Vikram Chandra - Geek Sublime - The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty

The gender politics of the Raj were of course much on my mind while I wrote my first novel in the late eighties and early nineties, as I traveled back and forth between India and America. The British “Cult of Manliness” had been an essential component of the creed of Empire, which — as above — conflated masculinity, violence, civic virtue, and morality. Even intelligence and intellectual capability were inextricably intertwined with masculinity; women and all others who exhibited symptoms of femininity were fuzzy headed, illogical, and easily overcome by emotion; they were incapable especially of scientific reasoning and therefore self-knowledge and progress. The state of the world — women without power, Englishmen ruling Indians — bore out the truth of these propositions.

By now, I’d read my Edward Said, and I prided myself on being aware of the ideological mechanisms that transformed local contingencies of history and culture into Nature itself. The attractions of Nick Carter, Killmaster, seemed altogether more sinister now that I had listened to many scholarly deconstructions of imperial American masculinity. But at the time, I didn’t question much the demographics of programming. The meetings of the special interest groups of HAL-PC devoted to programming were all-male; I think in all my years of consulting work I met one female programmer. This was just the way things were. The male programmers I met were often astonishingly generous with knowledge and technical advice, and yet, the very same men were also abrupt and outright rude. Indians are frequently taken aback by the American virtues of quick intimacy and bluntness, which come across as shockingly bad manners; I knew to discount for this, and understood that our own predilection for face-saving, izzat -preserving niceties made us maddeningly opaque and slippery to the average American. Still, these coders were deliberately obnoxious by anyone’s standards, especially online. They ad-hominemed, flamed, name-called, dismissed, despised. Not to put too fine a point on it: these guys were assholes. Preeminence among programmers was often decided by competitions of assholery, a kind of ritual jousting.

This unfortunate condition has only intensified over the decades. The “masculinization process” that Ensmenger describes has resulted in a contemporary American culture of programming that is overwhelmingly male, as one can see at conferences, on websites and blogs. The metaphors used within this world of one-man armies are very often martial. Teams working against impossible deadlines go on “death marches.” Finding and fixing defects in software is a pains-taking, detail-oriented task, one which Grace Hopper might have compared to housekeeping; but in the parlance of many programming shops, the most proficient bug sweepers are “bug slayers.”

In March 2011, David Barrett, CEO of Expensify (“Expense Reports That Don’t Suck”), blogged about how his start-up wouldn’t hire programmers who used Microsoft’s very large and elaborate.NET framework, which — according to him — provided ready-made, assembly-line tools that turned these programmers into drudges capable of only mass-producing pre-designed code, the programming equivalent of fast-food burgers. No, he wanted passionate programmers who could write “everything from assembly to jQuery, on PCs to mobile phones, [and code] hard core computer graphics to high level social networking.” 33Barrett wanted Einsteins, not Morts — fair enough. But this is how he described his Einsteins:

As you might know, we’re hiring the best programmers in the world. Sure, everyone says that. But my coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week. For example, Mich is barely 5 foot tall, but is a competitive fencer. Witold is a 6’3” former professional hockey player. Nate practices knife fighting for fun. 34

Over a few days, I read hundreds of comments and blog posts debating the merits of Barrett’s case against.NET programmers; some argued that many great programmers used.NET, and that other frameworks had as many bad or lazy programmers. The discussions were long and nuanced. But nobody seemed to notice his very literal conflation of omnivorous intellectual curiosity with manly combat skills. He extends his fast-food riff—“Programming with.NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything”—but then turns the metaphor into a paean to programmer-as-blood-soaked-pioneer:

The sort of person [we are looking for] grew up cooking squirrels over a campfire with sharpened sticks — squirrels they caught and skinned while scavenging in the deep forests for survival. We don’t want a short order chef, we want a Lord of the Flies, carried by wolves into civilization and raised in a French kitchen full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs. 35

“A Lord of the Flies in a French kitchen” neatly catches the geek machismo and extraordinary privilege that are essential ingredients in the cultural paradox that is Silicon Valley. Wages are so high here, Rebecca Solnit reports, that “you hear tech workers complaining about not having time to spend their money.” 36Depending on which San Francisco neighborhood you live in, your rent rose by anywhere from 10 percent to 135 percent over 2012, driven up by young techies outbidding each other. 37In the booming restaurants and cafés, there’s a general disdain for government, which is often described as fatally broken, in desperate need of “disruption,” that condition beloved of programmers and venture capitalists. Workers’ unions are regarded as anachronisms that hold back progress. Company founders chafe at any restrictions imposed by local or federal government as leftover mechanisms from a failed system which prevent the markets from working properly. 38

Given these attitudes, it’s easy to conclude that Silicon Valley is a haven for Libertarians. Doing so would be simplistic. President Obama won his second presidential election by 49 percentage points in the Bay Area, as compared to his 22-point lead in California as a whole. Employees at Google gave 97 percent of their campaign contributions to Obama, and Apple employees gave 91 percent. 39But these denizens of the tech campuses aren’t, as we’ve seen, leftists or progressives of the Berkeley-Oakland ilk either. Rather, this new “virtual class” of digital overlords combine the social and sexual attitudes of San Francisco bohemianism with a neoliberal passion for idealized free markets and unchecked profit-making, thus producing a caste orthodoxy for people who might be best described as “hippie capitalists.”

The media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have usefully described this new faith as “the Californian Ideology,” which “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.” 40This high-tech determinism dictates that through the new worldwide amalgamation of hardware and software, a frictionless “electronic agora” will come into being, allowing the profitable exchange of both goods and ideas. Individuals will be empowered, they will speak to each other across all sorts of borders and come to mutual understanding. The governments of the world — useless as they are — will fade into irrelevance because governance will be provided by the crowd-sourced wisdom of the masses, led of course by the fearless and very cool visionaries who make software and hardware, who found companies, who make billions. If you’ve “solved”—for instance — some problems in online social networking, surely you’ll be able to disrupt world hunger. Pioneering individuals will focus their skills, their genius, on one domain after another and so transform the world for the better.