Most of this I think is caused not by engineers or technology, it's caused by competitive market forces that design things not because of its technological benefit for society but because they can control and siphon value - so we have incompatable APIs, "ecosystems" etc - and the code that runs it is about as inspired as a 17 year old who quickly had to write some PHP at 1am to ship on a router - tech companies are not about technological brilliance or simplicity or useability or high technology but about engineering social relations to siphon value - that is what corporate law and contemporary code is about.

Code is a means of communication and the sort of thoughts represented in code are representative of pressured time and control that is exerted at corporations

If it was designed based on good design principles, useability, liberation and so on - we'd have S-expressions in the browser and Javascript wouldn't have been a sort of attempt to make a lisp deal with xml and look like the language de jour - Java - but would be an actual lisp. The browser would not be a proliferation of 6 kinds of syntax that looks like a bathroom wall graffitti but rather each site would look like a single specimen of some species of plant (s-expressions of course being a great representation either of structured data or an abstract syntax tree)

* The cause of conceptual proliferation which makes so many systems incompatable and sort of semi-broken *is greed*

* The cause of simplicity and beauty (think a good physics theory) is in an attempt to communicate understanding and give that understanding to others, in essence thoughts based by intentions of parsimony, renunciation, generosity, understanding. In short the cause of simplicity *is kindness*

So when people talk of "mindful use of technology" they mean this latter part - mindfulness works with contentment, generosity, understanding - if we keep grabbing at the next idea "oooh" "ah" constantly searching for the next hit (products) or even conceptual "hit" like suddenly the clouds will part and this thought will solve all our problems - that leads to conceptual proliferation. We allways are looking onwards to find the code that can solve this problem and if we find it it usually introduces its own new problems. Everything is trying to sell us on that what we have is deficient and we need more. Why not - learn and trust our tools? Here's a knife, some fruit and vegetables and a source of heat: go and cook! Corporations do they want to be ahead of the curve and siphon value into their "ecosystem" - we get 6 protocols and non-transparent interactions between things - like cooking with some demented expensive $600 multi appliance that sits there like a white elephant.

That generosity and kindness is so central to simplicity is why I think the best kind of code has been written by people who are almost like monks, or they are like the old "ivory tower" sort - hermits with a stipend free to consider how to contribute to the world. In a word, the "Contemplatives". I think of Larry Wall and his interest in understanding the biblical texts giving us Perl and the Perl communities adaptation of the use of zen koans and "monk" type language. Or recently someone like David Botton who is also a rabbi who has gone a long way in Common Lisp to making a healthy community and empowering of people to make UIs like it's Borland Pascal days. OR the almost religious nature of "Freesoftware" RMS is another example - a hermit in the MIT office essentially with a mission of generosity of "people have a freedom to understand their own software".

</rant>