Was The Moment We Went From The DOS, Command Line Driven World Of Programming...

...To the event driven world of graphical, master interface, operating system software, a telling metaphor for the recognition that singular linearity, and segmentation of process, launched manually, and in sequence isolation, was just not up to the multiplicity of flow done in parallel, and cross communicating, that modern, electrified information networks required? Basically what our multi media infosphere is made of today. And I express this as metaphor because this really harkens back to a more basic point: that the "segmented linearity" I just spoke of is of the same nature as both the typography that brought it into being, and the original nature of the industrial oriented economic operating system we call Capitalism.

One thing you have to understand about programming, at it's still quite mechanistic core, is that it is, in essence, setting up assembly lines; just as McLuhan described print on a page, going from left to right, putting together the needed word construct, one repeatable, assembly module after another. In programming the thing being assembled are switching instructions. We see them as commands of a fashion, as in adding or subtracting. And, as coincidence would have it, adding and subtracting, aside from either getting or putting, is all that the switching is really concerned with. We may think of it as comparing things so that a decision can be made, but it is still just basic arithmetic (even if the end result math, as a needed process, is very high end). Everything else the switching does is just more elaborate getting or putting; especially as it concerns the graphics, or linking through the web.

What takes your breath away in this, though, is remembering what can emerge from being able to change the entire switch state of a switching system with billions of switches, in increments of billionths of a second. The underlying mechanistic nature blurs away into insignificance as the outward result turns static frames of state into living reality.

In any case, though, it seems to me that the metaphor I described here might be another good indication of just how obsolete Capitalism is; as well as to provide ample justification for why it might have been mutated by the technological change it was never meant to handle in the first place. What do you think?