Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style? (1977) [pdf]
The actual mental slavery, is the notion of instructions.
You have Operand A, Operand B, and a hidden Operand I, which operates on given Operands, encoded in a endless chain of drudgery.<p>Now imagine a system, which is deterministic, but purely phyics based, data flows continously at maximum possible speed, by beeing copied from A to *, and operations, are executed purely as a attribute of data- meaning, this river carrying sand, carrys certain certain sand, again purely as a property to a stone in the river, where it is grinded, split, etc..<p>Then again, the new data, having diffrent &quot;physical&quot; properties, is sped along to other streams.<p>The art to program such a machine, would be to understand the physics of data, of the system, to place a stone upriver, and to know, where downriver to reach, to collect the gem, liberated and polished.<p>Such dataphysics also has interesting inherent properties. Interaction can never reach farther then the number of processors in parallel times the maximum length of data. So dataphysics has a lightcone, within which it is fully parallel. One could take  data out and insert it into this determinstic simulations, simply  by staying out of sight and keeping causality.
But i digress.