“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk

I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.

According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.

It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,

In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.

Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.