Yesterday, Dave Winer pointed me -- then all of Scripting News -- to a piece he wrote in May 1997. There, he says in part:

Programmers have a very precise understanding of truth. You can't lie to a compiler. Try it sometime. Garbage in, garbage out. Booleans, the ones and zeros, trues and falses, make up the world programmers live in. That's all there is!

Valued Readers:

I sing mere anarchy loosed. Of wildness and wilderness. Of a deeper ignorance too long ignored.

We own however much of the world we can embrace, maybe even understand -- not in an analytic way, but by feeling deeper into some magic that is beyond understanding. We create maps and visions, work them out in our heads -- constructs to show each other. Here, do you see? This is a picture of how it works. We begin with bare diagrams, flowcharts, abstract models. See? we say, do you see how this part mates to that? How the pieces fit together?

But not until we are able to populate the streets of these models, see exhausted workers, dreaming lovers, posturing punks and preening fashion plates walking their byways and back alleys, cops on the beat and shifty characters dodging into doorways, proud hookers and disapproving matrons sizing each other up, retired bankers reading the day's news over coffee, girlfriends giggling over you can only wonder what, shopkeepers hawking fruit and fish, children running, calling to each other, dogs sniffing at curbs and hydrants -- not until then does evening fall and the wheel of night begin to slowly turn, the eyes of the statues opening once again. Only then does the bare abstraction open into carnival.

Culture is a palimpsest. We write over it, over and over. It must not be too dear, too untouchable. The smoke from the Alexandrian library is our wealth, our burnt and blinded legacy. More where that came from. Nostalgia for the past is the beginning of the end of heroism. Museums preserve what once was. For those cut off, for those who no longer touch the earth or dirty their hands with the fallingdown world. When everything has a price, nothing is precious.

Homage hidden between the lines, sampled and reworked into something we can recognize, as if for the first time. The civilizations of the Australian dreamtime, of Egypt and Africa, of China, India, Greece, the Aztecs, Incas, Maya, Navaho, Hopi, Sioux. Pyramids, temples, holy roads and rivers, sacred forest spaces, gateways through which the spirit of the people opened into the infinite. All these were created with a fraction of the power we command today -- godlike knowledge, inconceivable wealth, technologies indistinguishable from magic. And what have we created with this power? What monuments have we erected to the imagination of our race? McDonald's, Yahoo, Disney World. Absurd simulacra bought with the ransom of 10,000 kings.

But it is not over. Not some cheap trip down memory lane. We do what we do and will continue. We do what the world asks of us when it gets no answer elsewhere.

Take heart.