The Long, Slow, Rotten March of Progress
Web Publication: The Outline, by Sam Kriss
This is the first article I’ve seen that starts to forcefully ask the important existential question about the locus of tech, coding. Of course coding is a useful thing. It pays a lot of bills and it creates efficiencies and connections that make a real difference in the world, but where is this all going?
Implied in the article is a dichotomy of coding labors. Some people have the opportunity to code very useful things. However, masses of worker ants being conscripted for the brave new coding world are being led onto a plantation, the digital cotton fields of the future. Perhaps that is a good explanation for the author’s curious digression into the cultural scape of New Orleans, the site of the conference that inspired his piece.
I’ve many times felt irked or perplexed about why we ‘need’ the ‘Internet of Things’. It seems like a significant waste of resources for progressively more insignificant whims that ultimately supplants our core mental functions of vigilance, mindfulness, and eventually, cognition.
If we were to dedicate ourselves as a species to ultimately become a meat appendage hanging off of the great digital singularity to come, we would just keep going the direction we’re going now. Ultimately we will become buried in a heap of meaningless machines, gadgets, and apps supported by all this code. Those machines will literally grow into our bodies and brains like molds sending filaments into an organism. This is not poetic license; it’s now in full R&D mode. Literally. I for one, plan to be part of the human resistance.
More immediately, the prospect of sending masses of displaced rural laborers to code school as their job – hope and salvation is dubious on many levels. It‘s incredibly boring and frustrating work for all but certain personality types. Coding is language, only it does not convey speech, but rather logic. Our brains are wired to learn languages in our toddler phase and becomes progressively harder into adulthood. Foisting this on former factory workers may be fortunate for a few but for many others, its problematic at best or just cruel hope.
What does an individual or family really need? They need food, clothing, shelter, community, and inner emotional wellbeing. Large swaths of America are surrounded by the raw components that would form these necessities. They cannot eat, wear, sleep in or feel close to code. Somehow, we have to remove the stigma that has only recently become attached the manual life. Call it the Mike Rowe effect. The mystique we assign to coding as an enlightened vocation is misplaced. We need to rediscover the human element in work. We as capitalists, for example, could actually choose to grow better food rather than figure out the utility of a talking toaster or making a bug implanted in our brain tell us the best joke at a party (that’s coming too). We must choose while we still have choice.