I am digging deeper into Thoughts on Smalltack & Agile after my check-in this week with Ward.
One question he posed regarding the intention behind fed wiki was particularly intriguing: "How do you write patterns in a way that has the feeling of the programming in Smalltalk 
?"
What is that feeling? Perhaps it is not about the objects or the message passing, but the dynamic between the two?
As I dug deeper into Alan Kay's story today to better understand Smalltalk, I came upon an interview with him in Fast Company that was fascinating.
Many topics were covered in this article. But I found this section particularly interesting, especially in light of my exploration of the fed wiki with Ward:
>Putting a writing system into an oral society doesn’t actually do it, doesn’t change them. It requires something more, because the thing that’s important about writing and how it changes the thinking of the civilization is the literate aspects of it, the structure and the thought, in various ways. Anyway, so this is all stuff that’s water over the dam, but most people don’t understand it. Most people in media don’t understand it. >If you read [Marshall] McLuhan, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought. And by the way, we need it, because our technology is taking us into a place where we need another level of thought, beyond the level that it took to create it.
"The structure and the thought"... interesting... sounds like he is talking about a metalanguage that enables this new "level" of thinking.
Crazy thinking: what if what Ward has created is a new type of communication medium, one that incorporates the experience of Smalltalk as a learning language and the meaning of pattern languages - something that might become a metalanguage for a creative culture?
While the printing press was developed with the concept of movable type, this new communication medium is based on the concept of movable blocks.
If, according to McLuhan, the nature of our thinking is shaped by the structure of how we consume information, how might we think differently if we create and consume information differently, moving from the linear paradigm of the published book, to a non-linear experience of hyperlinked, object-based wiki? Might this open up the possibility of "another level of thought"?