I felt that despite the more dense readings of Monday, we all were able to have a very engaging and productive discussion that went beyond my anticipation of what we would talk about. In doing my reading in preparation for class discussions, I often find that I forget that there are going to be two other readings for the class. Thus, having the “jigsaw” method always provides for an exciting addition of knowledge and perspective to what I believe we will discuss.

While we didn’t delve especially deep into this in class (it also appeared that Unsworth was a bit unclear on this as well), I am curious about the discussion of property and labor. Specifically, I am curious about the detachment of the human from humanity, where human is used and seen as the mode of production rather than an autonomous being (I am not sure if this is what people were referring to with Marx, as my memory of and exposure to Marxist theory is somewhat limited to a history class in high school).

Regarding my specific reading by Ritchie, one thing that seemed odd to me was the blend of technological history and social history. It felt like Ritchie was just adding random little “but it really was fun, and we were a community” type of notes in between large chunks of dense info on Multics and Unix. After talking on end about Unix as we know it today, Ritchie even chose to end the paper with a paragraph on looking back at his time at Bell Labs with a “rosy glow.” I thought this might tie into what we have been talking about regarding the treatment of creation as a fun thing rather than as a job.

As a side note, I struggled with writing this blog post, as I felt that there were many ideas brought up in class that were hard to unpack (you may notice that this post feels a bit all over the place). However, knowing that we usually continue and touchback on previous discussions, I know that things will become more clear!