As Houser acknowledges, to obfuscate an awareness of process and craft comes at the expense of a connection to the humanity of a work. Gone are the skills, talent, compromises, mistakes, ideas and collaborations of those who created it. Gone also is an accountability of the human decisions that shape the way a given technology functions. Living in a world that is exponentially shaped by digital creation and culture, equipping people with a knowledge of digital craft, allowing them to see and comprehend the human choices that have guided its creation, and in turn have the confidence to challenge them, feels like an increasingly imperative task.

In the collective, the pairing of the future and the past becomes signification, for the individuated being is recognized as integrated: it is integrated not only according to its future or its past, but according to the direction of the condensation of its future and its past: the individual is present in the collective, it is unified in the present through its action. The collective is not a substance or form anterior to the individuated beings that would compel them, penetrate them, or condition them: the collective is the communication that envelops and resolves individual disparations as a presence that is the synergy of actions, the coincidence of futures and pasts as an internal resonance of the collective (...) the collective is that in which an individual action has a meaning for other individuals as a symbol: each action presented to the others is a symbol of the others; it belongs to a reality that individuates into totality as capable of involving the simultaneous and successive plurality of actions.

When I say that the consciously active individual exists in a structure of dynamic expression, I mean precisely this. That I am consciously active means that I determine myself by expressing the world in myself. I am an expressive monad of the world. I transform the world into my own subjectivity. The world that, in its objectivity, opposes me is transformed and grasped symbolically in the forms of my own subjectivity. But this transactional logic of contradictory identity signifies as well that it is the world that is expressing itself in me. The world creates its own space-time character by taking each monadic act of consciousness as a unique position in the calculus of its own existential transformation. Conversely, the historical act is, in its space-time character, a self-forming vector of the world. To bring this out I say that the temporal-spatial (that is, conscious-spatial) reflects itself within itself as a contradictory identity. In this way each act of consciousness is a self-perspective of the dynamic, spatial-temporal world.

(...)

Our self-consciousness does not take place in a merely closed up, windowless self. It consists in the fact that the self, by transcending itself, faces and expresses the world. When we are self-conscious, we are already self-transcending. But such an evident truth has no place in a philosophy that substantializes the self and the act through some dogmatism based on object logic.

If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.

∆ Rainer Maria Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet