On the origins of Computer Codes as Literature

It's rare in life that one admits, to the public, and even less often, to oneself, that they were wrong. And not wrong as a matter of oversight or luck, but because of ignorance. Last week I mentioned, in a review, the writings of Algo. An author who has managed to include in his writings computer-code-like writing, as well as computer codes themselves. I won’t deny that I thought these algorithms to be somewhat overdone. And I didn’t even take a moment to try them out. They were mixed, of course, and the code notes accompanying them were enough to allow even a marginal computer literary person the ability to understand them (I should go even further to point out that Algo came up with pseudo code whereby he had prose that represented something like code that ‘called’ other tidbits of ‘prose’ from a library; this is not what I’m referring to, as that was fine). But I didn’t take it a step further and carry out the code the way it was intended. In other words, I wallowed in my ignorance and didn’t think twice on it.Last night I received a harried text telling me what I'd missed out on. I moved in to investigate and what I found out was that Algo didn’t come up (or even perfect) with the idea of telling stories through algorithms. That honor belongs to a subset of poets who started a movement a few years ago. There is no official title to their group. None that I’ve heard. Some have called them a derivative of the flarf poetry movement (something they both bristle at, and indeed they do seem like two distinct movements). Myself, after all my experiences with them, I’ve come up with a name for them: the crawlers. 
The start of the Crawlers is quite the story. A student was, a few years ago, kicked out of college in New York. No record exists of why (I even talked to the dean, and she said, with great disgust, that they had no room for “that kind”, that they were an institution of higher learning, created to make the country better, people like that student—poets, she said disgustedly—are either parasites, or at best a piece of lace on the chair. I left, certain that I had interviewed the wrong person), but the student of math and computer science was dumped out of his dorm room (a possible hacking scandal might have been the reason: the day before he was kicked out, someone hacked the college’s website and placed the following banner: “College is for kissing rich kids’ asses in hopes of a job”. Which sounds like the silly sort of analysis only a freshman can muster). A poor orphan from the hinterlands of America, he started to live inside the city’s churches that would accept him (not for long, both he and organized religion stood at odds with each other) and public libraries he could hide in. One day he befriended a man on 5th avenue. The ex-student stole the man’s laptop. Luckily for him, it was never reported or remotely shutdown. 
He burrowed his way into an abandoned subway station somewhere between 1st and 14th. There, alone, he wired into an ethernet line and thought about what it was he wanted to do in life. He swore off hacking and decided that he needed to focus on the beautiful aspects of humanity. And that’s where the first poems, made through codes, were created. The basic idea was this: that all one needed was code (however random, and indeed, at its inception it was mostly random code, looking for things like: top twenty sentences with the word Obama in it, or America and hunt in it and so forth) and one could create amazing works this way. 
I want you to think about that for a second. This code (with minimal help) created poetry. Myself I’m impressed with what it is they are aiming and trying to do.
But like all founders of groups of lasting import, the ex-student lost control of the group, the idea (though he would always remain its figurehead). At first it was simply a matter of diversity: there were people who preferred to get their poem lines from comments, or comments on a right wing or left wing blog, or headlines only, or headlines from other countries translated through google, or essays, or Facebook posts, or Facebook posts from women or white women or tweets… well you get the idea; the internet is full of text, and they manipulated it as they desired. 
When the group reached ten or so people, there appeared the first major rift. It wasn’t much, at first, but a pair wanted to create something like poems from before (they were, this group, let’s call them the crawlers, cocky enough to designate a Before Code (BC) and Apes Deconstructed (AD) for the moment the movement started), in other words, to manipulate the sentences or phrases grabbed from the Internet after the code had “harvested” them. This didn’t sit well with many of the others. The whole point, they said, was to care about the code. That the code was what mattered, no after the matter manipulation by humans could be allowed. The pair argued that it was about the result. But then another schism was created: some said it was not about the code, but that the text from the Internet in its original form that was sacrosanct. Words were exchanged, and the little utopia beneath the streets of New York was split. 
There ended up being two groups, at the end of that day (it was this one issue that rose above the rest): one that claimed the text was not to be rearranged, only grabbed from the internet, and one that claimed it was the final poem that mattered. Later, the original group (I’m assuming that the ex-student was head of this group, and that was that the Internet text was sacrosanct) would split, as would the first splinter. Each grew, gained followers and further split along the lines of whatever argument was pertinent at the time. There were many:
The issue of code being the only manipulation, that those who did any hands-on rearranging with the text or the order of the text were not being true to the original intention and were quite possibly computer-disinclined (a swear word at the time) would be a background radiation that would spike at random times and split groups irrevocably. Others, code-fundamentalists, claimed that it wasn’t what the code spat out that mattered but what the code looked like. 
After some time, the diversity about where the text was gathered became an issue. Some people claimed it should be from one place only, some said two, some said n, and some from wherever it was possible. Splits ensued.
The Turing shift is still an ongoing one today (similar, but stemming from different ideas, to the “beauty of the poem over the code” argument that I mentioned earlier): some people think that what is spit out should not be any different from what a human can write. Others claim that they are beyond that old and silly idea of copying humans. The time of humanity is over and to accept the future is to discard that antediluvian idea that is the Turing test (the immediate counter point to this is that the text is already being grafted from the internet, land of human text, so why the pretense?).
Realism resulted in one of the most bloody debates. It could have been a matter of jealousy; some of the poets were gaining fame, gaining money, while others were not; the realists, in the end, had found the most commercial route and were mocked for it; secretly everyone wanted their fame and it was proven as many groups collapsed and joined the realists. Some said that it was a vile group, these realists, that wanted nothing more than to destroy the diversity that had been created in the underground lair. There soon (I forget which specific group had it first, but it was to spread to some of the other groups too; for the most part the code fundamentalists would stay out of this—only further inflating their thought that their way was easily the best—and many other fights because they had strict rules, but they also tried less and had less followers) came a small war in this underground garden. The realists claimed that their point was to graft as much as they could from the internet as to show something of significance (show something of importance in the world, or highlight something about it that most people don’t know, or just take part in the cultural conversation), not random lines (some of them became prose writers in this sense) or even just beautiful or interestingly juxapositioned lines. The resultant civil war created numerous injuries. It created a detente (no one wanted the cops coming around) that still simmers today.
I cannot ignore the personal in all this. Some rifts occurred after lovers were stolen, and these were the longest lasting. Therefore actions that would seem inconsequential to outsiders resulted in breaking up of groups and tit for tat revenge schemes (all under the banner of some ideal, such as the ones above).

The latest fad is creating code that writes code that can learn from its mistakes and make more and more creative and beautiful poems. This one has just started. When I visited this dark underground lair—stinking of sewer runoff and burning fossil fuels and wood—I found checkpoints and narrow alleys. Men and women with torches and machetes stood guard. Each time I had to shift my way to a new group, I went through the same process of being patted down, of being asked inane questions that seemed to come out of a government manual. Some were nice about it, apologetic, telling me they had people to the latest infiltration of their group’s space (which seemed a little melodramatic, as I’d been to war zones and this wasn’t that). But others were rough, angry. 
As far as the code that writes code that writes poems, I heard many who were against the idea: some said it would make them redundant. Others said it wasn’t feasible—had you seen what it created? And wasn’t this whole endeavor about literature, about humanity, about humans? What happens when that’s ripped out? While others still said code writing code wasn’t enough. There needed to be more degrees separating humans from code. That exact degree was being debated fervently while I was there. And you could see it in the tension in the air. Everyone’s eyes darted about. They couldn’t afford another outbreak of ideas as they were tired of fighting. Many were reverting to the fundamental code group, hoping to at least find peace (if everyone else followed). 
Many were worried about the police. Certain that they were being paid by higher powers to come and destroy all that they had created. That somehow ‘natural’ poets above were paying the cops off to silence them. That even the NSA wanted a piece of what they were doing. Or perhaps didn’t like the competition. When I asked if they were really making that much money (them or the natural poets), they looked at me like I had been duped and said it wasn’t about money, it was about ideas. I decided that, given the fervor, it wouldn’t make sense to argue with them. I left the lair with relief. The fear in the air was strong and I wondered how it was when it was just starting out, when it was actually just about ideas. 
The police, when I talked to them a few days later, mentioned that they had only recently come to find out about this lair and that they were thinking about raiding it if something violent happened. But for the most part they had better things to do than mess with idiot poets. More disgust on that captain’s face. And the place was starting to stink. People, tax paying people, who lived above were complaining of a stench that seemed to be just lingering in the air. I can’t have that, can I? The captain said. I empathized with him. I wasn’t sure if the lair was sanitary. All it would take was one bug and they would be wiped out.
Nevertheless, there is hope, and the sense that the future will be with these poets. The movement has surely come of age and might reach a higher level of expression soon enough. All it needs is a little light.  Then Subscribe to my mailing list* indicates requiredEmail Address * First Name Last Name Email Format
htmltextmobile