Augment is a forthcoming collection of essays on the future of personal computing: specifically, on the kind we as a species need in order to move beyond our stuck present, and on the ideas that will help us get there. This book is meant to serve as guidance and inspiration as we build a next generation of hardware, software, and systems.

We hope you’ll share this page with those you think might write great essays for Augment, and even consider writing one yourself. Submissions are due by July 31.

The technology field is today in a precarious state. A tsunamic tide of commercial thinking has managed the wholesale capture of practitioners, institutions, and dialogue. This capture has drained all imagination from our surround, and so actual invention has slid likewise near to zero. Along the way, the systems meant first to extend human reach have instead become dull and clanking manacles.

Yet the same quality that makes technology easy to hijack — that massless, abstract ductility — leaves it as easy to re-form. The opportunity is still with us, undimmed, to build anew the beautiful thing, the powerful thing, the luminous thing, the human thing. This then is the invitation: to trawl a net through waters that, far enough down, remain idea-rich and that, with care, might still teem.

What does your instinct, your experience say about where we ought to be headed? What atrophied senses will we have to regrow to know, once we’re in motion, that the direction’s good? What about human minds and bodies and how they prefer to work, singly and together, is poorly attended by machines and their creators today? Is there an armature of aesthetics or philosophy that gives a more definite, durable form to technology built around it? What’s the feel of the machine we’d prefer? What technologies, architectures, and designs would support the kind of human agency we need and deserve?

What style of thinking are we missing? How ought we learn from pieces of abandoned past and from other fields? How ought we teach to fit a new generation of practitioners with modes of thought outstripping our own? What’s a seemly way for computers and culture to interact, and what would make it so? What does the rhetoric foregoing badly misunderstand and what are the right questions?

We hope all this gives a sense of intent without limiting possible substance: these are prompts offered loosely. We anticipate the final essays to land in the range of several thousands of words, with initial submissions between one and ten thousand words.

Augment will be produced in three editions: a handmade clothbound, a paperback, and an ebook, all published by Buddy Bindery & Press.

Contributors will receive royalties for each copy sold, and will retain the rights to their writing. They will also receive a clothbound edition of the book on its release.

Confirmed authors include Alan Kay, Alex McDowell, and Ben Fry. The book will be edited by John Underkoffler and Alexander Obenauer. If you have any questions, you can get in touch with us at augment@buddybindery.com.

Veins of wonderful writing and idea-sharing across our field have emerged online in recent years. Augment is meant to be an enduring artifact collecting this kind of work, and offering guidance for its future.