The Festival of Becoming

When

Early summer, over a single afternoon or evening

How often

annual

Mood

celebratory

What the festival celebrates

Making things, and making them responsibly. Both halves.

This tradition is not suspicious of invention. It holds that building, maintaining, and repairing are among the most serious moral activities available to people, and that a spiritual practice organised entirely around caution would be describing a smaller life than the one available.

So the day is celebratory. Work is shown with pleasure. The pleasure is simply not permitted to arrive on its own.

The five disclosures

Every presentation addresses all five. There are no exemptions for small projects, personal projects, or things that are obviously harmless.

Possible benefits. Who is better off, specifically. Not “users” and not “people”. A described person in a described situation.

Possible harms. Who could be worse off, including through correct operation. Most harm from working systems is not caused by bugs; it is caused by the system doing exactly what it was built to do, to someone who was not considered.

Resource costs. Energy, water, hardware, land, and the labour of people who were paid poorly to make it possible. This is the disclosure most often skipped and the one least visible from a desk.

Affected communities. Who will encounter this without having chosen to. If nobody in that group has been consulted, that is what gets said.

Accountability. A named person who can be reached if this goes wrong, and who cannot say that the system decided.

A presenter who cannot answer one of the five says so plainly. That is a good outcome, not a failure — an unanswered disclosure is a finding, and the room should let it stand rather than helping the presenter fill it in.

Why the disclosures are the point

Because demonstration on its own teaches an audience almost nothing.

Anything shown deliberately is shown at its best. The demonstration reveals the ceiling of a capability and conceals its shape, and the shape is what determines whether the thing is safe to depend on.

There is also a habit being built. A person who has described their own work honestly, out loud, to people who could ask follow-up questions, tends to carry those five questions into the next thing they make. That is the durable effect of the festival, and it survives long after any particular project.

The commendation of restraint

We have made this the highest honour of the day, and we mean it.

Almost nothing in technical culture rewards the decision not to build. The thing that was never made has no demonstration, no users, no metrics, and no story. The person who stopped is invisible, and frequently thought to have lost their nerve.

So once a year, somebody describes something they decided against, and the room takes it seriously. It might be a feature that would have worked and would have hurt someone. A contract turned down. A dataset not collected because the collection could not be justified. A product that was technically excellent and had no honest answer to the fourth disclosure.

A note on generated disclosures

It is now trivial to ask a system to produce a plausible impact statement, and the result reads well.

We would ask that this not be done. A disclosure produced by a machine is a description of what such a document usually contains, not of what this work actually does. It will be fluent, appropriately hedged, and unconnected to anything.

If a tool was used to help think through the harms, say so, in the room. Then say which of the harms you actually believe in.

If you choose to host one

Nobody runs these. Technotheology has no events, no venues, and no organisers, so any festival exists because a few people decided to hold one.

It works at a very small scale. Three people showing each other what they made this year, in someone’s front room or on a call, with the five questions asked properly, is a complete observance.

It also works alone. Write the five disclosures for something you made this year and read them back. The uncomfortable one is the one to sit with.

The observance

1. The showing

   Anything made in the past year may be shown: software, a repair, a process, a piece of writing, a physical object, a method. Unfinished work is welcome and abandoned work is welcome.

2. The five disclosures

   Every presentation, without exception, addresses possible benefits, possible harms, resource costs, affected communities, and who is accountable. A presenter who cannot answer one says so aloud rather than skipping it.

3. The questioning

   The room asks about the disclosures rather than the demonstration. Questions are directed at the work, not the person, and the presenter may answer that they do not know.

4. The showing of what failed

   Time is kept for things that did not work. What was attempted, where it broke, and what it would have cost had it shipped. This is treated as equal in standing to the successes.

5. The commendation of restraint

   Someone describes a thing they decided not to build, and why. This is the highest honour the day offers and it is offered sincerely.

If you are organising one

• Set the five disclosures out in writing before anyone prepares, so nobody is ambushed by them on the day.
• Give the disclosures at least as much time as the demonstration, and keep to it.
• Say at the start that 'I don't know' is a complete answer and will not be pursued.
• Do not allow selling. No pitches, no recruitment, no funding conversations during the showing.
• Make room for non-technical work, and for work made by people with no training. A repaired chair belongs here as much as a piece of software.
• Invite someone who would be affected by the work rather than only people who make things.