These are just distractions from real issues. This isn't even incremental progress; it's a conscious choice to do nothing while looking good like you're actually "doing something".
If we're being sticklers, in this context you have to take the meaning of the word "master" in relation to its counterpart, "slave"; the other definitions are irrelevant.
The other 3 definitions google offers make no reference to slavery unless you really want to stretch "in charge of an organization or group" just to be offended.
Personally, and perhaps I should have said this in my first comment, I would challenge the premise that the dictionary definition should be a controlling factor in responding to this whole question.
For me, it's more about looking at the potential for harm. I happen to be a white man with no particular harm one way or another associated with terms like these, but I can understand how people with other experiences might feel impacted by being surrounded by terminology like this.
It doesn't hurt me at all to change the terms I use, and if other people with other backgrounds think it's important to do it, I don't have any problem with that.
My issue with this approach is this: it drags attention and headlines away from real issues.
We need serious reform in our policing and prisons in the US. Every time serious reform is demanded in any real way, the distractions get brought up and the real issues are minimized. I don't believe for a moment that this is accidental.
As someone who has black siblings who are now having children of their own, I am infinitely more offended that the real issues get strategically minimized. Look at the reactions to these threads for an example. Look at how many people (black and white) are saying it's an [0]"obvious distraction" or a non-issue.
I absolutely respect that, and honestly I'm not sure how much energy needs to be spent on these terms. I agree that it would be an overall negative if we allowed something that might be insignificant like these systemic terms to distract from things like legal reform.
Personally, I would settle on the side of updating the terms and not being too worried about it or expending further thought, because the use of these specific master/slave terms isn't something I'm attached to. It's a habit I don't mind updating.
I also think, tentatively, that it's not really for me to decide how big a deal this is. I just don't have the experience to understand how big an impact these terms might have. It seems plausible that distractors would get thrown around at a time like this to expend energy without attacking any real structures which would make life more uncomfortable, and I appreciate your bringing it up because I might not have thought about it in those terms.
For myself, I'm happy for these terms to get updated, and I intend to do what I can to focus on continuing to educate myself and try to learn how I can be more effective in deconstructing things that cause harm to people, and to trying to learn more about what it means to be anti-racist.
In terms of values, that's how I think I want to approach something like this, and I respect that other people have a different approach-- I don't mind, as long as the approach people take isn't rooted in things that will perpetuate violence and harm toward people.
If everyone could agree on new terminology without getting annoyed or creating drama I'd be all for it. Unfortunately, people get so hung up over the words that they lose sight of the sticks and stones.
If the black folks discussing the topic seem to think it's harmful (and based on the upvote counts they have a ton of support for that opinion) then I'm inclined to agree.
To put it rather bluntly, I wonder what the opinion of the protestors on the street would be while they're facing down rubber bullets and tear gas. I imagine they'd want to fry bigger fish.
If potential harm matters that much, you should get rid of all the knives in your house and start eating without it, then come back and tell about it.
There is potential harm anywhere, the solution is to change the universe?
Sorry, I don't think I follow your argument. My best interpretation is that you're saying that knives in my kitchen could potentially cut someone, and therefore if I care about the harm caused by terms like "master" and "slave", in order to be consistent I need to care about the potential harm of knives as well.
Responding to that interpretation, I would say:
1. I need to take responsibility for the knives in my kitchen in the same way that I need to take responsibility for the words that come out of my mouth. If my knives are cutting people, then I would need to get rid of them. Apparently the use of these words are cutting people, and so the notion of replacing them with less harmful alternatives isn't worrisome to me
2. I would also say that the potential for harm being everywhere is not a reason for me to ignore this specific instance
3. Yes, I do think that the end goal is to change the universe. It's okay with me if the medium of change is small actions, if that's what's available
If that is so, then also consider the premise that people's experience and the context in regards to this terminology can differ greatly outside of the US.
Let's grant that a terminology change like this is just a distraction. If so, why do you get so worked up about it? Why not just say to yourself "heh, much good that'll do, but whatever" and move on?
It's exhausting watching companies that have enough capital and resources to educate, train, and employ disadvantaged Americans and give them a better life resort to pandering of the lowest level during a crisis to promote their brand. I don't wish to participate or support their ruse.
The case that could be made is that the energy, time, and attention of a movement are finite, and those resources can be allocated in a way that makes us /feel/ like change is happening while, in fact, no substantive change is occurring.
It can function like a pressure relief valve. An immediate example that comes to mind is the firing of 6 APD officers that discharged tasers at protestors. Subsequently, nothing structural in the police department changed, but protests dissipated because of the 'victory' and then an even worse botched arrest occured because nothing fundamental had changed.
Merely firing officers for wrongdoing is itself a huge departure from the norm and starts to set a precedent. Of course, it must continue even when riots aren't gathered outside the precinct.
The main legitimate reason I can see to objecting is not wanting to encourage "obnoxious bad actors". Renaming master/slave to something clearer and less likely to have awkward misunderstandings akin to "forking a child and killing widows and orphans" is a good goal in itself if it improves communication clarity. Toxic drama vectors get cut out for a reason - because nobody wants to deal with them.
Ironically it is possible both that someone is "right" on an issue and someone who is better off not encouraged. Contrary to what some believe there are bad tactics regardless of target.
While at first glance I don't see any value in changing these terms, I do think pushback of this angry tone serves to illustrate the shocking degree of negative emotional energy that people have for the topic, which ironically serves as evidence that the terms do matter, and strengthens the argument for the change.
No, I don’t think so anyway. It’s a very literal, very accurate abstraction for reasoning about the way two components in a system interact.
Consider devices connected on an i2c communication bus. One device is literally acting as the master and dictating to the slaves, who have no choice in the matter.
To argue that the terms should be changed is to deny the reality of the situation - some of those devices are enslaved. Not followers, slaves!
Yes, exactly. Take IDE drives for example. To use two drives with a single cable, one is set to be the master, the other to be the slave. From that point onwards, the slave cannot write to the bus until the master gives permission.
No, the abstraction is not literal and not very acurate either but was catchy and implied the control/controlled. You and all of us picked it up without issues. For black people, it may not have gone that well because of the implied meaning and the black history around slavery. Im fine dropping it for a different term
My grandmother from my father's side was enslaved by Nazis not long ago
Master/slave has nothing to do with black people, it was picked up because it was the right terminology for the job.
Master-slave was already in use in Mesopotamia (3.000 b.c.) in religious texts to express the relation between Gods and men.
BTW there have been slaves long after black people were freed in US, for example in Zarist Russia it was abolished in 1861 when half of the population were serves, but it kinda went on the same
In 1915 Nikolai Berdayev (a russian philosopher) wrote
> “Russia is a country of unbelievable servility and terrible humility, a country lacking any consciousness of the rights of the individual, and which fails to stand up for the dignity of the individual…”
There have been slaves in USSR
There were slaves during Franco dictatorship, that lasted until 1975
There are slaves in many third World countries right now in the form of forced labour, forced sexual exploitation, forced marriage and forced relocation
Thinking that slavery is a monopoly of black people from US is a form of cultural appropriation itself.
Seeing as all humanity comes out of africa (i.e. we were all black), there weren't slaves before there were black people.
But if you mean there were slaves before the american system of chattel slavery, sure. But what's your point? Are you trying to explain to the descendants of slaves that they shouldn't be offended or at least bothered by the popular use of slavery terms because they weren't the first?
Secondly, we must set some basic rules when discussing about complex topics such is this one.
The first rule is that if you are not a descendant of African slaves, you can't speak in their name.
And even if you are, I doubt you can speak for all of them.
Just like I don't speak on behalf of every Italian, living or dead.
The second is that I descend from Romans, but I can't teach Roman history better than a scholar who studied it in Australia.
My grandfather was a tailor, I know nothing about tailoring, so "are you trying to explain X to the descendants of Y" 200 years later doesn't qualify as an argument.
I could well be a descendant from Africans more than any American who's been living there for more than 3 generations. During WW2 where my family comes from, the "Marocchinate" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate ), there's even a movie about it it's called Two Women in English, La Ciociara in Italian, Sophia Loren was in it and won the academy award as best actress. I look like a North African, which is not a typical trait of my family's, so who knows what really happened.
I don't hate Moroccan people, I don't hate black people, it's in the past, Moroccans I know are not responsible for it and when I go to a bar to have breakfast and someone orders a Moroccan coffee I don't feel offended because 80 years ago a lot of women were killed and raped in my home region.
The popular word slave is a problem only for a small fraction of the world population, when I was a kid and learnt about slaves in Egypt that built the pyramids I dreamt about being one, so I got to build pyramids.
Our history books are full of stories about slavery, dating back thousands years before our lord and saviour Jesus.
The world slave applied to tools is quite common and it never bothered me nor did it make me a racist, the contrary is in fact true, I was usually bullied when I was younger by US military personnel stationed in my country (we have been somewhat colonized by US, you know...) because my family was communist. I say was because the Italian communist party doesn't exist anymore, but my family is still communist. It's ok in Italy, we don't eat kids, we don't pray to Stalin, we don't send people to Gulags.
We have a millenarian history, we don't pretend everybody shares it, please don't pretend your sensitivity is global, because it is not.
The point is that you can't link US slavery and today's racism in US with master/slave applied to inanimated things, because it's wrong, Sumerian already used it 4 thousands years ago.
Everyday I kill orphans which are made orphans by killing their parent on my computer, that didn't make me a serial killer.
"slaving" or "(being) slaved" as an intransitive verb has a history that predates modern computing meaning a mechanical or electromechanical system that takes its control inputs from another (master) source. Examples:
It appeared in religious literature many centuries ago, probably in Mesopotamia (we don't have written testimonies before them) to express god-man relation.
Many religions nowadays are still based on the concept of a master God and a slave human follower
The Bible is the most simple example were slavery is accepted and considered normal (slaves, concubines, that became domesti workers but we're still slaves)
Another example is God that asks Abraham to kill his child, and Abraham obeys, because he's an "humble servant"
There are still many prayers that refer to God as The Lord (master) and the believers are servants to God (slaves to God, sometimes literally)
* “Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” *
The social incentives involved aren't constrained by the good intentions of this article's author or anyone else.
There are some places where renaming master/slave would, if anything, be a syntactic enhancement.
But the incentive at work is for corporate and professional virtue-signaling / clout-chasing, hence GitHub's decision to rename default branch from "master" to "main", which just muddles its purpose.
I live in a country where slavery is something we read about from books, the master/slave terms have no race conotations.
Changing established technical terms just because less than 5% of the world population has some sensitivity to history before their grand-grand parents is excessive.
Don't make me remember what Italian's ancestors did to my ancestors, or else I will have to ask current Italians for reparations. Well, this sounds extremely stupid, is it?
It doesn’t sound extremely stupid to me. I’m not a person of color but can imagine how it might feel like the right time to shrug certain terms out of our public discourse.
That it does not upset you is of no consequence. That it may be hurtful to others has consequence.
It’s very little skin off our backs in the grand scheme. If it is a hill you’d like to die on though, do as you must.
I’d just suggest that there may be times things frustrate you that you do not understand, and it is then that it can be better to simply listen.
Do not be sorry for what some people 2000 years ago did to some other people; it was not you, there is nothing to be sorry about. Collective guilt and collective punishment are bad ideas.
That 5% of the world population comprises 83% of the world's native English speakers. Since we're talking about making modifications to the words we're using in English then I'd argue that 83% have considerable sway in that conversation - way more than the 5% sway you're arguing they should have.
> Since we're talking about making modifications to the words we're using in English
We are actually not.
Master and slave will continue to exist in English.
Besides, your numbers are completely wrong, India and Nigerian have English as one of the official languages, if we sum them there are more people speaking English in those two countries alone than in the entire US of A.
Even in Europe there are more people speaking English than in the US.
EDIT
I ran the numbers
These are all countries where English is an official language
India 129,377,965
Nigeria 114,172,822
Pakistan 94,300,000
Philippines 70,371,000
United Kingdom 59,600,000
--------------------------
Total 467,821,787
US 283,160,411
Only considering these 5 countries (excluding the entire continent of Oceania)
Maybe it's time that US people drop the attitude, because that's the main problem in their society: the feeling that they are on top of everything.
It doesn't surprise me at all the rampant racism in a society shaped around the illusion that you are the best and all the others can't even compete in the same league...
Indeed. I'm glad people are fixing racism (read: assuaging their white guilt) by renaming things instead of agitating for health care reform (or, closer at hand: for interview process reform).
Why it's almost as if this is all a distraction that effectively benefits the already comfortable...
> Why not change it to something that does not refer to one of the most barbaric, nightmarish relationships between people?
Gee, maybe because it also has connotations that have nothing to do with racism or human slavery?
Where does this slippery slope end?
Should we change other terms in computer technology simply because some vastly small minority emotionally fragile busybodies break down at the mere sight of the word "abort" or "kill" or "terminate"?
Master/slave have very well defined meanings in computer terminology ~ and spoiler alert, there are no human or racial connotations in those meanings anywhere.
I think I see where you are coming from. I'm not advocating for changing "abort" or "kill" and agree they go too far.
I disagree with your point that it has nothing to do with racism or human slavery. The name master/slave indicates one is giving direction and one is following direction. It's not like someone sat there thought the letters m.a.s.t.e.r sounded good and might at well be the name of bit of the system giving order.
My concern is not with industry veterans, but with people being introduced to tech or non-techincal people who are brought into technical discussions.
Honestly, would your rather explain a bug as "the secondary was not following the instructions from the primary" or "the slave was not following the instructions of the master" to a room full of people unfamiliar with the subject?
The master/slave naming scheme is, to me, an especially bad situation. Things like whitelist/blacklist do not have the same urgency in my mind.
I appreciate your concern for the slippery slope but think we can address this without falling all the way to the bottom.
It's remarkable how much drama is being manufactured over a non-issue. There's a zero percent chance the people putting in the effort to promote this don't realize that 'Master' is an industry term of art meaning original or reference copy.
Is “slave” an industry term of art? Certainly most people are familiar with the concept of a “master copy” - keys, documents, etc. but computer networking is the only time I’ve ever encountered the word “slave” thrown around so cavalierly.
Yes, both "master" and "slave" have been used as a pair for a long time in a number of different technical fields to describe relationships between devices. Instead of computer networking, the linked article is on a site that focuses on music technology (https://cdm.link). If you search (for example) [midi "slave"] you'll come up with a lot of hits using "slave" in a technical sense for electronic music. Here's a nice example page from that search, that goes farther to distinguish (technically and without irony) two different types of masters and slaves: https://steinberg.help/cubase_pro_artist/v10/en/cubase_nuend....
Master and slave cylinders also exist for break cylinders and guess what computer hardrives were largely historically before flash? Rotating cylinders of some sort even if the memory was tape. That are literally "driven" by the master. Having no motive of their own only driven by the master. It is a tasteless pun metaphor at worst.
> There's a zero percent chance the people putting in the effort to promote this don't realize that 'Master' is an industry term of art meaning original or reference copy.
True, although in the case of this article it's talking more about music technology like MIDI, where rather than "original" or "reference" it usually means something closer to "leader" or "commander".
But this misses the point of the article. The suggestion isn't that we should drop the historic terms to improve the precision of tech communication. Rather, the worry is that habitualizing the terms "master" and "slave" in technology desensitizes us to concept. If we accept that one device is naturally the "master" of other devices, perhaps we are more willing to accept that one human can be the master of other humans. If we accept that the role of one device is to be merely a "slave", perhaps we won't recoil sufficiently at the notion that one human might be enslave another.
Certainly, one can disagree with this premise. Why should using the same language to describe one concept influence attitudes toward another? But rather than suggesting that author is pretending not to understand a standard industry term, you'd do much better to argue about the point the article is actually making.
The terms are already desensitizes and as someone wrote earlier, no person alive was ever a slave, so the sensibility is not justified. When we use these terms we don't think of a black slave in USA 200 years ago, these are terms that are totally repurposed.
They’re coming after tech. Don’t worry, changing terminology will change the underlying issues. Just be careful not to cause thoughtcrime once neuralink is feasible in a few decades.
No, the people who want this change literally built the tech. [1] All of you getting triggered and crying from the peanut gallery need to develop some perspective and go back to work.
Regardless of who invented it, it’s the notion of changing how one speaks, and it’s vocabulary, to gain control over people. Don’t abide by the change/are against it? Then you’re a racist fool, like all the others. It’s a move towards further tribalism. This isn’t about a functionally better term for it. It’s a push during the mob rage over names, statues, and symbols. They already want to shutdown stem, first for a day, then more.
Let’s not debate these symbols, in coherent discourse, let’s label those opposed as racist, and demand change or else more chaos will ensue.
Another opinion: Instead for going after the words, go after the facts.
The US is the world's largest slave owner state. Their prison system is the modern equivalent of a slave economy under slave jurisdiction, and the treatment of illegal foreign labor not much different. How about legal reforms?
It's kinda depressing to see the downvote, again, because people don't know history
Slavery does not imply racism, it hasn't been the case for a very long time throughout history, slaves were a social class, a synonym for what we call "working class" or they were people from conquered lands, that were enslaved as a display of suoremacy, not because of their ethnicity.
They usually were of the same ethnicity.
Rome had emperors who were born in Africa (Settimio Severo for example)
Have the slaves suffered abuses?
Yes, of course, just like working class, and farmers and other poor classes before them, have been exploited.
French Revolution is all about that.
They were all French against other French.
Only in modern history slavery has been justified by racism (the theory that some "races" were superior to others) but it's not modern slavery that created racism, it's the opposite.
Slavery in the United States was an especially brutal form of slavery referred to as chattel slavery. In this form of slavery the slaves are not regarded as even being human, they are treated with the same regard as one would treat an ox. American slaves were not the working class as you describe.
There is nothing special in US slavery, except it happened in US and US has been culturally relevant for the west since the end of WW2
One thing is the historical reasoning about it, another is thinking that it happened only to one place in the world and only those people can talk about it.
Don't get me wrong, slavery is a terrible and unjustifiable crime, but it didn't start in US and it didn't end in 1861
The United States was not the only country to ever employ chattel slavery - it's not unique in that regard. It is unique in that it's the only country to end slavery due to civil war - a fact I think is very important in this discussion. There are to this day a number of "rebels" as they call themselves who believe themselves to be intellectually and morally superior to black people, they want to keep black and whites separated, and they want to remind blacks of their inferiority by prominently displaying statues of Confederate Generals in the public square and promulgating the use of terms reminding blacks of their inferior social standing. Terms such as blackmail, blacklist, and master/slave. There's way more behind this than just slavery and snowflakes getting their feelings hurt.
In UK for example anti slavery movements are born during the civil war as well.
But chattel slavery was already abolished for a period in the 12th century, before the Norman occupation that reinstated it.
US abolished it after a civil war because every other country already did it without having to kill each other, but civil war was really about money and taxation.
Isn't it weird that people that don't know words etymology want to decide what they mean for the rest of us?
> 1550s, "tribute paid to men allied with criminals as protection against pillage, etc.," from black (adj.) + Middle English male "rent, tribute," from Old English mal "lawsuit, terms, bargaining, agreement," from Old Norse mal "speech, agreement;" related to Old English mæðel "meeting, council," mæl "speech," Gothic maþl "meeting place," from Proto-Germanic mathla-, from PIE mod- "to meet, assemble" (see meet (v.)).
In 1550 USA didn't even exist, not even in the form of colonies, that formed after 1600.
The first known settlement in what we call US today is by the Spanish in 1513 that reached Florida.
So no, blackmail doesn't mean what you think it means and doesn't come from where you think it does.
I'm sorry it came out this way, it means we have no shared history and values that we can rely on in a discussion
I was replying to
> So structural racism has ended?
The obvious answer would have been "does it end if we remove master/slave from tech terminology?"
But I wanted to give more context, because I believe people can and will understand things when they learn about them in a deeper way
Racism and slavery are two completely different problems, the first existed before races were even considered a thing (for like thousands of years, you might not understand the difference, but 7-8 thousands of years is a really loooong time, imagine that Egyptians to Romans were older than Romans are to us today!), the former hasn't died when slavery was abolished.
Is slavery in the US the worst episode of dehumanisation we can think of, when literally the Nazis no more than 80 years ago were slaughtering and torturing in concentration camps millions of innocent people just because they didn't like them?
They were kept behind walls and deprived of any humanity that was left. I don't think I need to make the list of the atrocities they suffered...
There are no stories of free slaves or good masters that led them have their own piece of land in some plantation in Virginia.
The few that came back have lived among us, they are our grandparents, parents, uncles ...
We've heard their stories, we didn't just read them on books.
My dad met his father (my grandfather) when he was 5, he was captured by Nazis and believed dead.
I never met him because he died young, from the consequences of the imprisonment.
So please don't assume we cannot understand.
Racism and slavery sometimes can fuel each other, but generally slavery is a tribal thing, racism is philosophy gone bad.
Even Gandhi has been criticized for being racist, he didn't enslave anybody, did he?
You can have racism without slavery and slavery without racism
No. There is a finite amount of time and energy (physical, emotional, and other) that an individual, and by proxy a group, can dedicate to a given cause. Wasting those resources on token gestures like this means there is _less_ energy to go towards actions that will cause meaningful change. "Changing words because feels" is social self-gratification, and does nothing to address the actual societal ills.
If you want to see meaningful change, disregard this terminology frippery and call/write/email/whatever your local rep to support the tri-partisan bill revoking qualified immunity. I promise, you will see vastly more improvement in society if this bill goes through, than if we spin our wheels wondering if "foobar" is going to be the next doublePlusUngood(tm) term d'art of the week.
Personally I feel like these changes are silly but it is not a hill I want to die on. I understand some may think this is a slippery slope but as a society we've been sliding down it for years now. Just make the change and move on. Focus on problems that matter.
My point is we aren't going to stop 30 years of political correctness. The inertia is there. Software already has an image problem. Fighting something like this makes our industry look bad and doesn't really help anyone or set back the PC train.
We're hitting rock bottom either way. Let's not drag down the software industry in the process.
it seems the end game of this is to disappear the words slave and master from our vocabulary, so we can't express those ideas anymore and let slavery expand unhindered
If the words were to dissapear from the dictionay (which is not happening btw) then we’d invent others, don’t worry.
I find this change somewhat futile as it will not make people less
racist, but if it offends black people we could go with a diferent term, why not?
I always found master/slave a bit too idiomatic. I imagined a hardrive whipping the other form time to time. This picture is painful to some, lets update it and show we’re willing to do good.
Im worried though that the change will amount to these types of changes, removing statues, adding disclaimets in history books, old movies etc and then no real change (as in needed change) will emerge. Hope im wrong though
> it seems the end game of this is to disappear the words slave and master from our vocabulary, so we can't express those ideas anymore and let slavery expand unhindered
No, you're engaging in inaccurate hyperbole.
The end game for these efforts will be to make "slave" a more precise and specific term, not to erase it entirely. Does the existence of the terms "pork" (pig meat) and "pig" (animal source of pork) strike you as Newspeak?
Cars have master and slave cylinders. I never liked the terms because I don’t think the terms a very descriptive. Pedal cylinder and wheel cylinder describe the devices better.
pointless arm flappery. how many people when configuring a piece of music software or hardware to be a slave get themselves a jolly thinking about how they're putting one over the downtrodden.
What is that make people react to events that happen in the US differently than those outside of the US? I mean there are people who die and people who protest about a variety of different issues outside of the US (just recently protests in Hong Kong, Iraq, and Lebanon). However, it never causes this magnitude of response, from media platforms and tech companies, to music production terminology.
Ideas like this are a great way to signal how privileged you are. Black people being murdered by the cops don't care about master/slave jargon in technology, it's hilariously out of touch that someone would even think this is at all important with respect to the issues going on right now.
I think some people like myself see the current issue as an iceberg like problem. Systemic racism is composed of many tiny parts. This is not an either/or question, but a yes/and one. You can both not want to be killed and care about the casual and lazy use of language. We can as technologists, change this without stopping work on police reform for example. The defensiveness/resistance to change is much more interesting to me.
As for signalling, Sure we don't need to advertise it to ourselves and give accolades for something so simple. But we can do the bit and move on. I guess a lot of people are in love with the idea that if doing something is good then it must be being done in order to be _seen_ as doing good. That is bullshit unless you happen to know intent.
Somehow people forgot that "micro" was part of "micro aggressions". When you are in a comfortable space where macro aggressions are absent, it's worth looking at micro agressions.
I'd rather GitHub keep "master" and have a onhover tooltip in the web UI showing a quote of the day about modern slavery or racism and linking to a way to take action.
I think now is the worst possible time to delve into this issue. America doesn't pay attention to anything for long, especially issues related to systemic racism. Right now when we have the ear of America we can't afford to squander that attention on trivialities that don't affect the lives or outcomes of oppressed people. The dynamics of racial discourse over the last decade means unimportant issues like this will only be used as an excuse to shut down the conversation around the issues that really do matter, yet we don't get anything material in return for dying on this hill, this is just social justice theater meant to make privileged people feel good about themselves.
If the terminology is (1) non-descriptive (it is, especially in comparison to the various _alternatives_ that describe very different scenarios) and (2) offensive to people, why not change it?
But let‘s be clear: there’s a race problem in technology, just as there’s a gender problem in technology. If someone whose ancestors were enslaved were working in technology and encountered the terms master/slave … how would they feel? Would this be another of the thousands of microagressions that they face working in technology today? Would they ultimately leave technology because they can’t get any of their white coworkers to take these microaggressions seriously?
The answer, of course, is an ongoing yes to all of those. This is a trivial way to remove offensive microaggressions, and the pushback that is being received to this makes it very clear to racialized peoples that the real privilege is in the people who object to these inaccurate and offensive terms being changed for something more accurate and inoffensive.
There is absolutely a race problem in technology starting with the pipeline problem, extending into discrimination, salary disparities, microaggressions etc and I don't believe microaggressions are trivial.
I disagree that the use of the master/slave terminology in technology is racialized and I also disagree that it falls into the category of microaggression. A microaggression is e.g. "but you listen to rap right?" or "what exactly are you?" or "wassup homie" directed only at black people. If the comment or action is not directed at a person it's not a microaggression.
Finally, I am not opposed to changing the terminology, I think alternative words are fine, I just think now is perhaps the worst possible time in hisory to litigate this issue.
Insisting that all actions be measured by their "importance" in relation to whatever other more important things exist at the same time is useless. Ironically, you're gate-keeping morality. Additionally, your use of the word "hilarious" is petty mockery and betrays an us-vs-them mentality that doesn't have to exist, and therefore makes me less likely to believe you're interested in a good faith discussion.
> Insisting that all actions be measured by their "importance" in relation to whatever other more important things exist at the same time is useless
We'll just have to agree to disagree on the merits of measuring ideas based on importance. When it comes to social justice there is limited bandwidth for change, devoting attention to unimportant trivialities that have zero material impact on oppressed people hurts the effort for productive change, it's a waste of political captial and welcome fodder for racist agitators. For what? A label in some software programs that almost nobody ever thinks about. Litigating this now is worse than doing nothing.
> you're gate-keeping morality
I'm speaking out against something I believe is actively harmful to the movement for social justice. Characterizing that as gate-keeping is a rhetorical trick that frames my position as inherently inappropriate without actually addressing the substance of what I'm saying.
> Additionally, your use of the word "hilarious" is petty mockery
It is what it is. The sentiment of changing meaningless computer jargon as a response to racist police violence deserves to be mocked. The only positive thing this does is make privileged people feel good about themselves. People are quite literally being gassed and killed in the streets, the only people in the headspace to bikeshed over computer jargon in the context of racial injustice are those with considerable levels of privilege.
White people fighting worthless causes to feel good about themselves and patting themselves on the back because they fought away racism by changing names, episode 2345.
But sure, go ahead, make the term disappear. That will surely fix the underlying issue.
There we go again with a Rubocop-like complaint. Are we at the pinnacle of ridicule yet ? Because I don't think I can take anymore. The amount of bigotry in the news is puzzling.
A lot of the other comments here seem absurd to me. We should all be able to imagine terminology that would be repulsive. (I.e., imagine if some tech term or project name were a racial slur. Would you really argue against changing it?). So yea, there's a line to draw somewhere; we can't say every technical term is immune from critique.
So then the argument is that in this particular case it's just not a big deal and people shouldn't be upset about it. Well, if you're saying that, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your recent ancestors didn't have to deal with slavery!
What percentage of people in tech are Black? Some single digit percentage? What if tech were 95% Black? Would we really say master/slave? Of course not. That wording has a lot of baggage for some people! So even if 9 out of 10 people don't have a problem with the word and see this as a PC slippery slope, that doesn't mean the minority is wrong to request changes. It's not difficult to change the terminology, and it helps some people, so why fight it.
You, and I, are responsible for our own emotions. Once we start going down that road it will be very easy to do away with free speech because “emotions”.
>>> Master is a word. Slave is a word. Being words, they have a meaning.
Let me put it another way: "wimp" is a word, and being a word, it has meaning. Does that mean I should choose to call you a wimp? Doing that would be rude, but free speech, amirite?
> You, and I, are responsible for our own emotions. Once we start going down that road it will be very easy to do away with free speech because “emotions”.
Do you refuse to account for others' emotions in your actions "because of" free speech? You speak like you feel like that's how you should behave.
Like most things, there aren't hard rules set in stone for all time. Using "master and slave" in a computing context is becoming rude, and sooner or later those who continue to use it unapologetically will be frowned upon and judged. If you want to be part of that club, I suppose that's your choice, but it's not a stand for free speech or anything like that.
> Using "master and slave" in a computing context is becoming rude, and sooner or later those who continue to use it unapologetically will be frowned upon and judged
You know what? I really don't care at all about if the term is going to change or not. If it changes it may be for the better.
But you reacted exactly the way I expected and it's exactly what I don't want to see.
Vilification will not get you far and you will not get you a lot of friends.
If you do want to make this change, try doing it without threatening.
> In the context that are being used, it describes the abstraction very well.
In some contexts, yes. But other times, other words would explain it better. I think that existing stuff probably need not changed, but in cases where a different word is more clearly describing it, I should think that the different word will do, especially in documentation. There are other reasons why the words used for commands should remain traditional (and American; even though I am Canadian and write the documentation in Canadian, I will use the American terms for the names of commands, etc; just as though, if I am writing music I will use neither Canadian nor American, but Italian), though. (Words also have multiple meanings, anyways.)
> Is slavery absolutely wrong? Of course! That doesn't mean we will have to ban the words.
to your point: go check any post on Cockroach DB on HN to find a ton of "rename your software" comments, on the ground that they find it disgusting but try to remove the use of a term referring to something actually disgusting and "noooo, why would you do that, it's not like its referring to slavery! Hiding words is not going to change anything!"
> What percentage of people in tech are Black? Some single digit percentage
I think it's presumptuous to imply that black people necessarily have a problem with master/slave terminology outside of the "owning people" context. I feel compelled to out myself as a black person to say that its absurd. The issue of the day is that police need to stop killing us with impunity. Believe it or not, there is actually a very limited amount of attention available for issues surrounding systemic racial injustice and distractions like this just exhaust that very limited resource and leave us with jaded citizens who roll their eyes whenever issues of social justice are broached. Even the very idea of "social justice" is considered a pejorative because of the focus on stupid issues like this by a privileged group of people who are so comfortable that they have time to worry about things like arbitrary technology labels.
> Not everyone can directly make the changes that will stop police from killing black people
They can do exactly what they're doing with regard to this issue, spread awareness, except with regard to issues that actually affect the lives and outcomes of black people, not imaginary problems that don't affect black people in the least.
> If this microaggression can be removed, why shouldn’t it?
The presence of certain words outside of a racial context isn't a microaggression. Microaggressions are subtly racist behaviors acted out by people that make other people feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, or unwelcome. It's about behavior. However, I am not arguing it shouldn't change, I'm saying that now is the worst time to bring up this issue, it's just sapping the attention from the issue of police violence and systemic racism.
Am black, I totally agree it’s not a major issue, but I still think it’s not a bad change to make. This is just a hypothetical scenario but I’ve had similar moments before. I’m working with a white person, he says something like, "you mind hooking up that slave device?" And there’s this tiny bit of awkwardness, which feels unmentionably dumb to both of us, but is there none the less. We say nothing, and the moment passes. Except maybe, next time subconsciously, we’re a little more reluctant to work with each other, we don’t even realize why. If making this inconsequential terminological adjustment serves to help get rid of a minuscule, barely perceptible degree of racial friction, then great, why not I say.
I don't think it's a bad change, I think alternative words are fine and I would encourage anyone who wants to make such a change to do a find/replace in their codebase. What I don't like is delving into this topic now, when there are so many more important issues at hand and the nation is actually listening for once, especially knowing how this issue will be used to shut down important conversations around race and characterize the social justice movement as puerile and trivial. The reality is master/slave terminology is trivial.
If someone wants to replace "master" with "main" in code review, I think that's fine, perhaps even slightly better than what it was before, but this should stay within the confines of the organization rather than dilute the movement proper.
> A computer programmer can change programming terminology
And that's fine, perhaps even laudable in the abstract, but right now it's not what we should be wasting time on.
> They can't really change police department practices
They could protest. They could donate time and money. They could use their platform to elevate issues that have a material impact on people's lives. They aren't obligated to do those things to be good people, and a few of them might be doing all of the above, but changing computer jargon doesn't even begin to register on the scales of social justice, it is so utterly meaningless in the face of what's going on all around us that it's almost insulting, save for the fact that the idea is overall well intentioned.
I'm all for these changes on a personal level, but when a company like Github (and by extension MS) makes a PR move virtue signaling like they actually did something then we should be skeptic, because they have time and time again supported ICE and other law-enforcement that tells a very different story.
I was hesitant to submit this article because it seems extremely insignificant in the broader context of current societal changes.
But then it made me ponder the wide extent to which current events are causing people of all walks of life to question and reevaluate even the smallest details of everything around us. Do I think that the proposed changes would make a noticeable difference to society? Probably not. Ultimately do I care if this specific effort succeeds or fails? Nope, don't really care either way.
However, I do think the broader discussion about questioning how we use language, and where certain colloquialisms originated, is important. But I do see opinions at both extreme ends of this topic which are not trying to have good faith discussions, and instead are focused on the absolute worst case scenarios. Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.
It's a good article. Thanks for submitting it! Perhaps reflexively, I tend to disagree with its conclusions, but it certainly makes me doubt myself. I was going to resubmit it if it didn't gain traction. I do think you should have gone with something closer to the original title, though. It doesn't quite fit exactly, but it does if you leave out a comma and one word: "Let’s dump master-slave terms: they’re vague and we’re better off without them". Maybe you still able to edit it?
> Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.
That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).
When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.
In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing
BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?
This is really creepy and I have an intense dislike for the people behind it. Nobody alive today was a slave and choosing to become ass hurt at industry standard terms, which aren't even racial in nature (every race has been enslaved), isn't acceptable.
I never used Github as my primary host for projects, merely as a social network to show off my projects. But I'll be moving away from them now because I simply don't want to see crazy lefties redefining my language to suit their whims. And there's no discussion at all, it's all unilateral or you're a Nazi.
This suggestion was in fact made at the bottom of the article: Bonus footnote – male and female? Switch to “plug” and “socket.” This change is tougher, though, because there’s no easy abbreviation to ‘m’ and ‘f’ for text that is tougher to change. But the terms are clearer and … you know, less gross.
If your initial response to this is negative, and you aren't a member of a demographic that doesn't have recent, painful memories of slavery with horrible, tragic effects that persist to this day, then you really need to check yourself.
For some people who've been through this trauma, the words "master" and "slave" evoke one painful meaning first, before the alternative meaning is understood. If you've never personally experienced something like this, I've read it described as being punched in the stomach. And it's wholely unnecessary, so why not change it?
Words matter. Maybe they don't to you, but trust that people aren't lying when they say it does to them.
I'm super disappointed by the callous response to this: when people talk about gatekeeping in tech, or the myriad failures of tech to be accessible to marginalized people, this is what they mean. This is the culture that enables that.
>> a demographic that doesn't have recent, painful memories of slavery with horrible, tragic effects that persist to this day
"Recent" means about 2-300 years? I thought slavery was abolished in US over 150 years ago, that is several generations that never met, so other than books where are the memories? Have you ever met a slave? Have you ever heard about a slave in your lifetime? Do you know anyone who ever talked to a slave?
I think the idea is that despite the time difference, some black americans in industry find it distasteful because identity is a tricky thing which persists. Though this HN thread is really missing that perspective...
Anyways, there are plenty of southerners who care a great deal about confederate icons despite being just as far apart in time, why do they care about statues and flags of people who they have never met, who they have never talked to? There's still some sense of being wronged (I once listened to someone from Georgea talk about Sherman's March with a great degree of pain).
Recent means within 2 lifetimes (in other words, possibly within the lifetime of someone's great grandparents), and only one if you count the systems of indentured servitude that existed throughout the United States in the aftermath of the civil war[1] -- not to mention the modern institution prison labor which is the legacy of these very systems. Black people weren't "free" in the sense of "empowered to thrive" -- they were "free" in the sense that "slavery on paper is illegal (except where states and local laws allow it under a different name), but you are still legally second class citizens, will possibly very quickly find yourself subject to extreme violence, imprisonment, death, or all of the above if any white stranger doesn't like the way you're looking at them, and you'll have access to subpar everything -- from medical care, to education, to service at a restaurant"
And it is recent relative to the scale of the trauma it wrought -- we're talking an entire population of people subject to extreme brutality and repression.
> but trust that people aren't lying when they say it does to them.
Please know that I ask this with all sincerity: does it matter to them? I'm a racial minority, but not black, and I would find it surprising if this was a top of mind issue for black employees in tech. I mean, you'll always find someone who feels some way about some topic, and I'm sure that this terminology would not have been a black person's first choice but is this something that black people in tech, in general, feel needs to be fixed? If so, count me in. I mean it, I'll help. But if not, I'm not sure why taking on a non-trivial amount of work to move the needle a trivial amount is something we should pursue. People only have so much bandwidth, so why not spend it in pursuing causes that will have a large impact?
Racial minorities have good reason to feel like they're often treated as second-class citizens in this country. Having police offers, over and over again, maim or kill people of color with no repercussions, for example, is the type of b.s. that keeps the wounds of slavery alive and raw today. The name of a branch in source code? I'm not denying that it bothers some people, but I'm willing to bet if you fixed the real problems that plague minorities, this type of stuff would not even be an issue.
Look up micro-agressions. Not the ever so fragile anti-pc political rhetoric. Look up the peer reviewed paychological studies on it.
Most black people aren't directly affected by police killings. It's the day to day drip of racism that they have to deal with that saps their mental energy.
You don't think slavery has carried any effects forward two or three generations? You don't have to have experienced it directly to be experiencing it's effects.
As I am disappointed by the callousness of these changes and how little they achieve. Words matter and terminology matters.
My main problem with these changes is that they seem to be done with the intention of virtue signaling by a bunch of white dudes.
Fail to consider:
- 90% of the world doesn't share the US experience or baggage with the terminology
- Changing standard terminology breaks communication standards, tutorials, and ubiquitous language we use to communicate in our profession.
Finally, this sets a precedent and can and will devolve wasting time, development efforts and making things worse without creating any meaningful positive change.
The other trend going on right now is dropping `master` from use on git repositories, when in reality `master` in that context has nothing to do with race.
Where do we stop? Should we start going after universities for using the term master's degree?
Do we need to boycott the World Chess Championship since chess is inherently racist; after all White moves first!!!
I'm all from inclusivity, for making people feel welcomed, and for us to build a better society; I just don't agree this is how we do it.
Disclaimer: I'm not and English native speaker and there's no equivalent in my language, in fact they usually are not translated and used in English. (I mean, there is an equivalent, but it's never used in this context)
My position about this issue is ambivalent.
From a purely human standpoint I understand it, truly.
When we use those terms referring to tools, I don't see much sense.
When men used bulls to pull the plough it really was a master-slave relationship
The bull could not be the master, even if it wanted too, a human is not strong enough to pull the plough effectively
It's a symbiotic relation between two elements where one is in charge of the "intellectual" part and the other of the physical one.
We can use controller and agent, but controlling is problematic too
We can use manager and worker, but it still implies that there's a disparity between the two
Frontend/backend doesn't fully capture what's going on
We use master/slave because one side is taking all the decisions, the other is just obeying
It's bad, I recognize it, and maybe it's time to change, but no amount of re-wording will change the fact that it's mainly used nowadays for tools that work that way, not for people.
Maybe leader/follower looks like a better choice, but really isn't, follower sounds more dumb to me, at least slaves rebelled throughout history, followers don't. And a leader can be as bad as a master who owns slaves.
Main/secondary is somewhat the best of them all, but it only works for systems were any secondary node can be promoted to replace the main in case of failures, which is not always the case.
To move forward, you must be willing to make changes. If something is causing controversy, you cannot ignore it for long before it drags you and everyone else down. If you do not identify with the controversy, you should step away from it and let the others who can lead the change. You can focus your energy on things that matter to you.
Changing reality with language is a Soviet propaganda tool, actually more and more used elsewhere. Look at Trump, BoJo et al. It doesn’t change reality. It muddled the problem, confounds the description of the problem with the solution, and makes us forget where we come from. The shame of using the term ‘slave’ for an electronic device or ‘master’ for a Git branch is here to stay, to remind us where we come from. Erasing them is fighting history and language, and as such worse than futile.
Sure, some terms are outright offensive, but this is not the case here.
There are some factual errors in the article too, but I’ll leave that. As a Slav I have no issue with the term “slave”, not least because it’s not the root of the word...
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[ 9.0 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadThese are just distractions from real issues. This isn't even incremental progress; it's a conscious choice to do nothing while looking good like you're actually "doing something".
“a man who has people working for him, especially servants or slaves.”
Wouldn’t that seem to justify moving in a direction of updating these terms?
The other 3 definitions google offers make no reference to slavery unless you really want to stretch "in charge of an organization or group" just to be offended.
For me, it's more about looking at the potential for harm. I happen to be a white man with no particular harm one way or another associated with terms like these, but I can understand how people with other experiences might feel impacted by being surrounded by terminology like this.
It doesn't hurt me at all to change the terms I use, and if other people with other backgrounds think it's important to do it, I don't have any problem with that.
We need serious reform in our policing and prisons in the US. Every time serious reform is demanded in any real way, the distractions get brought up and the real issues are minimized. I don't believe for a moment that this is accidental.
As someone who has black siblings who are now having children of their own, I am infinitely more offended that the real issues get strategically minimized. Look at the reactions to these threads for an example. Look at how many people (black and white) are saying it's an [0]"obvious distraction" or a non-issue.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/h8w36t/github_...
Personally, I would settle on the side of updating the terms and not being too worried about it or expending further thought, because the use of these specific master/slave terms isn't something I'm attached to. It's a habit I don't mind updating.
I also think, tentatively, that it's not really for me to decide how big a deal this is. I just don't have the experience to understand how big an impact these terms might have. It seems plausible that distractors would get thrown around at a time like this to expend energy without attacking any real structures which would make life more uncomfortable, and I appreciate your bringing it up because I might not have thought about it in those terms.
For myself, I'm happy for these terms to get updated, and I intend to do what I can to focus on continuing to educate myself and try to learn how I can be more effective in deconstructing things that cause harm to people, and to trying to learn more about what it means to be anti-racist.
In terms of values, that's how I think I want to approach something like this, and I respect that other people have a different approach-- I don't mind, as long as the approach people take isn't rooted in things that will perpetuate violence and harm toward people.
If the black folks discussing the topic seem to think it's harmful (and based on the upvote counts they have a ton of support for that opinion) then I'm inclined to agree.
To put it rather bluntly, I wonder what the opinion of the protestors on the street would be while they're facing down rubber bullets and tear gas. I imagine they'd want to fry bigger fish.
Responding to that interpretation, I would say:
1. I need to take responsibility for the knives in my kitchen in the same way that I need to take responsibility for the words that come out of my mouth. If my knives are cutting people, then I would need to get rid of them. Apparently the use of these words are cutting people, and so the notion of replacing them with less harmful alternatives isn't worrisome to me
2. I would also say that the potential for harm being everywhere is not a reason for me to ignore this specific instance
3. Yes, I do think that the end goal is to change the universe. It's okay with me if the medium of change is small actions, if that's what's available
It can function like a pressure relief valve. An immediate example that comes to mind is the firing of 6 APD officers that discharged tasers at protestors. Subsequently, nothing structural in the police department changed, but protests dissipated because of the 'victory' and then an even worse botched arrest occured because nothing fundamental had changed.
Ironically it is possible both that someone is "right" on an issue and someone who is better off not encouraged. Contrary to what some believe there are bad tactics regardless of target.
So, for example, creating a CD master, or remastering, is fine.
The issue is with the master/slave pairing.
Consider devices connected on an i2c communication bus. One device is literally acting as the master and dictating to the slaves, who have no choice in the matter.
To argue that the terms should be changed is to deny the reality of the situation - some of those devices are enslaved. Not followers, slaves!
My grandmother from my father's side was enslaved by Nazis not long ago
Master/slave has nothing to do with black people, it was picked up because it was the right terminology for the job.
Master-slave was already in use in Mesopotamia (3.000 b.c.) in religious texts to express the relation between Gods and men.
BTW there have been slaves long after black people were freed in US, for example in Zarist Russia it was abolished in 1861 when half of the population were serves, but it kinda went on the same
In 1915 Nikolai Berdayev (a russian philosopher) wrote
> “Russia is a country of unbelievable servility and terrible humility, a country lacking any consciousness of the rights of the individual, and which fails to stand up for the dignity of the individual…”
There have been slaves in USSR
There were slaves during Franco dictatorship, that lasted until 1975
There are slaves in many third World countries right now in the form of forced labour, forced sexual exploitation, forced marriage and forced relocation
Thinking that slavery is a monopoly of black people from US is a form of cultural appropriation itself.
But if you mean there were slaves before the american system of chattel slavery, sure. But what's your point? Are you trying to explain to the descendants of slaves that they shouldn't be offended or at least bothered by the popular use of slavery terms because they weren't the first?
Secondly, we must set some basic rules when discussing about complex topics such is this one.
The first rule is that if you are not a descendant of African slaves, you can't speak in their name.
And even if you are, I doubt you can speak for all of them.
Just like I don't speak on behalf of every Italian, living or dead.
The second is that I descend from Romans, but I can't teach Roman history better than a scholar who studied it in Australia.
My grandfather was a tailor, I know nothing about tailoring, so "are you trying to explain X to the descendants of Y" 200 years later doesn't qualify as an argument.
I could well be a descendant from Africans more than any American who's been living there for more than 3 generations. During WW2 where my family comes from, the "Marocchinate" ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marocchinate ), there's even a movie about it it's called Two Women in English, La Ciociara in Italian, Sophia Loren was in it and won the academy award as best actress. I look like a North African, which is not a typical trait of my family's, so who knows what really happened.
I don't hate Moroccan people, I don't hate black people, it's in the past, Moroccans I know are not responsible for it and when I go to a bar to have breakfast and someone orders a Moroccan coffee I don't feel offended because 80 years ago a lot of women were killed and raped in my home region.
The popular word slave is a problem only for a small fraction of the world population, when I was a kid and learnt about slaves in Egypt that built the pyramids I dreamt about being one, so I got to build pyramids.
Our history books are full of stories about slavery, dating back thousands years before our lord and saviour Jesus.
The world slave applied to tools is quite common and it never bothered me nor did it make me a racist, the contrary is in fact true, I was usually bullied when I was younger by US military personnel stationed in my country (we have been somewhat colonized by US, you know...) because my family was communist. I say was because the Italian communist party doesn't exist anymore, but my family is still communist. It's ok in Italy, we don't eat kids, we don't pray to Stalin, we don't send people to Gulags.
We have a millenarian history, we don't pretend everybody shares it, please don't pretend your sensitivity is global, because it is not.
The point is that you can't link US slavery and today's racism in US with master/slave applied to inanimated things, because it's wrong, Sumerian already used it 4 thousands years ago.
Everyday I kill orphans which are made orphans by killing their parent on my computer, that didn't make me a serial killer.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-a-slave-engine-on-on-a-locomot...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_situation_indicator
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propeller_synchronization
Many religions nowadays are still based on the concept of a master God and a slave human follower
The Bible is the most simple example were slavery is accepted and considered normal (slaves, concubines, that became domesti workers but we're still slaves)
Another example is God that asks Abraham to kill his child, and Abraham obeys, because he's an "humble servant"
There are still many prayers that refer to God as The Lord (master) and the believers are servants to God (slaves to God, sometimes literally)
* “Amen, amen, I say to you, no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than the one who sent him.” *
Said Jesus to his disciples in John 13:16
That's where it was born
And that's why it stayed
It really wasn't a joke, it was all very serious.
There are some places where renaming master/slave would, if anything, be a syntactic enhancement.
But the incentive at work is for corporate and professional virtue-signaling / clout-chasing, hence GitHub's decision to rename default branch from "master" to "main", which just muddles its purpose.
It may be relevant to whether or not you could or would likely understand adequately why this might bother someone.
Edit:
Downvotes won’t make this inconvenient reality go away.
Changing established technical terms just because less than 5% of the world population has some sensitivity to history before their grand-grand parents is excessive.
Don't make me remember what Italian's ancestors did to my ancestors, or else I will have to ask current Italians for reparations. Well, this sounds extremely stupid, is it?
That it does not upset you is of no consequence. That it may be hurtful to others has consequence.
It’s very little skin off our backs in the grand scheme. If it is a hill you’d like to die on though, do as you must.
I’d just suggest that there may be times things frustrate you that you do not understand, and it is then that it can be better to simply listen.
Take care.
And I add to what you said: don't make me remember what other Italians did to my Italian family, no more than 75 years ago.
We are actually not.
Master and slave will continue to exist in English.
Besides, your numbers are completely wrong, India and Nigerian have English as one of the official languages, if we sum them there are more people speaking English in those two countries alone than in the entire US of A.
Even in Europe there are more people speaking English than in the US.
EDIT
I ran the numbers
These are all countries where English is an official language
Only considering these 5 countries (excluding the entire continent of Oceania)Maybe it's time that US people drop the attitude, because that's the main problem in their society: the feeling that they are on top of everything.
It doesn't surprise me at all the rampant racism in a society shaped around the illusion that you are the best and all the others can't even compete in the same league...
Why it's almost as if this is all a distraction that effectively benefits the already comfortable...
We can call these things whatever we want. It's a name for an abstract concept.
Why not change it to something that does not refer to one of the most barbaric, nightmarish relationships between people?
For me personally it makes we wince whenever someone uses "master/slave."
We don't need to be casually throwing around "master and slave" in a professional setting
Gee, maybe because it also has connotations that have nothing to do with racism or human slavery?
Where does this slippery slope end?
Should we change other terms in computer technology simply because some vastly small minority emotionally fragile busybodies break down at the mere sight of the word "abort" or "kill" or "terminate"?
Master/slave have very well defined meanings in computer terminology ~ and spoiler alert, there are no human or racial connotations in those meanings anywhere.
I disagree with your point that it has nothing to do with racism or human slavery. The name master/slave indicates one is giving direction and one is following direction. It's not like someone sat there thought the letters m.a.s.t.e.r sounded good and might at well be the name of bit of the system giving order.
My concern is not with industry veterans, but with people being introduced to tech or non-techincal people who are brought into technical discussions.
Honestly, would your rather explain a bug as "the secondary was not following the instructions from the primary" or "the slave was not following the instructions of the master" to a room full of people unfamiliar with the subject?
The master/slave naming scheme is, to me, an especially bad situation. Things like whitelist/blacklist do not have the same urgency in my mind.
I appreciate your concern for the slippery slope but think we can address this without falling all the way to the bottom.
True, although in the case of this article it's talking more about music technology like MIDI, where rather than "original" or "reference" it usually means something closer to "leader" or "commander".
But this misses the point of the article. The suggestion isn't that we should drop the historic terms to improve the precision of tech communication. Rather, the worry is that habitualizing the terms "master" and "slave" in technology desensitizes us to concept. If we accept that one device is naturally the "master" of other devices, perhaps we are more willing to accept that one human can be the master of other humans. If we accept that the role of one device is to be merely a "slave", perhaps we won't recoil sufficiently at the notion that one human might be enslave another.
Certainly, one can disagree with this premise. Why should using the same language to describe one concept influence attitudes toward another? But rather than suggesting that author is pretending not to understand a standard industry term, you'd do much better to argue about the point the article is actually making.
They may have written this, but it is strikingly false. By most accounts, there are hundreds of thousands of people alive today living as slaves in Africa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa
Not quite on point, but here's a great Atlantic article from a couple years ago about someone who realizes late in life that his family had a slave: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/06/lolas-s...
https://twitter.com/xpasky/status/1271477451756056577?s=21
Let’s not debate these symbols, in coherent discourse, let’s label those opposed as racist, and demand change or else more chaos will ensue.
The US is the world's largest slave owner state. Their prison system is the modern equivalent of a slave economy under slave jurisdiction, and the treatment of illegal foreign labor not much different. How about legal reforms?
They were already there in Babylon over 4 thousands years ago.
Slavery does not imply racism, it hasn't been the case for a very long time throughout history, slaves were a social class, a synonym for what we call "working class" or they were people from conquered lands, that were enslaved as a display of suoremacy, not because of their ethnicity.
They usually were of the same ethnicity.
Rome had emperors who were born in Africa (Settimio Severo for example)
Have the slaves suffered abuses?
Yes, of course, just like working class, and farmers and other poor classes before them, have been exploited.
French Revolution is all about that.
They were all French against other French.
Only in modern history slavery has been justified by racism (the theory that some "races" were superior to others) but it's not modern slavery that created racism, it's the opposite.
Obviously, "scientific racism" didn't exist before "science".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free...
Do you think slaves in Japan were treated equally?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Japan#:~:text=Jap....
There is nothing special in US slavery, except it happened in US and US has been culturally relevant for the west since the end of WW2
One thing is the historical reasoning about it, another is thinking that it happened only to one place in the world and only those people can talk about it.
Don't get me wrong, slavery is a terrible and unjustifiable crime, but it didn't start in US and it didn't end in 1861
In UK for example anti slavery movements are born during the civil war as well.
But chattel slavery was already abolished for a period in the 12th century, before the Norman occupation that reinstated it.
US abolished it after a civil war because every other country already did it without having to kill each other, but civil war was really about money and taxation.
It didn't start to abolish slavery.
Isn't it weird that people that don't know words etymology want to decide what they mean for the rest of us?
> 1550s, "tribute paid to men allied with criminals as protection against pillage, etc.," from black (adj.) + Middle English male "rent, tribute," from Old English mal "lawsuit, terms, bargaining, agreement," from Old Norse mal "speech, agreement;" related to Old English mæðel "meeting, council," mæl "speech," Gothic maþl "meeting place," from Proto-Germanic mathla-, from PIE mod- "to meet, assemble" (see meet (v.)).
In 1550 USA didn't even exist, not even in the form of colonies, that formed after 1600.
The first known settlement in what we call US today is by the Spanish in 1513 that reached Florida.
So no, blackmail doesn't mean what you think it means and doesn't come from where you think it does.
I was replying to
> So structural racism has ended?
The obvious answer would have been "does it end if we remove master/slave from tech terminology?"
But I wanted to give more context, because I believe people can and will understand things when they learn about them in a deeper way
Racism and slavery are two completely different problems, the first existed before races were even considered a thing (for like thousands of years, you might not understand the difference, but 7-8 thousands of years is a really loooong time, imagine that Egyptians to Romans were older than Romans are to us today!), the former hasn't died when slavery was abolished.
Is slavery in the US the worst episode of dehumanisation we can think of, when literally the Nazis no more than 80 years ago were slaughtering and torturing in concentration camps millions of innocent people just because they didn't like them?
They were kept behind walls and deprived of any humanity that was left. I don't think I need to make the list of the atrocities they suffered...
There are no stories of free slaves or good masters that led them have their own piece of land in some plantation in Virginia.
The few that came back have lived among us, they are our grandparents, parents, uncles ...
We've heard their stories, we didn't just read them on books.
My dad met his father (my grandfather) when he was 5, he was captured by Nazis and believed dead.
I never met him because he died young, from the consequences of the imprisonment.
So please don't assume we cannot understand.
Racism and slavery sometimes can fuel each other, but generally slavery is a tribal thing, racism is philosophy gone bad.
Even Gandhi has been criticized for being racist, he didn't enslave anybody, did he?
You can have racism without slavery and slavery without racism
That was the point
If you want to see meaningful change, disregard this terminology frippery and call/write/email/whatever your local rep to support the tri-partisan bill revoking qualified immunity. I promise, you will see vastly more improvement in society if this bill goes through, than if we spin our wheels wondering if "foobar" is going to be the next doublePlusUngood(tm) term d'art of the week.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/how-the-supreme-court...
We're hitting rock bottom either way. Let's not drag down the software industry in the process.
I find this change somewhat futile as it will not make people less racist, but if it offends black people we could go with a diferent term, why not?
I always found master/slave a bit too idiomatic. I imagined a hardrive whipping the other form time to time. This picture is painful to some, lets update it and show we’re willing to do good.
Im worried though that the change will amount to these types of changes, removing statues, adding disclaimets in history books, old movies etc and then no real change (as in needed change) will emerge. Hope im wrong though
How do we know black people are offended by the terminology of midi clocks ?
No, you're engaging in inaccurate hyperbole.
The end game for these efforts will be to make "slave" a more precise and specific term, not to erase it entirely. Does the existence of the terms "pork" (pig meat) and "pig" (animal source of pork) strike you as Newspeak?
An Inherently racist game were White fights against Black, and where the White privilege is clearly documented as White gets to move first.
> Reason 10.0.1 / Reason Essentials 10.0.1 Release Notes
> ReWire master/mixer and slave/device is now always referred to as "host" and "device"
― Arthur Miller, The Crucible
flag me, reid. you know you want to.
As for signalling, Sure we don't need to advertise it to ourselves and give accolades for something so simple. But we can do the bit and move on. I guess a lot of people are in love with the idea that if doing something is good then it must be being done in order to be _seen_ as doing good. That is bullshit unless you happen to know intent.
I'd rather GitHub keep "master" and have a onhover tooltip in the web UI showing a quote of the day about modern slavery or racism and linking to a way to take action.
But let‘s be clear: there’s a race problem in technology, just as there’s a gender problem in technology. If someone whose ancestors were enslaved were working in technology and encountered the terms master/slave … how would they feel? Would this be another of the thousands of microagressions that they face working in technology today? Would they ultimately leave technology because they can’t get any of their white coworkers to take these microaggressions seriously?
The answer, of course, is an ongoing yes to all of those. This is a trivial way to remove offensive microaggressions, and the pushback that is being received to this makes it very clear to racialized peoples that the real privilege is in the people who object to these inaccurate and offensive terms being changed for something more accurate and inoffensive.
I disagree that the use of the master/slave terminology in technology is racialized and I also disagree that it falls into the category of microaggression. A microaggression is e.g. "but you listen to rap right?" or "what exactly are you?" or "wassup homie" directed only at black people. If the comment or action is not directed at a person it's not a microaggression.
Finally, I am not opposed to changing the terminology, I think alternative words are fine, I just think now is perhaps the worst possible time in hisory to litigate this issue.
We'll just have to agree to disagree on the merits of measuring ideas based on importance. When it comes to social justice there is limited bandwidth for change, devoting attention to unimportant trivialities that have zero material impact on oppressed people hurts the effort for productive change, it's a waste of political captial and welcome fodder for racist agitators. For what? A label in some software programs that almost nobody ever thinks about. Litigating this now is worse than doing nothing.
> you're gate-keeping morality
I'm speaking out against something I believe is actively harmful to the movement for social justice. Characterizing that as gate-keeping is a rhetorical trick that frames my position as inherently inappropriate without actually addressing the substance of what I'm saying.
> Additionally, your use of the word "hilarious" is petty mockery
It is what it is. The sentiment of changing meaningless computer jargon as a response to racist police violence deserves to be mocked. The only positive thing this does is make privileged people feel good about themselves. People are quite literally being gassed and killed in the streets, the only people in the headspace to bikeshed over computer jargon in the context of racial injustice are those with considerable levels of privilege.
But sure, go ahead, make the term disappear. That will surely fix the underlying issue.
So then the argument is that in this particular case it's just not a big deal and people shouldn't be upset about it. Well, if you're saying that, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that your recent ancestors didn't have to deal with slavery!
What percentage of people in tech are Black? Some single digit percentage? What if tech were 95% Black? Would we really say master/slave? Of course not. That wording has a lot of baggage for some people! So even if 9 out of 10 people don't have a problem with the word and see this as a PC slippery slope, that doesn't mean the minority is wrong to request changes. It's not difficult to change the terminology, and it helps some people, so why fight it.
In the context that are being used, it describes the abstraction very well.
Is slavery absolutely wrong? Of course! That doesn't mean we will have to ban the words..
And emotional content, which may differ from person to person. Society is not made up of robots.
> In the context that are being used, it describes the abstraction very well.
It's also gauche, at best.
And I say that as an extremely sensitive person.
Let me put it another way: "wimp" is a word, and being a word, it has meaning. Does that mean I should choose to call you a wimp? Doing that would be rude, but free speech, amirite?
> You, and I, are responsible for our own emotions. Once we start going down that road it will be very easy to do away with free speech because “emotions”.
Do you refuse to account for others' emotions in your actions "because of" free speech? You speak like you feel like that's how you should behave.
Like most things, there aren't hard rules set in stone for all time. Using "master and slave" in a computing context is becoming rude, and sooner or later those who continue to use it unapologetically will be frowned upon and judged. If you want to be part of that club, I suppose that's your choice, but it's not a stand for free speech or anything like that.
You know what? I really don't care at all about if the term is going to change or not. If it changes it may be for the better.
But you reacted exactly the way I expected and it's exactly what I don't want to see.
Vilification will not get you far and you will not get you a lot of friends.
If you do want to make this change, try doing it without threatening.
In some contexts, yes. But other times, other words would explain it better. I think that existing stuff probably need not changed, but in cases where a different word is more clearly describing it, I should think that the different word will do, especially in documentation. There are other reasons why the words used for commands should remain traditional (and American; even though I am Canadian and write the documentation in Canadian, I will use the American terms for the names of commands, etc; just as though, if I am writing music I will use neither Canadian nor American, but Italian), though. (Words also have multiple meanings, anyways.)
> Is slavery absolutely wrong? Of course! That doesn't mean we will have to ban the words.
I agree (with both parts).
I think it's presumptuous to imply that black people necessarily have a problem with master/slave terminology outside of the "owning people" context. I feel compelled to out myself as a black person to say that its absurd. The issue of the day is that police need to stop killing us with impunity. Believe it or not, there is actually a very limited amount of attention available for issues surrounding systemic racial injustice and distractions like this just exhaust that very limited resource and leave us with jaded citizens who roll their eyes whenever issues of social justice are broached. Even the very idea of "social justice" is considered a pejorative because of the focus on stupid issues like this by a privileged group of people who are so comfortable that they have time to worry about things like arbitrary technology labels.
If this microaggression can be removed, why shouldn’t it?
They can do exactly what they're doing with regard to this issue, spread awareness, except with regard to issues that actually affect the lives and outcomes of black people, not imaginary problems that don't affect black people in the least.
> If this microaggression can be removed, why shouldn’t it?
The presence of certain words outside of a racial context isn't a microaggression. Microaggressions are subtly racist behaviors acted out by people that make other people feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, or unwelcome. It's about behavior. However, I am not arguing it shouldn't change, I'm saying that now is the worst time to bring up this issue, it's just sapping the attention from the issue of police violence and systemic racism.
If someone wants to replace "master" with "main" in code review, I think that's fine, perhaps even slightly better than what it was before, but this should stay within the confines of the organization rather than dilute the movement proper.
And that's fine, perhaps even laudable in the abstract, but right now it's not what we should be wasting time on.
> They can't really change police department practices
They could protest. They could donate time and money. They could use their platform to elevate issues that have a material impact on people's lives. They aren't obligated to do those things to be good people, and a few of them might be doing all of the above, but changing computer jargon doesn't even begin to register on the scales of social justice, it is so utterly meaningless in the face of what's going on all around us that it's almost insulting, save for the fact that the idea is overall well intentioned.
But then it made me ponder the wide extent to which current events are causing people of all walks of life to question and reevaluate even the smallest details of everything around us. Do I think that the proposed changes would make a noticeable difference to society? Probably not. Ultimately do I care if this specific effort succeeds or fails? Nope, don't really care either way.
However, I do think the broader discussion about questioning how we use language, and where certain colloquialisms originated, is important. But I do see opinions at both extreme ends of this topic which are not trying to have good faith discussions, and instead are focused on the absolute worst case scenarios. Maybe the reactions to this story are even more significant than the story itself.
That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).
When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.
In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing
BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?
I never used Github as my primary host for projects, merely as a social network to show off my projects. But I'll be moving away from them now because I simply don't want to see crazy lefties redefining my language to suit their whims. And there's no discussion at all, it's all unilateral or you're a Nazi.
OK then.
For some people who've been through this trauma, the words "master" and "slave" evoke one painful meaning first, before the alternative meaning is understood. If you've never personally experienced something like this, I've read it described as being punched in the stomach. And it's wholely unnecessary, so why not change it?
Words matter. Maybe they don't to you, but trust that people aren't lying when they say it does to them.
I'm super disappointed by the callous response to this: when people talk about gatekeeping in tech, or the myriad failures of tech to be accessible to marginalized people, this is what they mean. This is the culture that enables that.
"Recent" means about 2-300 years? I thought slavery was abolished in US over 150 years ago, that is several generations that never met, so other than books where are the memories? Have you ever met a slave? Have you ever heard about a slave in your lifetime? Do you know anyone who ever talked to a slave?
Anyways, there are plenty of southerners who care a great deal about confederate icons despite being just as far apart in time, why do they care about statues and flags of people who they have never met, who they have never talked to? There's still some sense of being wronged (I once listened to someone from Georgea talk about Sherman's March with a great degree of pain).
So yeah, there's still a number of Americans who have talked to a former slave.
And it is recent relative to the scale of the trauma it wrought -- we're talking an entire population of people subject to extreme brutality and repression.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_unfree_labor_in_the...
Please know that I ask this with all sincerity: does it matter to them? I'm a racial minority, but not black, and I would find it surprising if this was a top of mind issue for black employees in tech. I mean, you'll always find someone who feels some way about some topic, and I'm sure that this terminology would not have been a black person's first choice but is this something that black people in tech, in general, feel needs to be fixed? If so, count me in. I mean it, I'll help. But if not, I'm not sure why taking on a non-trivial amount of work to move the needle a trivial amount is something we should pursue. People only have so much bandwidth, so why not spend it in pursuing causes that will have a large impact?
Racial minorities have good reason to feel like they're often treated as second-class citizens in this country. Having police offers, over and over again, maim or kill people of color with no repercussions, for example, is the type of b.s. that keeps the wounds of slavery alive and raw today. The name of a branch in source code? I'm not denying that it bothers some people, but I'm willing to bet if you fixed the real problems that plague minorities, this type of stuff would not even be an issue.
Most black people aren't directly affected by police killings. It's the day to day drip of racism that they have to deal with that saps their mental energy.
But who does?
Where I come from (Rome) in 1515 the ruler of the times, the Pope, condemned slavery even if it was legal.
US abolished it 360 years later and it's still not pacified about it.
Maybe there are other issues to address first, in some countries more than others.
Maybe.
Does it apply to the use of "Hitler" in the name of a popular office party game?
Or one of HN's favorite terms "wage slavery"?
My main problem with these changes is that they seem to be done with the intention of virtue signaling by a bunch of white dudes.
Fail to consider: - 90% of the world doesn't share the US experience or baggage with the terminology - Changing standard terminology breaks communication standards, tutorials, and ubiquitous language we use to communicate in our profession.
Finally, this sets a precedent and can and will devolve wasting time, development efforts and making things worse without creating any meaningful positive change.
The other trend going on right now is dropping `master` from use on git repositories, when in reality `master` in that context has nothing to do with race.
Where do we stop? Should we start going after universities for using the term master's degree?
Do we need to boycott the World Chess Championship since chess is inherently racist; after all White moves first!!!
I'm all from inclusivity, for making people feel welcomed, and for us to build a better society; I just don't agree this is how we do it.
My position about this issue is ambivalent.
From a purely human standpoint I understand it, truly.
When we use those terms referring to tools, I don't see much sense.
When men used bulls to pull the plough it really was a master-slave relationship
The bull could not be the master, even if it wanted too, a human is not strong enough to pull the plough effectively
It's a symbiotic relation between two elements where one is in charge of the "intellectual" part and the other of the physical one.
We can use controller and agent, but controlling is problematic too
We can use manager and worker, but it still implies that there's a disparity between the two
Frontend/backend doesn't fully capture what's going on
We use master/slave because one side is taking all the decisions, the other is just obeying
It's bad, I recognize it, and maybe it's time to change, but no amount of re-wording will change the fact that it's mainly used nowadays for tools that work that way, not for people.
Maybe leader/follower looks like a better choice, but really isn't, follower sounds more dumb to me, at least slaves rebelled throughout history, followers don't. And a leader can be as bad as a master who owns slaves.
Main/secondary is somewhat the best of them all, but it only works for systems were any secondary node can be promoted to replace the main in case of failures, which is not always the case.
Bull/man is not main/secondary for example.
Or master/blaster as in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
- Stop using the word "communism" because it may offend ex-USSR citizens
- Stop using the word "famine" because it may remind bad memories to some africans
- Stop using negative words to talk about the chinese government because it could offend chinese people
- Stop using the words "bible" and "jesus" because it might offend muslims
The world will sure become a better place without those negative feelings...
Sure, some terms are outright offensive, but this is not the case here.
There are some factual errors in the article too, but I’ll leave that. As a Slav I have no issue with the term “slave”, not least because it’s not the root of the word...