Dynamicland Is a Practice, Not a Place

I was re-watching Bret Victor’s Dynamicland demo from last year and a thought struck me: I don’t think the physical representation is the most important idea.

If you haven’t seen the demo before, take 5min and watch the video. It’s

you’re surrounded by people that are building programs out in the open where everybody else can see what they’re doing so it’s like working in a wood shop or a communal kitchen everybody’s learning from everybody else all the time and this extends all the way down to the operating system itself here it is there is no code base in GitHub it’s just real stuff in the world

The important idea here is working in the same medium, doing widely varied things in the open.

The reason this feels most natural in the physical space is because there’s no where to hide. In the digital form, the default is to be hidden. First of all, your thoughts and words and physicality is hidden by default. You have to make a concerted effort to put your thoughts into an expression and form that can be digitally transmitted. And then everyone has to commit to sending that transmission into a common space and common form.

In Dynamicland, they leverage the default of the physical world: I can move and look while talking. And the physical space is constantly shared.

Is there something here around “Collaboration through communication” instead of collaboration through manipulation? Dynamicland is collaborating by multiple people having their hands on the same object, but in a virtual world it’s better to collaborate through commnunication (messages and links)?

And they both get to the end state of people building out in the open and sharing knowledge. Can manipulation be recorded as messages/communication in the digital world?

Note

See also: Ambient Co-presence

Update 2026-08-11

Now that I’m a couple years into the agentic-software revolution, I do see that there’s something special about having users understand that the actual software they’re using is perfectly malleable. When users understand that the tools in their hands can be reshaped ad-hoc and easily, they start interacting with them differently and things diverge rapidly. Something unique to Dynamicland - that we’re now catching up to with malleable agentic software - is that physical objects like paper immediately make users feel that way.