Mile
Zero

The Emperor had set out to beat not just Gurgeh, but the whole Culture. There was no other way to describe his use of pieces, territory and cards; he had set up his whole side of the match as an Empire, the very image of Azad.

Another revelation struck Gurgeh with a force almost as great; one reading — perhaps the best — of the way he'd always played was that he played as the Culture. He'd habitually set up something like the society itself when he constructed his positions and deployed his pieces; a net, a grid of forces and relationships, without any obvious hierarchy or entrenched leadership, and initially quite peaceful.

[...] Every other player he'd competed against had unwittingly tried to adjust to this novel style in its own terms, and comprehensively failed. Nicosar was trying no such thing. He'd gone the other way, and made the board his Empire, complete and exact in every structural detail to the limits of definition the game's scale imposed.

Iain M. Banks' classic novel Player of Games follows Jernau Morat Gurgeh, who is sent from the Culture (a socialist utopia that's the standard setting for most of Banks' genre fiction) to compete in a rival society's civil service exam, which takes the form of a complicated wargame named Azad. The game is thought by its adherents to be so complex, so subtle, that it serves as an effective mirror for the empire itself.

Azad is, obviously, not real — it's a thought experiment, a clever dramatic conceit along the lines of Borges' famous 1:1 scale map. But we have our own Azad, in a way: as programmers, it's our job to create systems of rules and interactions that model a problem. Often this means we intentionally mimic real-world details in our code. And sometimes it may mean that we also echo more subtle values and viewpoints.

I started thinking about this a while back, after reading about how some people think about the influences on their coding style. I do think I have a tendency to lean into "playful" or expressive JavaScript features, but that's just a symptom of a low boredom threshold. Instead, looking back on it, what struck me most about my old repos was a habitual use of what we could charitably call "collaborative" architecture.

Take Caret, for example: while there are components that own large chunks of functionality, there's no central "manager" for the application or hierarchy of control. Instead, it's built around a pub/sub command bus, where modules coordinating through broadcasts of custom events. It's not doctrinaire about it — there's still lots of places where modules call into each other directly (probably too many, actually) — but for the most part Caret is less like a modern component tree, and more like a running conversation between equal actors.

I've been using variations on this design for a long time: the first time I remember employing it is the (now defunct) economic indicator dashboard I built for CQ, which needed to coordinate filters and views between multiple panels. But you can also see it in the NPR primary election rig, Weir's new UI, and Chalkbeat's social media card generator, among others. None of these have what what we would typically think of as a typical framework "inversion of control." I've certainly built more traditional, framework-first applications, but it's pretty obvious where my mind goes if given free rein.

(I suspect this is why I've taken so strongly to web components as a toolkit: because they provide hooks for managing their own lifecycle, as well as direct connection to the existing event system of the DOM, they already work in ways that are strongly compatible with how I naturally structure code. There's no cost of convenience for me there.)

There are good technical reasons for preferring a pub/sub architecture: it maps nicely onto the underlying browser platform, it can grow organically without having to plan out a UML diagram, and it's conceptually easy to understand (even if you don't just subclass EventTarget, you can implement the core command bus in five minutes for a new project). But I also wondered if there are non-technical reasons that I've been drawn to it — if it's part of my personal Azad/Culture strategy.

I'm also asking this in a very different environment than even ten years ago, when we used to see coyly neo-feudalist projects like Urbit gloss over their political design with a thick coat of irony. These days, the misnamed "web3" movement is explicit about its embrace of the Californian ideology: not just architecture that exists inside of capitalism, but architecture as capitalism, with predictable results. In 2022, it's not quite so kooky to say that code is cultural.

I first read Rediker and Linebaugh's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic in college, which introduced me to the concept of hydrarchy: a type of anarchism formed by the "motley crew" of pirate ships in contrast to the strict class structures of merchant companies. Although they still had captains who issued orders, that leadership as not absolute or unaccountable, and it was common practice for pirates to put captured ship captains at the mercy of their crews as a taste of hydrarchy. A share system also meant that spoils were distributed more equally than was the case on merchant ships.

The hydrarchy was a huge influence on me politically, and it still shapes the way I manage teams and projects. But is it possible that it also influenced the ways I tend to think about and write code systems? This is a silly question, but not I think a stupid one: a little introspection can be valuable, especially if it provides insight in how to explain our work to beginners or accommodate their own subconscious worldviews.

This is not to say that, for example, Caret is an endorsement of piracy, or even a direct analog (certainly not in the way that web3 is tied to venture capitalism). But it was built the way it was because of who did the building. And its design did have cultural implications: building on top of events means that you could write a Caret plugin just by sending messages to its Chrome process, including commands for the Ace editor. The promise (not always kept, to be fair) was that your external code was using the same APIs that I used internally — that you were a collaborator with the editor itself. You had, as it were, an equal share in the outcome.

As we think about what the "next era of JavaScript" looks like, there's a tendency to express it in terms of platforms and layers. This isn't wrong! But if we're out here dreaming up new workflows empowered by edge computing, I think we can also spare a little whimsy for models beyond "pure render functions" or "strict hierarchy of control," and a little soul-searching about what those models for the next era might mean about our own mindsets.