[joe_the_user]

I hate being "mean" but I'll admit sometimes my frustrations get the better of me.

I am interested in efforts to connect the act of programming with the large issues of human existence. However, I tend to also be critical these approaches also have the danger of creating shallow, surface comparisons that don't actually provide much value.

In this case, I feel "high modernism" as a concept loses most of it's content if one removes all particular historical strands that made it. Applied in the abstract, it becomes "central control bad, M'kay".

The interesting thing is you describe a lot of programming programs reasonably but it seems obvious to me that the answer to them is ... centralization and control. The problem of many systems is that software gives the impression that everyone's needs can be accommodated simultaneously and so results in actually contradictory requirements - especially when there isn't central control of the requirements. I'm sure that could be spun as too much central control too but that spin just seems unnatural.