In 2006, a Swiss team published a randomized trial in the BMJ: four months of daily didgeridoo practice reduced moderate obstructive sleep apnea. Circular breathing requires sustained contraction of upper airway dilator muscles, the same ones that collapse during sleep. The didgeridoo is the same instrument it’s been for thousands of years. Nobody added a therapeutic feature. The capability was there before anyone thought to measure it.
Last week, Nicolas Seriot proved that Jira is Turing-complete. Stock Jira Cloud, no plugins. Just automation rules, linked-issue counts as registers, and workflow states as a program counter. Unlike the didgeridoo, Jira’s capability wasn’t latent in an original design. It accreted. Atlassian added triggers, conditions, issue linking, one feature at a time, until the combination crossed a threshold nobody was watching.
Both produced unintended generality: a musical instrument that doubles as medical treatment, a project tracker that doubles as a universal computer. But the mechanisms contradict. The didgeridoo’s generality came from fixity — the design didn’t change, so its properties had millennia to be discovered in every context, including clinical ones. Jira’s generality came from accumulation. The design never stopped changing, and each addition was narrow enough to justify on its own terms, so nobody noticed the compound becoming something else.
Fixity reveals. Accumulation conceals.