§1. ISO: anti-computational computer interfaces. We rent them out by the month here at Ladder Research, Ponds, that is. We send a big friendly guy along to dig out the Earth and flush it with water and tend to the infant ecology and hydrology and epistemology. If we manage to wake him from his slumber we also have the keeper of the spirits visit you at this stage, and he sets loose in the water twisted entities to seed a happy sort of chaos—happy for you, that is, you will be very pleased, very satisfied with your Pond. I can wake the keeper up but it's not always so easy, it's not exactly costless for me, but I could do it for you, and if you want to help me—there's no need!—if you wanted to help me—it's your decision, it would be up to you—you could help me cover my costs, financial, yes, but also spiritual, because I enter strange realms in search of the keeper.
§2. As development continues and features become more advanced, and therefore their dependence on external libraries and frameworks grows greater, I find it more and more difficult to design into Pond novel forms of interaction, and methods of delivering on inculcating a novel kind of understanding. Computational frameworks are necessarily representational, and this informs the design of languages, compilers, databases, implementation patterns, and communication protocols. This I've known, and I never expected to alter the computational character of processes internal to the computer (besides of course making use of semantic embeddings)—I only aim to design a set of representations and affordances with the recognition that the human is not (necessarily) a part of the computational system. The most straight-forward implication of this recognition is that understanding is not a gleaning off of information on a screen, of processing and computing a certain set of well-presented representations, but a phenomenon, extended in time, constituted by a range of different activities, like re-contextualising, relating to concepts one is more familiar with, and that type of thing.
§3. Why didn't I aim at something like OpenNote? Well because I wasn't concerned with understanding as a specific, limited project, but with understanding as the thing that we express a desire towards as we range across the internet and our reading and listening and seeing. So this, our archive, is our material, and the object is to make it available to participate in the activities that we take to constitute understanding.