Dewaffling the tech industry

Well, I'd appear to have a whole bunch of new readers after the last article: welcome, everyone! This is a blog/newsletter/place to publish long-form articles about the intersections of tech, politics and culture that I write: I try and publish about once a week, but there is sometimes slippage. This is entirely reader-supported: if you like what I'm doing and want to help me make more of it, there are avenues to do so, with links at the bottom of the article.

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, I guess. A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!". And since then, it seems that a large part of the Bluesky staff have descended into posters' madness, arbitrarily banning users that were critical of them even when they were highly prominent, treating their userbase with contempt and openly mocking people who were complaining about why fascists seem to keep getting a pass on blatant Terms of Service violations on Bluesky, and generally causing a massive wave of drama on the platform.

This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?

Of course, this is far from the first time something so stupid has happened on a social media platform: just look at Matt Mullenweg and his conduct, or whatever the hell Zuckerberg is doing at the moment. Stepping away from social media, Thiel, Musk and Larry Ellison have all expressed covert or explicit sympathies with fascists, to say nothing of some of the worst shitheads on the face of the planet. Looking at the tech industry with a critical eye, it would appear that, at a much higher rate than almost any other group you might care to name, the industry seems to generate, protect and laud people with fascist sympathies, or, in fact, outright fascists.

And this raises the question: why the hell does this keep happening? Why does the tech industry consistently generate fascists and fascist sympathisers? And is there any way we can stop them from melting down like this?

Yes, we have a fascism problem

I know that there are half a hundred ways in which we can claim that tech or software doesn't actually predispose people to fascism. On an individual level, a lot of them are even true. It's true, for example, that Peter Thiel and a few of the other fascist luminaries studied philosophy or finance rather than engineering as such. I will discuss later why I think this doesn't quite get us out of the issue, but for now, I'll give my hypothetical interlocutor this point.

But let's face it, even with all that, it's a systemic issue. To take the most trivial objection, there are an awful lot of people in tech with fascist proclivities who clearly are highly technical. Eric Raymond, to give one example, is both a highly capable engineer and clearly has a strong attachment to hard-right politics, racism and homophobia. And more recently, David Heinemeier Hansson has both created Ruby on Rails (an accomplishment in tech if ever there was one) and an outright white nationalist. Further examples are trivial to find (James Damore comes to mind), and it seems clear that, at a minimum, being a fascist is no great barrier to being popular in the tech world. I've no hard data on whether fascist ideas are more common in publicly-facing tech figures than they are in other fields, but they certainly seem more open about it.

Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common. A lot of people in tech think that, even if they don't agree with the ideas, there are no harms associated with the free discussion of race science, eugenics, and the benefits of dictatorship and fascism. The sense I get with this group is of a general sense of flippancy: people who act like this simply don't think that their speech can have any real consequences, and even if it does, it's certainly not going to happen to them.

And finally, as I've discussed in the introduction, the vast bulk of people who hold the purse strings in the industry like fascists and want them to succeed: Jay Graber demonstrated this brilliantly now that "waffles" has become a dog-whistle for some of the most odious, transphobic shitheads on the internet to demonstrate that the great powers on the internet are on their side.

So, when numerous high-profile people in the tech world outright express fascist views, the companies that we work for and who pay our wages actively fund the fascists the world over and make a home for them on their websites, and much of the rank and file of software development sits somewhere between being indifferent to fascism and actively flirting with it, how can we not say that we have a fascism problem? It seems clear that while knowing how to write code doesn't predispose one to fascism (this is trivially disproven by the number of natural scientists who know how to write code pretty damn well and who aren't going fascist in any great number), being a part of what we might call "the tech industry" or "a tech person" really does seem to.

Software has no substance

So, why? After all, it's not clear that there's much of a structural reason why the tech industry has almost entirely given itself over to fascism, given that a lot of us individual people working in tech are liberal, progressive or outright socialist? Surely this great mass of people should have much more of an impact than it does on how tech-the-social-construct behaves and how it's perceived?

To understand this, we need to first understand what "tech" and "the tech industry" actually is, and that means understanding what coding is and how it relates to the work of technology as a whole. Writing code, in itself, is a literacy skill: the closest skill to writing software is, unsurprisingly, writing. When you write code, you're writing a series of symbols that are going to be interpreted by a machine developed by other people in such a way that it will make the machine behave in certain determined (though highly complex) ways. Coding, just as much as writing, is first and foremost an act of communication and the skills are, in all honesty, quite a lot more transferable than you might think.

The thing is, being able to string words together grammatically does not a writer make. None of you would be reading what I have to write if I had nothing interesting to say, and I can safely say that I did not learn anything that would make my writing worth reading by learning how to turn a phrase or not to split an infinitive. I can write in a way that gets my thoughts across because of that, but the thoughts themselves are thanks to my life experiences, extensive reading and study and considerable practice across a number of fields. Without that, it really wouldn't matter how nice my prose is.

Other people who make a living by writing bring different things to the table; different experiences, different types of creativity, different backgrounds. Consequently, we get different kinds of people writing different things, which we call by different names. I'm your friendly local civil society essayist and tech critic. Garth Nix is a fantasy author. We have poets, we have songwriters, speechwriters, editors, journalists, copywriters... all of these people can write well and make a living through their words, but there are all fundamentally different trades that need very different skills other than just being able to write well for you to be successful in them.

Coding, by which I mean broadly "the process of typing out arcane runes to make a computer do a thing", is very much similar. If all you know how to do is write the arcane runes, the skill is more or less useless: it can be enjoyable, much like Sudoku or cryptic crosswords, but it just doesn't do anything. Paul Graham (I know, he's very much one of the reactionary centrists who have to be right and above it all that I wrote about) actually wrote about this when he discussed working with an early punch-card computer: you could compute the digits of pi and similar kinds of maths problems, but making the machine do anything relevant to his day-to-day life was relatively hard. The fact of this is masked these days by the fact that computers have become pretty ubiquitous and have kind of faded into the background: we focus on the useful software that is out there, and what actually goes into making it becomes pretty non-obvious.

The real value in software, counter to what one might think, is in domain knowledge. Software is useful inasmuch as it has effects in the real world on real people: it lets you design a bridge, write a document or run a web server that lets all of you fine people read my words. This is basically a universal, even for things like cryptography: hell, even Mark Zuckerberg, for all that he's lauded as being a tech genius, was able to make Facebook successful not because of any coding skills, but because he was able to monetise being a massive fucking creep. It follows from this that being a "coding genius" in the abstract is not a thing that actually exists: even people specialising in things like high-performance embedded systems computing are leaning more on the domain knowledge of the systems they're working on and their idiosyncrasies than any particular level of "I can write arcane symbols that much better than anyone else". Coding, as such, therefore has almost no actual substance to it.

So, if coding as such is insubstantial to the extent that, much like writing, it only becomes relevant in the context of other things, what the hell is "tech"? And why do "tech" and "the tech industry" even things that we have to define and talk about in the first instance?

Being "technical" is defined in the negative

The obvious conclusion is that "tech" and "the tech industry" are more cultural constructs than they are useful descriptors of what people actually know or do. I believe that this is largely a historical artifact: in the early days of computing, all computers were large, specialised machines in the way that high-performance compute clusters are these days. You couldn't just get a small team of developers together and try things out: you needed a fairly large, fairly specialised team. In that situation, it makes quite a lot of sense to create "computer engineering" or "software engineering" as a specialised group of people who focus on getting the machine to work. In that kind of workflow, also, computers tended to only be used for the most obviously computer-related stuff, mostly the storage and processing of large volumes of information for bureaucratic and administrative purposes: automated scholar-bureaucrats, essentially. Even as late as the 90s, the primary purpose of personal computers was to run spreadsheets and do word process, with Excel, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 being the killer apps that led to the widespread adoption of the PC. All of this was instrumental to creating a distinct "tech industry" construct with an associated culture and perceptions around it.

The issue, of course, is that none of the conditions that created this construct exist any more. I can write a basic web application in a few days on my work laptop and deploy it basically immediately, and there is every chance that it'll actually do something useful. Even with the recent profusion of LLM slop making the learning process harder, it's really easy for anyone to learn to write a bit of code online and do something useful with it, in a process that started with HTML and has only accelerated since then. People don't need a large body of specialist skills just to keep the computer running and basically functional, and as a result we've seen an explosion in the number of people in the world who are doing cool things in code, many of them not a good fit for the traditional "tech" stereotype. This has resulted in a dispersal and deconsolidation of the cultural "tech" grouping.

While all this was happening, though, tech was becoming a highly-paid, high-prestige occupation that occupied and still occupies a position of real importance in our culture (C.F. Hackers, Silicon Valley and a myriad of similar cultural products). And this posed a problem for the more traditional, centralised tech people of yesteryear, who naturally wanted to guard their privileges and restrict access to their high-prestige group at the same time as the boundaries of the group had well and truly fuzzed. But as we've established above, absent the domain knowledge (the domain knowledge underpinning the initial tech cluster was, I'd argue, the understanding of the hardware and machinery needed to make a computer do anything at all), there really isn't much to tech these days. And that, in turn, means that as the boundaries blurred, tech and "being technical" increasingly became a thing that is negatively defined and spoken about in terms of what it isn't and who doesn't count as being technical more than who is.

This leaves two options for our aspiring gatekeepers. Either you heavily filter on which domains are acceptably "technical" and which aren't, or you wind up treating any domain knowledge at all as suspect. In practice, most people with an attachment to "tech" lean on a mixture of these things in varying proportions, with the call on which domains are technical being based largely on vibes (because, as established above, the lines you might actually use to build a delineation are very blurry). And that, as we'll shortly, has led to some very dark things.

Hollow definitions attract hollow people

It's worth digressing briefly here to ask ourselves what kind of person has a real incentive to gatekeep "coding skills" or "technical identity". The first point to note is that obviously the people with an incentive to gatekeep are people who have been a part of the "technical" in-group for a while now: for historical reasons to do with patriarchy and a bunch of other shit (which is mostly patriarchy at one level of remove), these people are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately white and well-off. The classic 80s and 90s hacker stereotype who learned while computing was highly centralised and their descendants are a pretty good mental model for the kinds of people we're thinking about. However, people who've developed a niche and some domain knowledge, and who are consequently secure in that identity regardless of who else might take part in it, are unlikely to care much about gatekeeping: it's a waste of time and effort.

Our gatekeepers, then, tend to feel insecure in their identity and be mediocre-to-poor engineers measured by the yardstick of actually getting things done. Their grasp on the identity also tends to be quite tenuous: think of the kinds of men in engineering who are genuinely threatened by being shown up by women and consequently have an absolute fucking meltdown the moment they have to work with any: while a lot of this is just plain misogyny, the fact that they can feel threatened by a woman doing their job does not speak to any level of confidence in their own ability to compete.

Finally, as mentioned earlier, the gatekeepers are likely to be people who've either not acquired much domain knowledge yet or who have permanent defects in acquiring it. Note here that domain knowledge here is being used in quite a wide sense: communication skills and management skills, for example, are forms of domain knowledge, and very important ones at that. Whether they're still in university and thus young and stupid, badly brought up or just awful thanks to some defect of character, these people are incapable of doing anything other than handling the arcane runes well.

By now, you've got a pretty clear picture of the gatekeepers in your head, don't you? White, male, mediocre, leaning younger but with some old and embittered people in the grouping, sheltered and having limited contact with the real world... these are the people working the hardest to delineate what tech is and what it isn't. And unfortunately, what they say kind of sticks, because to an outside observer, a proper understanding of the arcane runes is what writing software looks like.

This in itself, explains why the boundaries of tech are delineated the way they are in our society. When drawing the line, our gatekeeping group is interested first and foremost in drawing the line so that the stuff they're good at is on the inside and the stuff they're bad at is on the outside. The second consideration is self-gratification. Put those together, and you wind up with a slate of acceptably technical domains that are more or less the kind of thing that a precocious white boy can do that'll get people to pat him on the head and tell him that he's smart. Blockchain and cryptocurrency are an excellent example of this, as is the current GenAI craze: they're technical and messy enough that it's easy to ignore the domain (which is, without loss of generality, basically just fraud for both of them), talking about them makes you look hella smart to people who don't actually understand the technology and people who are too brown or too female for you to want to associate them self-select out, because in general, we have the life experience (or domain knowledge, if you will), to understand, for example, why technology that can generate convincing-looking images of women engaging in sex acts based on a reference photo is a fucking terrible idea.

Equally, anything that's too obviously useful gets pushed out of the technical identity, especially if it's something that wrong kinds of people tend to be drawn to. HTML and CSS aren't really technical: they're too much about making things look good, which is feminine-coded. DevOps and SRE work tends to be about care and maintenance much more than it's about building anything, which is also non-white and feminine coded: that's out as well. Data work doesn't really count either, of course: it's too close to science, and science as a concept is feminine and obviously not technical.

In the wise words of dril:

"This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit

— wint (@dril) June 16, 2012

However, we're pretty few and far between in the industry: a lot of people in tech wind up here because they either want a job that pays well or they see the vibe that the industry is giving off and are drawn in by it. They're attracted to the culture of tech, and when the people doing most of the work of defining the conceptual boundaries of the space are mediocre man-children, creeps and people who've either never been told "no" in their lives or who've been told it way too much but seem incapable of hearing it, the industry's eventually going to start attracting more hollow, broken people. If they aren't themselves in the demographic described, they're people with little enough soul or commitment to anything that they're willing to engage with the culture for the sake of money, or they're simply frauds, grifters or mediocrities with no other options.

And now we have our explanation: thanks to the development pathway of tech and internal incentives in the culture, we've generated a perfect breeding ground for fascists, reactionaries and other cranks. The whole faintly gross and sweaty industry attracts people who are predisposed towards fascist thinking, and once they're in they mostly interact with each other, radicalising further. Anything necessary to the industry that would push against this trend is, by rhetorical sleight-of-hand, carefully eliminated from the culture.

We need to kill the "coding" concept

So yeah. That's why the Bluesky waffle discourse keeps happening. That's why notables in the tech space so often wind up coming out as explicitly fascist, and why so much of the field is either sympathetic to fascist ideas or insists on keeping them around in the interests of "diverse viewpoints" or some such shit. It's how a social network can be so caught up on open protocols and whatever that they don't register that their primary job is running a social network, meaning that they don't bother to do things like hire communications staff or invest in trust and safety. It's how the CEO of said social network can then start arbitrarily banning people and taunting her userbase because she's not willing to enforce the site rules when it comes to fascists and transphobes, and she doesn't like this being pointed out. It's how OpenAI keeps doing what it does despite the fact that Sam Altman is, by all accounts, credibly accused of sexually assaulting his sister. It needs to end.

Don't get me wrong: the things we can do with software are amazing. Software runs so much of our world these days, and it's really important that lots of us are good at using it for things. But this can't continue. This idiotic, cruel, creepy industry and culture needs to die, and the people who built it need to repent. Those of us who build software for doing useful things need to be included in whatever comes next, as full and equal members given exactly the same amount of respect that the fascist tech types are given now.

As you might have guessed from the heading here, fixing this starts with killing the concept that typing arcane runes into a machine is anything beyond a literacy skill. It's useful, it's helpful, but it's no good without knowledge and experience of actual substance behind it. We need to demonstrate loudly, clearly and publicly that tech is fundamentally not about this, and to centre domain knowledge front and centre in every way we teach software engineering skills.

When we talk about social media networks, we have to focus in, not on the tech, but on what the tool materially does: allow us to see what our friends are up to, talk to interesting people, show your work to the world and start Discourse. We need to show, not the nuts and bolts of writing software, but the process of how we, embedded in our domains, go from an idea to something that makes all our lives better in some way. Facebook should be directly described in terms of how it solved the problem of "creepy men can't rate women on campus by fuckability", which, morally abhorrent as it is, was apparently very profitable for one man in particular.

Relatedly, we need to demonstrate that you don't actually need to know that much to make something cool and useful. A basic static site generator requires very little knowledge of code these days (though still too much, if I'm to be honest). Custom Shopify and Wordpress themes are pretty easy to right. We need to demonstrate that even learning a little bit of the arcane-rune language lets people do things that are useful to them with tech. Web designers building things on the indieweb should count as just as technical as the hardcore blockchain developers, if not more so.

Finally, you should get zero points for being technical if what you're building is useless or actively harmful to people. Being able to write complex code and then using it to generate non-consensual pornographic images of people should not count as technical at all: after all, it solves no relevant issue beyond "I want to get my dick hard to this person, but they said no, so I'm going to use maths to do it anyway." If you want to be seen as an amazing engineer, you need to build something that makes peoples' lives better, and going forward, that should be a complete non-negotiable for us to grant anyone that level of respect or authority (as an aside, this is why Linus Torvalds, despite having some serious issues, is not beyond redemption, whereas Raymond and Stallman have fallen into perdition: Torvalds was motivated first and foremost by wanting a working open-source kernel, whereas Stallman and Raymond started with the ideology, and this is why Hurd still doesn't work).

This is not going to be easy: it will require those of us who think that tech should serve people rather than the other way around, and who mostly want to build useful things rather than make ourselves sound smart to do a lot more of the hard work of communicating with non-technical people about what tech is. It will mean countering the Elon fanboys and the dunces and wank-purveyors wherever they are, and it'll mean pushing very, very hard to bake this into how we teach software engineering and how we educate people about it. And, of course, we have to fight through a massive pile of Venture Capitalist money and the likes of Curtis Yarvin to do this.

We do, however, have a bunch of advantages. First of all, as with any group that's defined in the way that "tech" currently is, there are a lot more of us that don't fit it than the ones that do. A lot of us are in fact the ones actually keeping all of the tech infrastructure underpinning our world running. And we tend to be a lot better than the stereotypical crowd at things like communicating effectively with the non-tech world, writing in general and being normal, relatable people (well, not me: I once had an interviewer reject me at the final stage because I "lacked relatability", but my readers are on the whole very good at this). A good grassroots communications campaign can easily win this.

One method that's effective for this is working to influence non-technical elites, which is one part of what I'm trying to do. I don't have demographics on who reads my blog, but a large number of you are not technical people in the strict sense of the term: I know that a lot of philosophers, writers artists and such read this blog. That means that I can shape your view of what the tech industry is and does, and if I convince you, you'll then pass that understanding on to your own audiences. It's a slow process, but over time it has very real effects.

For attempting to influence population views more directly, the monumental unpopularity of the tech magnates at the moment is something we can exploit. In crisis situations like this, people are very willing to take on board narratives that can help them make sense of the situation: putting what's going on in simple terms and hammering that messaging (that the tech industry has, in large part, been captured by a very small fucked-up minority that isn't representative of any of us) repeatedly will work.

All in all, I think it's much healthier for us as engineers to identify ourselves first by the industry and field that we work in in a domain sense, and as "people-who-write-code-good" a distant second. When all's said and done, we aren't that different from other knowledge workers, and there's nothing that innate to us that makes us different: we simply have a slightly different skillset. Believing otherwise, however much we might like to think otherwise, lets fascism slip in through the gaps. And then, when what we've become eventually hits us, we start saying strange things about waffles.