This would be so much more interesting a line of thought if the work done at Silicon Valley weren't so infernal, if we weren't so far far far down the chain of converting Personal Computing into deeply anti-human/inflexible Service-as-a-Software-Substitute (SaaSS).
If we want to draw a religious connection (as the author does in their book Work Pray Code), then perhaps software is high church religious, with all Latin mass. The new practitioners get to be high clergy, and the mundane regular normie people get to show up & receive your sermon, without really knowing or understanding your ritual or ceremony or ever being able to interpret or think about the thing for themselves.
Yes we can take pride in doing hard work, in proving ourselves in harsh tests, in managing to make great works. But there feels like such an apparent & growing chasm here, that our pride is more isolated, more solitary, less to the general benefit & welfare, less interpretable & understandable by anyone else. Yes we throw ourselves into things & feel connection, but it feels disingenuous & cheap to me that we'd take great pride when so few others can evaluate & assess, can review & rank us. We can congratulate ourselves, but I don't see pride in how far apart we techies are from so much of humanity, how inscrutable & distant the technics are- I see that as a failing, as throwing into question whether the general project is at all on course, when only crude understanding is even possible. Most computing is deep in the data-center, well inside the firewall, and this armored, defended, admit-no-one version of Rome feels not holy & virtuous, but unspeakable & ghastly to me.
I do think this article is at least somewhat correct about the challenges to overthrowing how we see our work as how we see ourselves- we lack other good measures:
> We would have to build communities of belonging, together seeking meaning and purpose outside of our productive labor.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 15.7 ms ] threadIf we want to draw a religious connection (as the author does in their book Work Pray Code), then perhaps software is high church religious, with all Latin mass. The new practitioners get to be high clergy, and the mundane regular normie people get to show up & receive your sermon, without really knowing or understanding your ritual or ceremony or ever being able to interpret or think about the thing for themselves.
Yes we can take pride in doing hard work, in proving ourselves in harsh tests, in managing to make great works. But there feels like such an apparent & growing chasm here, that our pride is more isolated, more solitary, less to the general benefit & welfare, less interpretable & understandable by anyone else. Yes we throw ourselves into things & feel connection, but it feels disingenuous & cheap to me that we'd take great pride when so few others can evaluate & assess, can review & rank us. We can congratulate ourselves, but I don't see pride in how far apart we techies are from so much of humanity, how inscrutable & distant the technics are- I see that as a failing, as throwing into question whether the general project is at all on course, when only crude understanding is even possible. Most computing is deep in the data-center, well inside the firewall, and this armored, defended, admit-no-one version of Rome feels not holy & virtuous, but unspeakable & ghastly to me.
I do think this article is at least somewhat correct about the challenges to overthrowing how we see our work as how we see ourselves- we lack other good measures:
> We would have to build communities of belonging, together seeking meaning and purpose outside of our productive labor.