25 june 2025
Yesterday while reading the Unix Programming Environment, I was considering the psychology of computing. In critical theory, psychoanalysis is considered, and one analysis is Lacanian. Lacan introduces “extimacy,” which Ciano Aydin describes in their essay [1] as the self not as something hidden within our material self but “discovered and developed through a pre-existing symbolic order” (such as our culture, law, traditions, etc.).
This led me to the idea of structures in system programming, specifically how C receives a bitstream. The stream itself has no order or obvious meaning until the structure has contextualized it to the receiving application. Furthermore, the bitstream of a file specifically is not arbitrarily or meaningless because of the inode structure itself. Files exist as themselves with the inode structure because if they did not, then the file would not be. It is the structured nature of the data that creates the file, much like Lacanian psychology projects on what makes me a person.
This perhaps seems obvious, but then it leads to question to what is a real datagram? Is it a partial structure? And if partial, how partial? How many layers must be explored until you are at the real computer? These questions might not seem so interesting to us because we know that data comes from signals of electrical signs, on or off, etc. And this logic emerges from the system of signals, system calls even have what are called signals that have significant impact on application processes in the kernel.
[1] “The Technological Uncanny as a Permanent Dimension of Selfhood” from the The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Technology