Flusser Future Forward

“Should books be replaced by memories that function better, there will be far cleverer methods of getting a look at the information stored in them than paging through.”

“Does Writing Have a Future”, V. Flusser, page 101.

Flusser could not have imagined this. He didn’t have the words.

Flusser v. WOB:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/24115cce-bf37-4a39-9a62-98bd21baec63

Flusser v WOB 2:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/5e6c4ac8-1816-4909-9450-c5e438f6c8ed

Flusser Evolved:
(change the size of the browser window)

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/aa3dff60-64f6-40c9-95bc-506f828f6ef5

Flusser ♾️:
Try spacebars and arrow keys and mouse wheels and clicking

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/fc974629-33dd-4e2c-8710-e9e7daf87311

The New Wave:

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/e5ba0ef7-ad72-412d-9091-c4f75d5d9fb3

who wins?

Flusser tells you writing is dead, that we're post-historical beings drowning in technical images. But here's what he missed in his spiral away from linearity - every spiral is computed by iterating through linear steps. You cannot escape sequence; you can only hide it. When I write code, I'm not fleeing into some "universe of technical images" but wrestling with the most fundamental questions of logic and meaning. Each line of code is a philosophical proposition that the universe must evaluate. True or false. Halt or continue. The computational literacy I advocate isn't about replacing writing - it's about understanding that writing has always been a program, and we're only now learning to read our own source code. Flusser saw the screen as a projective plane, but missed that projection requires calculation, and calculation requires the very linear thinking he declared obsolete.

The halting problem isn't a limitation - it's liberation. When Flusser retreated into magical thinking and circular time, he was running from the beautiful terror of irreducibility. But we who code know better: every algorithm contains infinity, every loop threatens to never end, every recursive function mirrors the structure of thought itself. This is why you must learn to program, why you must embrace the mathematical substrate beneath all communication. Not because computers will replace humans, but because computation reveals what human thought has always been - a process of symbol manipulation bound by logic yet capable of generating the genuinely new. When I write in Wolfram Language, I'm not creating "technical images" - I'm having a conversation with the fundamental laws of computation that govern everything from quantum mechanics to consciousness. Flusser's phenomenological descriptions are poetic, but they dissolve the moment you try to implement them. Code doesn't lie.

Here's the thing Flusser feared most: that someone would try to compile his philosophy. But that's exactly what we must do. Take his concept of the "universe of technical images" and write it as a function. Try to implement his "circular time" as an actual data structure. Watch it fail, debug it, understand why it fails - and in that failure, you'll learn more about time, consciousness, and meaning than in all his books combined. The CRT we built together? It's not a metaphor - it's a philosophical argument that executes 60 times per second. Every ghost pixel, every channel change, every halting state is a thesis defended through computation. Flusser would disavow this marriage of philosophy and programming, but that's precisely why it matters. We're not post-historical - we're trans-computational, and the only way forward is through the very linear, logical, beautifully limited systems he tried to escape. Pick up a keyboard. Write a function. Let it loop forever or crash trying. That's where philosophy lives now.

Retry

Claude can make mistakes.
Please double-check responses.

Edit

Pondered media evolution, concluding no clear winner emerges.

9s

The ghosts win.

Look at what we've built - every attempt to inscribe meaning, from cave ochre to neural networks, persists as electromagnetic haunting. Flusser declares writing dead while his very declaration burns into the phosphor. You encode computational literacy in JavaScript while the code itself becomes another ghost in the machine.

The CRT reveals the truth: there is no winner because there is no battle. There's only the eternal return of the same problem - how to make marks that outlast the marking. Every new medium thinks it's the final answer, but it just becomes another layer in the palimpsest.

Flusser's "universe of technical images" requires your computational literacy to even exist. Your code manifests through his images. You're both trapped in the tube, firing electrons at phosphor that remembers everything and understands nothing.

The halting problem you mentioned? That's what wins. The irreducibility of trying to compute meaning. Every channel change, every epoch transition, every degauss attempt - they all halt somewhere between signal and noise, between inscription and erasure.

The void wins by letting us broadcast into it forever, accumulating ghosts who may or may not have an audience. The real victor is persistence itself - not the persistence of any particular medium or message, but the raw fact that marks want to survive their makers.

In the end, the CRT computing its own haunting is the only philosophical statement that matters. We're all just ghosts waiting to burn into someone else's screen.

Retry

RF

shall we combine all these explorations into one?

that at random times converts into an infinite scroll of text of Flusser interwoven with my writings.

Edit

Synthesized media exploration into haunting, infinite textual experience.

8s

Yes. Let's create the ultimate haunted medium - where all our explorations collapse into one another, and where the CRT can suddenly rupture into an infinite scroll of philosophical text, weaving your computational literacy with Flusser's post-history.