An ode to locks
I
once tried to imagine a world without locks. Instead of a flowery
paradise out of the imagination of John Lennon, this world was a bleak
hell where civilization and any kind of improvement never got past
bloody tribal wars. Ordinary people could not accumulate any real
capital, since once you left your home, someone could come and get your
stuff. Of course it is theoretically possible to maintain your property
without locks, especially if you are a king, assuming suitably strong
religious repression to keep other people in check. But if the physical
reality did not allow locks to exist, the effect on the development of
society would probably be roughly equal to the effect of, say, there
being no ores available underground.
I would therefore like to take a moment to praise locks, our ingenious and useful little friends. By its very existence, a lock discretizes a world in two parts, forbidden and allowed, open and closed, in a very concrete and undeniable fashion. A lock is by its nature inherently binary and doesn't follow the fashionable principle of "anything goes". To change the state of a lock, you must follow and obey the physical restrictions inherent in it, and no amount of narcissistic magical posturing about social construction, stomping your feet or having value discussions makes any difference.
The metallic sound of a lock closing is not the sound of repression, as it is usually imagined to be, but it is the beautiful sound of civilization, echoing freedom and security. Locks can exist in our physical world, but let's hope that the complexity classes P and NP are distinctly unequal, so that locks can also exist in the abstract and platonic world of ideas of computer science and the inhabitants of this world get to enjoy the happiness provided by locks.
I would therefore like to take a moment to praise locks, our ingenious and useful little friends. By its very existence, a lock discretizes a world in two parts, forbidden and allowed, open and closed, in a very concrete and undeniable fashion. A lock is by its nature inherently binary and doesn't follow the fashionable principle of "anything goes". To change the state of a lock, you must follow and obey the physical restrictions inherent in it, and no amount of narcissistic magical posturing about social construction, stomping your feet or having value discussions makes any difference.
The metallic sound of a lock closing is not the sound of repression, as it is usually imagined to be, but it is the beautiful sound of civilization, echoing freedom and security. Locks can exist in our physical world, but let's hope that the complexity classes P and NP are distinctly unequal, so that locks can also exist in the abstract and platonic world of ideas of computer science and the inhabitants of this world get to enjoy the happiness provided by locks.
Boring. We have already read this in finnish. ;)
Posted by Anonymous | 4:24 PM