvas or even html. or timelines — layers + time for video editing
    - abolishing apps means that the information substrates wouldn't be controled by the walled gardens of the tools — ie layers that you could move between software
    - ie if you wanted consistent keyboard shortcuts across all of the programs that you use, that project is really cumbersome and arduous
- What would happen if all your apps dissapeared?
- Apps are there for markets and profit, but sold to you as agency/freedom, they should be abolished



## 30.1.2024 | Examples of software that is not apps

- **Linux commands** (do one thing, do it well) piping for interoperability (using basic data types).
    - The incentive to use apps was to interact with complex data.
    - Skill barrier is high because of the interfaces, in CL, you loose some visual affordances.

- **Plugins**
    - Community supported
    - Modular
    - Interoperability framework

- **VSTs**
    - Standardized modules

- **Knowledge graphs**
    - Semantic web 

- **(Some) websites**
    - Irma:
        - simple HTML is very cheap to build and to load
        - hyperlinking small websites
        - map a small universe of websites
- **Programmable environments / VMs** 
    - like smalltalk or even javascript.
    - 
- **Large language models**
    - They also can be composed, and made interact with each other via natural language.

- **Static website generators from MD**

- 'Facebook apps' even though they are interoperable, you don't own your data. Priviatize data pipelines only going one way.
- Interoperability is not only a technical problem, but an economic, organizational and political issue. A solution cannot be exclusively technical, but needs to emerge from a different political/economic and organizational culture.


## Underlying protocol? Changes at the OS level? (Compostable Software)

## Are OSs made for apps?

## Computation as an excellent example of capitalism making something actively worse than how it could be.
- Software would be relatively easy to decommodify, we are fools for not doing it.

## What are the characteristics of 'post-apps'?
- Data ownership
- Data locality
- Composability
- Underlying framework for inter-component interoperability (meta-model)
- Community based (Alternative culture)
    - Need to understand that computing is already understood under a corporate & military culture. (commands, execute, etc.)
    - Client server as a manifestation of corporate structures.
    - Every group that embraces progressive computing, embeds their cultures in the architectures they create.
    - Address the organizational stack of the groups that create the tech.
- Decommodified (Alternative economic model)
    - Non-commercial
    - Locally owned, municipally owned.
    - Book: Internet for the people (Ben Tarnoff)
    - (There's a place in the US where the internet)
    - Using internet for most things is mega-bloated
    - Local-first from a software perspective, extending to the physical infrastructure
    - Mesh networks
    - Local-first network infrastructure
        - Resilient (to state intervention, climate catastrophes)
        - Anti-fragile
        - Supply chain of a program (as a way to surface the cultures of the orgs that produce software)
- Liberated (Alternative political culture)
    - Anti-patriarchal
        - eco-feminism as a model for scaling (post-web ref?)
        - gatekept by technical language
        - non-linear (logarithmic)
        - Branchable
        - Collective & communal
    - Siezing the means of computation
        - If we wanna repurpose computing it's insufficent to 'start at the top'.
        - Software engienieerng R&D has been shaped from a perspective of privately owned firms.
        - To change the course of computing and redirectly in a radical direction, we need to unpack the full-stack of technology and how it has been shaped by capitalism.
        - Accesibility.
        - Comparison to enviornmental movement: Before it was fragmented into different efforts, there was a later recognition of all of them being part of a broader narrative.
- Interoperability framework for modularity
- Interface deeper than the OS: at the data level.

The guiding forces of software dev (metaphors, methods, etc) have been economic: a new form of commodity. opposed to giving users agency.



