Without Me You’re Nothing
In 1980, Frank Herbert and Max Barnard co-wrote a book about personal computers called Without Me You’re Nothing.
Published a year after the Apple II’s debut, it aims to demystify personal computing for a ‘computing-curious’ audience. A technology that Herbert (correctly) believed would become central to our lives. The title encapsulates Herbert’s core message throughout the book: That the computer is just a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Without human input, it is inert. A mere “stupid, inanimate chunk of hardware”. Also, to what extent the title is play on John 15:5, I have no idea.
I recently read the book because it was mentioned in Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing and as a massive Dune AND vintage computing book fan, I was curious.
Though outdated, in the book Herbert imagines a computer system that could assist in creating vast, interconnected worlds, organising the sprawling chaos of notes, drafts, and ideas into a coherent and usable framework. Predicting dedicated writing apps like Scrivener and wikis, Herbert wrote that computers would “store, index, and cross-check massive amounts of information very rapidly,”.
He is excited by the idea is that computers could become partners in storytelling. A device he calls ‘The Author’s Computer’.
It’s unsurprising that the author most famous in our current age of AI for imagining a civilisational injunction against ’thinking machines’ insists that computers cannot create for you: “Your computer has no will. It does not think. It is not conscious.”
Herbert was however not above the power of naming, nor a little sympathetic magic:
“We know of a milling machine operator who calls his machine Esmerelda. Why? “Because it performs better when I call it by name.”
This has a great deal to do with naming the device because people seldom observe the other side of the coin: How you identify the machine determines how you will use the machine.
Computers are extremely susceptible to this unconscious “name game.” SWITCHING works so fast that it can create an illusion of human behaviour. But the thing is still just switches and electric currents. Illusion remains illusion.
How about calling it the “illusion machine”?”
This ability with creative illusion is at once a danger and one of the most attractive characteristics of computers. When we get into the section of this book dealing with images on screens, you will understand even more of that fascination with creating illusions that correspond to our “real world.” One of the most exciting things about computer screens has to be that ability to create illusions of reality.
(…)
“We all know that the closer we bring our illusions to the way the universe performs around and within us (based on a hard reading of consequences), the better we are at predicting what’s going to happen next. Accurate prediction, after all, is the real name of the scientific game.
Should we call it the “prediction machine,” then? Or perhaps “reality machine”?
(…)
Let’s get back to the fact that this device is a tool, and by the best operational definition it is anything you can make it do. Let’s go ahead and be a little bit anthropomorphic, as long as it’s all in fun. And let’s name it in a way that keeps the thing in its place. Let’s call it “Hey, you!” or anything else that suits you at the moment you’re using it.
One more thing in this same vein. Just to make very sure that you keep the relationship between you and your computer in the proper perspective, the first time you prepare to use it, stand there for a moment and address it sternly. Say, “You stupid, inanimate chunk of hardware! Without me, you’re nothing!”
We guarantee that unless somebody is playing a very difficult joke on you, your computer will not answer back. After all, computers don’t argue; they just don’t forgive.
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
Patchwork
I bring this up because I was reminded of Herbert’s Author’s Computer last week while reading about Patchwork, Midjourney’s new collaborative, multiplayer platform for world building.
Patchwork is a worldbuilding tool with an infinite, zoomable canvas that lets users organise and connect ideas visually—like Figma, but for worldbuilding. It uses “scraps” as building blocks to represent things like characters, events, places, or props. Each scrap can include text, images, and links to show how everything fits together. The app supports real-time collaboration, so multiple people can work on the same project simultaneously, with updates appearing instantly..
To generate a new world, the user enters a text prompt into an editor bar at the top of the “create” screen and selects one or more of a set of 10 different image styles.
This then produces a new whiteboard with a bunch of new still image assets and text boxes or entities known as “scraps”, including input boxes that allow the user to prompt new images or settings that fit the initial world description, even whole new AI generated character descriptions.
Coming from Midjourney, Patchwork has AI image generation at its core, making it easy to generate consistent visuals for characters and settings. In the future, the developers plan to add 3D and VR features, “world generation,” and better tools for teamwork and feedback.
I haven’t tried the app yet, so I can’t say much more about it, but it feels like the first of the “new creative tools” I spoke about the other week. The fact that it’s a ‘worldbuilding tool’ adds further evidence to my thesis that “worlds” are the first new medium of the 21st century—and that people will be required to run them.
Herbert’s ‘Authors Computer’
I’ve seen a lot of (predictable) grumbling about Patchwork online from artists, authors etc. But, to me the tool feels like a big step towards Herbet’s Author’s Computer.
In the book Herbert spends considerable time describing features that are now standard in all word processors: dictionaries, spell check, grammar tools, note-taking, and organisation. He even predicts more specialised features of writing tools like Scrivener:
“Rafael Sabatini, the Italian-born master of English prose, could never remember whether he had already killed off a particular character in his work. He is noted for handling a large number of characters in intricate relationships. To keep himself from inadvertently bringing a dead character back to life in a later chapter, Sabatini kept a row of dolls on his desk. Each doll was labeled with the name of a character. When Sabatini killed off a character, he searched out the appropriate doll and pushed it over. Keeping an eye on the dolls that were still standing told him which ones were still “alive” in his book.
A computer can store your “dolls” for you”
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
He also wants the ability to have a vertical screen, and GUI windowing:
“The CRT is on a vertical format.
A page of manuscript is on a vertical format, why not the screen?(…)Without notes, the screen will carry type for about three normal typewriter pages at one time.Any place in a long manuscript can be brought onto the screen while you go on with other work.”
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
The chapter also covers the need for better printers—a feature we’re arguably still waiting for, and features like autosaving and backups. It also describes a kind of proto-Internet “books filed in computer storage by Library of Congress numbers (…)provides a means for calling up the stored books.”
He also expresses an intense displeasure at noisy keyboards (sorry mechanical keyboard nerds). Apparently Heinlein wrote on a silenced typewriter, of a kind built for use in mortuaries?
But in addition to all of this he also describes features that much sound like what’s coming together in Patchwork and takes it even further into the realms of simulation:
“For a science fiction writer, the computer is a “dream machine.” That becomes clear if you follow what we are doing with this new computer and what has been done with other computers to augment the dramatic effect.
Our “author’s computer” has a system to simulate visually some of science fiction’s requirements-the display of exotic solar systems, for example.
With a computer you can create a multibody solar system-let us say, two suns, eight planets, many minor satellites-and you can choose among these places for the settings of your drama. You can build into one of these planets a number of exotic conditions-variable gravity, dramatic differences in atmospheric thickness, strange seasonal progressions …
You then let your computer roll this system through its orbits, displaying your chosen settings on the screen at every stage of the yearly passages. You will know when it’s spring on Planet X or when the tides rise four hundred feet on Planet Y.
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
With the new text to .obj / mesh tools that are being developed to prompt 3D models this next feature is round the corner for the average non blender user too:
The same facility that lets you do this with an imagined solar system lets you create exotic spaceships and turn those ships to any desired angle of view on your screen. You can examine the outside skin of your ship or look into its rooms and corridors. You can move that spaceship from one planet to another. Your computer will supply the logical elapsed time according to the program(s) you have supplied. No more laborious figuring of such flight times.
As a time-saving boon to the science fiction author, this facility alone is worth the price of admission into the computer age.
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
I can imagine Herbet being a heavy obsidian or scrivener user in 2024
The writing of Dune, for instance, required years of research, mountains of notes, tedious hours of careful computations, and a number of educated guesses. A computer would not have eliminated the research, but it would have condensed and organised the notes for quick recall, and it would have helped enormously with the guesses. The computations could have been done in minutes.
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
Lastly, and this is a total aside, but connects things I’ve written elsewhere in my Solarpunk talks etc. Herbert offers some scathing criticism from 1980 of the current state of the film industry in 2024. (Emphasis mine)
Computer graphics-the production of computer-managed images on the CRT-offers an open-sesame to the simulation of imaginary settings. This already forms a mainstay of Hollywood’s attempts to translate science fiction into movies.
Some of the things Hollywood calls science fiction are really comic books for the screen, akin to some early pulp stories in their primitive assumptions and laughable mistakes in science. But it’s obvious that these crude attempts to translate imaginative images into film are still in their infancy.
The written form of science fiction has left the pulp training ground and errors far behind. Films will do the same.
But we have seen the “image writing” on the screen.
Excerpt From: Without Me You’re Nothing: The Essential Guide to Home Computers – Frank Herbert
‘Image writing’
I can’t think of a better term to describe prompting a generative image synth model.
Herbert’s assertion that “without us, computers are nothing” still feels truer than ever. Tools like Patchwork don’t create worlds; they empower us to build them.
Permanently Moved
Permanently Moved (dot) Online is a quarterly audio personal podcast, written, recorded and edited by by @thejaymo
Leave a Reply