look over there

1.0 our purpose is understanding.

2.0 our medium is handwriting.
2.1 certain handwritten documents
will be central to our discussion.
2.2 mathematical “code” will be
central to these handwritten documents.

3.0 our “class”—the group
within which we’re working—
is part of a “school”.
3.0.1 this school can (and here will)
be treated as an entity having
goals and strategies and so on
quite apart from those of any
individual human being.
3.0.2 people do this all the time
so it’s no big deal philosophically.
remark: we don’t know—any of us—
what “thinking” is anyway… so
why *not* attribute it to corporate
entities?
3.0.3 we do not of course deny that
humans work within schools and suchlike
systems in service of their *own* needs;
the point is that *no* relationship
between the “desires” of the larger
entity and those of any of the
particular individual humans therein
is here *assumed*. 3.0.3.1 it’s messy.
3.0.3.2 why go into it now?
3.1 the purposes of the school are economic.
3.1.1 they boast of this:
“the center for workforce development”.
3.1.2 the “positive” spin is colleges
as engines-of-social-mobility—
places where students can “step up”
in *social class*.
3.1.2.1 but this topic—social class
in USA—is highly taboo.
3.1.2.2 the problems this creates
cannot be told: we will leave it at
at “vague and other misleading language”.
3.1.2.3 one might, for instance,
aspire to a condition higher than
that of somebody else’s fucking workforce.
3.2 their medium is bits of data.
3.2.1 certain collections of bits
pass for money in our society.
3.2.1.1 the role of handwriting in
what passes for money—
the “paper trail” of checks—
has recently shrunk to almost nothing.
3.2.1.2 troubling, as far as i know,
nobody in the world but me.
3.2.1.2.1 never. 3.2.1.2.2 theless.
3.2.1.3 this probably isn’t coincidence.
3.3 everybody in our class is made to buy…
and to use… an obsolete calculator.
3.4 meanwhile they’ve got the net
on their bloody phone so who are we kidding.

4.0 bits have transformed the world—
anyhow a lot of what we see around here—
one heck of a powerful medium.

5.0 if you wanna learn any math, you’ll
pick up a pencil and *calculate*.