$Let me fix that for you
A while back, scrolling reddit, I ran into a meme. An anatomical 3D model of the neck — nerves, vessels, the whole thing — and someone asking: why is this so messy? Why would nature converge on this? The internet did what it does best ofc and proposed fixes, from hilarious to absurd. There was this one with cable ties, titled: “Let me fix that for you.”
That one kept haunting me for days, so I tried to find it again (good luck lol), and I did - well, not the exact post with “let me fix it” but others. Some weird kind of inspiration, shivering — not at the tangle, but at the fix.
Not that I am not acquaintanced with the mindset, having a tech background myself. Yet here’s the underlying (mis)conception that made me shiver - the “mess” doesen’t equal bad engineering. It’s a solution derived under constraints that would make any systemdesigner weep: every intermediate version has to be a living, surviving creature. No starting from scratch, no refactoring, no return-button — only patching what’s running. Four billion years of backwards compatibility, so to say.
The cable ties, as proposed fix, whilst tounge-in-cheek in this context ofc, had me iterating on a different question alltogether. What kind of value function does this solution encode? Optimizing for full control — readable, maintainable, predictable, orderly. Simplification. Mess is complicated, mess is a black box, mess is uncontrollable, mess is overwhelming, mess means certain collapse into entropy.
Yet… by being leaky, continuously exchanging matter and energy with their surroundings, helplessly interdependent and coupled, is how living order actually works. The engineering-approach here feels like…a bizarre dream — born out of a conscious mind’s desperation against its own death, falling in love with a kind of order that only dead things can hold.
“…the fight is between those who want to live as creatures and those who want to live as machines.” — Wendell Berry
Thinking about above a lot, we share the same flesh, same constraints, same mortality. The diff is what each side counts as a cost. I feel them both smh..
