Imagine a room filled with electronic devices�appliances, thermostats, computers, portable music players, PDAs�all of which can communicate wirelessly. This may not even require an act of imagination. Now imagine yourself with a handheld device in the middle of all this wanting to use it to communicate with just one of these devices. How will you do it? Will you select its name from a menu on a screen? Will you tap on an icon? Either way your attention will be focused on the device in your hand, not the true target of your intention. Your selection will be a selection by metaphor. Why not simply point at the thing you want to communicate with? Pointing is a natural extension of the human capacity to focus attention. It establishes a spatial axis relative to an agent, unambiguously identifying anything in line-of-sight without a need to name it. This brings our interactions with electronic devices closer to our interactions with physical objects, which we name only when we have to. Pointable Computing proposes that a visible laser be coupled to a handheld device and cheap sensors attached to potential objects of communication. Information may be conveyed along a laser beam, establishing a channel of communication along a perceivable axis of pointing. Ultimately, the goal of this project is�through a subtle change in the focus of interaction�to foster decentralized computation in which individual computational objects scattered in the environment may be controlled directly rather than through a single hub. This kind of electronic autonomy curtails the ability of faceless authorities or proprietary standards to shape the future of computation.