Assume that one day, there could be a form of communication faster than spoken language. Some claim they can already type faster than they speak, but imagine expressing ourselves faster than we think? Sure, this is a classic future trope, and a defining idea to cyberpunk —outputting thought straight into machines, with say a brain-computer interface. But why does it have to take the form of a brain prosthetic necessarily? Put implants aside for a second, and imagine a different scenario: we just learn a language. A language lying half-way between ever-more humanized computation — looking in particular at how natural languages are becoming increasingly easier for machines to parse — and our ever-more widespread ability to speak "machine" through code, or even simpler computable elements like #hashtags, links, or user handles. This would be a language in which humans could communicate together, as well as machines, and anything in-between, a sort of "human x human x machine x machine" communication protocol.
This is the premise of Rapid Language, a speculative language that's nothing more than the result of acceleration in our machine-mediated forms of communication. It is devoid of estheticism — though some may argue that poetry too can be born out of necessity — and as such, comprises no adjectives.
Rapid language finds its basic logic in a form of ternary computing. Its basic components are simple bars, some half-empty some empty some full, in a design reminiscent of Chinese trigrams and the Postnet encoding of our mail. Every character carries in itself a value: ‑1, 0, +1 which, as they add up give away a general score, letting the viewer catch a sense of the general "positivity" in of a string. Below is an excerpt from our book 'N003' where Rapid Language is used as the source code of a fictionalized internet called 'The Stream.'
