Why Plain Text Files Rock

“Big Scientists” often enjoy working with.in ‘plain text’ files on a daily basis:

Actually modern “Researchers” don’t have any choice – and, while they (/often only) faintly mistrust and even mildly despise the ongoing trend toward mere Victorian ‘utility’, ‘practicality’, ‘accessibility’, misplacing-notions of ‘convenience’ or general ‘benefits‘, will often admit to strolling around the Lab (seemingly) “Freely admitting that there ‘really is something to be said about using plain text / files’, don’t you think, Henry..?”

With this in minds (eg. as a tmp.buffer storage-process), set up the initial operating parameters for a Research Log entry on why “Plain Text Files Rule”, perhaps unnaturally gravitating towards the following:

1. - Plato’s Theory Of Forms: Something to do with G(/r)eek architecture / the philosophy of perception and where Minds draws the (artificial  virtual) boundaries for what it considers seemingly ‘outside’ the Mind: note this is obviously not really a starting point but actually ‘another starting point’..

2. - The Absolute Minimum (unicode & character sets): Often consider the absolute minimum to be absolutely Everything at once. The notion that everything about humanity is ‘already pre-encoded’ in a certain way gives rise to thankfully disturbing questions about free will, block universes, and oranges which run like clockwork – andor a ‘locus of a set of innate possibilities‘..

3. - Neurotransmitters leaping across the synaptic cleft: text as visualizations of nonlocal structure (answering one link with another – call & response between two non-existent parties – hmm.)

4. – Postmodern Detritus; Materialis (pdf file) & History (magazine article).. gladly lost in the deep data. Sifting for fool’s gold, or rather perhaps – tuning in to the higher (deeper) frequencies of a-historical time while taking small notes in the margins along the way.

5. – Text Files throughout virtual digi-history: If there was ever a way out of the Basement Archives, the House Of Asterion considered as the human brain itself -

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Text: Aesthetic Measurements Of Cultural Units Of Information-Presentation

6. Despite increasingly wider bandwidth, Text Files (/equals sign) Rock. There’s something about the form which is not only neat and efficient, but innocently neutral. As if they belong in some naturalistic ‘continuum of usefulness’ which includes mothers, pencils and paper, rules and pocket knives.

In terms of the social perception of their specific ‘form’, feel Text Files are seen (/by non-programmers) as mere scratch-pads for half-baked ideas or marginal mental doodlings – and little else. They are actively shunned for being ‘non-professional’, and are culturally associated with viagra spam and polite ‘advance fee’ emails from Nigerian princes.

Text files have their place – andbut it seems this place is somehow ‘fixed’ in the cultural Hierarchy of Presentation Of Research Information (lower forms / format-processes first):

  • (Non-political) graffiti on the walls of public toilets
  • Student-based impromptu desk-etchings
  • Wobbly demonstrator placards
  • Backs-of-postcard scribbles in thick purple crayon
  • Text files (utf-8, non-bom 4tehwin)
  • Carl Linnaeus index cards
  • HTML5 (?) files
  • PDFS
  • Strictly limited edition leather bound grimoires with hand-set type
  • Sanitary electro-totemic tablet computers (Steve Jobs as Moses)

Text files are everywhere – in the virtual spaces which form my current research lab, they form deep digital snow drifts that Researchers can happily mush through for hours at a time. They look fully crystallised, but are always actually on the verge of crystallisation and materialisation – sets of potentialities rather than ‘actual’ forms..

Text files. Just look at those little digital beauties. Bless 'em

Whenever one ‘clicks’ on them with a semi-pleasantly obsolete ‘rsi-mouse’ pointing device, feel like a l33t h4x0r, surfing the Great Tubular Interwave and exploring the Gibsons for ‘raw’ information – something primal, unseen, the underlying source=code of an infinite online multiverse

Well no, not really. But the ‘low-rent’ nature of .txt often comes pretty close.

10 Things Plain Text Excels In: the blog’s title is interesting – “Invisible to the eye.” Taking about a use-focus on the ‘content’ of a text file, it’s ‘logic’(/s) – that it’s a ‘universal interface’.

  • All this suddenly bringing to mind what fellow Researcher Zizek is talking about when he discusses the ‘mythologisation of technology‘ – ie. that the more transparent and ubiquitous it becomes, the more the horizon of our understanding of it’s Hegelian materiality shifts – and the more we need hardcore internal Philosophy-fu to untangle ourselves out of its apparent simplicities.

//Note: thinking of ‘materiality’ in the artificial context of “Text Files & Why They Rock”, you’re suddenly reminded of the characters in Tarkovsky’s timeless meditation “Stalker”:

There’s something about the ancient (spiritual) heaviness of Earth, the paradoxical weightless of Text Files – the ingenuity of people from Russia who one imagines might well admire their well constructed sturdiness. Compare and contrast:

Zizek: The Thing From Inner Space“[..] on the contrary, when he abandons the hold of his intellect and engages in an intense relationship with material reality” – and

Lillemose: Conceptualizing Materiality – “These reconceptualizations thus act as an imaginative and speculative mediator between [..]” Emphasis yours

More on this later. Now go off for a slow instacoffee and chew some organic banana cake slowly, while listening to a looped tape of tropical morning jungle birds in the empty auto-dispense cafeteria. [Scuffing sounds of a chair on brilliantly white industrial hard-flooring are heard]

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//Update 2: About the ideology of ‘plain english’ and its connection to ‘plain text’. More on this later.

Perhaps the ideology in the word ‘plain’ is precisely because it appears to be a nice, plain, seemingly ‘neutral’ word – a word you could take home to your ailing grandmother, a word you could trust not to suddenly display its flailing alien genitals.

Thing is, the ‘white’ of a freshly opened text file is never a ‘neutral’ space – the myth of the ‘tabula rasa’ often lies in (silently) disavowing previous knowledge of the ‘eraser’ and what was in.exactly erased – Henry, imagine the ‘clean’ milky whiteness of a post-industrial toxic spill, ‘smoothly and efficiently’ leaking into the nearby cursed graveyard and deep into those polished bones.

It’s not the alleged clean simplicity of the form which gives parallel rise to thoughts of conceptual ‘purity’ – rather it’s the unexamined search for ‘innate purity’ of form which creates – as if out of thin air – forms which precisely conform to their ‘plain’ (ideological) construction ie. “What other way would it be?”

//Talking about ‘plain english’ – talk also about ‘plain chinese’

Sure – in computing, plain text is the contents of an ordinary sequential file readable as textual material without much processing, usually opposed to formatted text. But ‘ordinary’ – ‘sequential’, ‘readable’ – ‘textual’ and ‘material’ – in what ways are these ordinarly, sequential, readable, texturally meterial

//”Format: a particular way that information is encoded”

//The Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension “text/plain”: perhaps from the Greek mimos, “imitator, actor”: someone who acts “textually – plainly” an active actor in a ‘plain role’ – a lovely film star from Germany, perhaps ‘merely observing’ the passing of ‘just some’ Plain Text on pass by on the far wall of the geostationary cafe via his augmented data-shades. It’s all an N-man show for the cameras and the floating girls. Yet nobody quite realizes – andor really wants to..

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Jaron Lanier (Not A Gadget) on “Files”:

Quote: “Entrenched Software Philosophies Become Invisible Through Ubiquity

An even deeper locked-in idea is the notion of the file. Once upon a time, not too long ago, plenty of computer scientists thought the idea of the file was not so great.

(..) The file is a set of philosophical ideas made into eternal flesh. The ideas expressed by the file include the notion that human expression comes in several chunks that can be organized as leaves on an abstract tree – and that the chunks have versions and need to be matched to compatible applications.”

Henry: Wow. Imagine breaking open the ‘file’.. a (non-linear!), file-less, window-less O.S..