Against Usefulness - by Oana Olteanu - Motive Notes

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Against Usefulness<br>In a Brooklyn warehouse, a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.

Oana Olteanu<br>Jul 10, 2026

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Every useful company stands on rails that were once somebody’s stubbornly useless research. I invest in useful for a living. This essay is about the stage before useful, who works on it, and who pays for it, so that the next generation of useful companies has something to stand on. At Motive Force I back both stages. They need each other.<br>In June I stood in a warehouse in Brooklyn while a man handed me a piece of paper that was a running computer program.

A printout would have been a picture of a program. This was the program itself. He set it on the table and the system executed it. Then he connected a keyboard to the paper, typed a line of code, hit save, and the paper turned green. He unplugged the keyboard and the paper kept running, glowing on the table like it had always known how.<br>A few feet away, an animation system was cycling through hand drawn frames. He gave me a marker and I drew a bunny, frame by frame, and watched my drawings come alive in real time on the table. Then we made music by laying cards down between us, each card a track. I heard myself say a sentence I did not plan to say: “I don’t need the monitor anymore.” For the first time I was programming with my whole body, collaborating with another person in the same room, with almost no distance between the idea and the thing. It was the most human programming I have ever done.

The system is called Folk Computer. It’s an open source physical computing system built by Omar Rizwan and Andrés Cuervo, two researchers who worked at Dynamicland, Bret Victor’s lab in Oakland. Cameras on the ceiling watch the room. Projectors paint onto every surface. Small tags identify each piece of paper, and each piece of paper is a program. There are no pixels inside the system; every coordinate is in meters, mapped to where things sit in the room. You stop staring into a rectangle. The computer is the room, and you program it together with other people, standing up, talking, drawing, moving paper around.<br>I have spent my career inside enterprise software, decomposing how work gets done. I know what it looks like when someone is optimizing an existing paradigm. This was someone asking whether the desktop metaphor, the screen, the cubicle, the solitary body hunched toward a rectangle, was a fifty year detour rather than a destination.<br>How I got there

A week earlier I had lunch with my friend JP, who was visiting San Francisco. The Bay Area, I told him, has become a monoculture. Everyone is building the same thing, funded by the same people, using the same words. Where are the independent thinkers? I want the Xerox PARC vibes back, the people who work on questions instead of markets.<br>JP didn’t argue. He said: they exist, but not here. Or rather, they exist here too, but scattered, one by one, never together. And then he said a name: Folk Computer. In New York.<br>I happened to be flying to New York days later. I was going for something almost comically institutional, which turns out to be the other half of this story.

The oldest club in computing

I was in New York to volunteer. I sit on the Professional Development Committee of the ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest and oldest computing society. It was founded in 1947, back when computing was a curiosity shared by a few hundred people, before anyone could make a career of it. The organization’s stated purpose was to advance “the new machinery for computing, reasoning, and other handling of information.” Reasoning, in 1947. Joining an association about computers was itself an act of independent thinking. No one joined for money. They joined out of conviction that something interesting was going to happen.<br>Nearly eighty years later, ACM has over 100,000 members and gives out the Turing Award, computing’s Nobel. When our committee reviewed what members are learning right now, the picture was striking: the entire field is studying the same topic. The most read titles and the most searched terms are all about agents. The learning curves of a whole discipline have converged into one line.<br>I am not against that line. I invest in it. My whole firm is built on the thesis that autonomous execution needs deterministic infrastructure, and the convergence is part of why the opportunity is real. But convergence has a cost: no one is left standing off to the side asking the strange question. The next paradigm comes from the people the curve forgot.<br>I carried the institutional memory of computing’s oldest society into that warehouse, and watched its youngest incarnation run on paper.

The lineage

Folk Computer did not come from nowhere. It is the current end of a thread that runs back through the entire history of the field.<br>It starts with Alan Kay at Xerox...