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

Programmers and entrepreneurs tend to believe implicitly in

the liberal ideal of the self-sufficient individual. In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals — the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. The American revolution itself was fought to protect the freedoms and property of individuals against oppressive laws and unjust taxes imposed by a foreign monarch. For both the New Left and the New Right, the early years of the American republic provide a potent model for their rival versions of individual freedom. 41

David Barrett’s knife-wielding, Lord-of-the-Flies programmer belongs to this mythology. Despite eating lunch in company-provided kitchens “full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs,” he is a rugged man of action. He may complain mightily about an eighty-thousand-dollar salary two years out of college, but he is a hunter and killer. A man who leads a magnificent posse of such hardened, hardcore individuals might justly say, “My coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week.”

This figuring of computing as agon, a geeky arena of competition in which code-warriors prove their mettle against all comers, demands a certain manly style from those who would win and be recognized as victors. Steve Jobs was famed not only for his success but also his aggressive rudeness; his erstwhile partner Woz describes him as a “real rugged bastard” who found it necessary to “put people down and make them feel demeaned.” 42The social ineptitude of the sandal-wearing, long-haired pioneers of the early days has been elevated to a virtue. Shouting at co-workers and employees, abrasive behavior, indifference to the feelings of others, all these constitute both a privilege earned by skill and a signifier of the programmer’s elite status. This is most true, paradoxically, in the open-source movement, within which volunteer programmers collaborate to produce programs (like Firefox and Linux) under licensing schemes that guarantee universal, free access. These volunteers must cooperate to produce viable programs; yet it is within open source that programmers most fiercely pledge allegiance to the legacy of the early neckbeards. And so Linus Torvalds, the “benevolent dictator” of Linux, dismissed the makers of a rival operating system as “a bunch of masturbating monkeys”; and so, Eric S. Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary and The Cathedral and the Bazaar , once told an interviewer proudly, “I’m an arrogant son of a bitch,” and refused a hapless Microsoft headhunter’s form-letter inquiry with an e-mail that ended, “On that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft’s grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.” 43

These postures and attitudes are common enough that some programmers have found it necessary to protest against them, as in a recent blog post by Derick Bailey titled “Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being a Jerk.” Bailey writes about “open source elite” programmers making fun of inexperienced would-be contributors to their very own projects. “I’ve seen people delete their accounts, disappear from the internet, and leave the open source community behind because of jerks that torment and belittle and tear apart the work that they are putting in,” Bailey writes. “The worst part of this is knowing that some of these ‘OSS Elite’ were the geeks and freaks and nerds in high school, that got picked on by the jocks and other popular kids … The victims are becoming the perpetrators.” 44

The financial systems which support the software industry bring their own models of masculinity into interactions with programmers. Alec Scott, a Canadian journalist who writes about the Valley, was told by a rising young entrepreneur that he was surprised how “brusque” the venture capitalists were in meetings. “At first, I was taken aback by how tough they can be, but I learned to roll with it. There’s not much time wasted when they shoot you down quickly at least.” Another start-up founder told Scott, “This is a guy’s guy world, and you’ve gotta be prepared to go mano a mano with them. You might go down in flames, and they honour that. You can’t apologize. You must be ready for the fight.” 45

Those who do not participate in this manly roughhousing are regarded as suffering from a fatal incapability which precludes them making good software. The rudeness of elite programmers — the explanation goes — is actually the necessarily blunt, no-bullshit style of problem-solving engineers who value results over feelings. And finally what matters is the quality of the code — which is an objectively definable value — and the nationality or ethnicity of the programmers is irrelevant. Culture is irrelevant. Or, perhaps, in code, culture is absent, nonexistent. So if there are no women in programming, it is because they don’t or can’t code, because they are not interested in the craft. The world of programming is as it should be, as it has to be.

One of the hallmarks of a cultural system that is predominant is that it succeeds, to some degree, in making itself invisible, or at least in presenting itself as the inevitable outcome of environmental processes that exist outside of the realm of culture, within nature. The absence of women within the industry is thus often seen as a hard “scientific” reality rooted in biology, never mind that the very first algorithm designed for execution by a machine was created by Lady Ada Byron, never mind Grace Hopper’s creation of the first compiler, and never mind that the culture of the industry may be foreign or actively hostile to women.

The tech industry prides itself on being populated by rational thinkers, by devotees of the highest ideals of freedom and equality. Human resources departments are rightfully leery of litigation, and try to protect the companies through training and education. Yet, over the last few years, the industry has been beset by controversies sparked by acts of casual sexism — images of bikini-clad women used as backdrops for presentations about software; a Boston start-up that announced a hack-a-thon and as “Great Perks” offered gym access, food trucks, and women: “Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) staff get it for you.” 46In the heated discussions that have followed, one of the main rhetorical modes used by defenders of the status quo has been that sexism doesn’t really exist in the tech industry because in this perfect meritocracy programmers who write excellent code will rise to the top. Programming is male because men are excellent programmers. As male doctors and lawyers and chefs were once thought to naturally possess certain essential qualities that fitted them for these once universally male professions, male programmers have logic and problem solving written into their DNA, they are naturals. A woman who codes is out of her realm; one might say that “to be masculine is her worst reproach.”

Of course, as Ensmenger shows us, the personalities and behavior that one encounters within the world of programming are embedded in a contingent culture constructed by a particular history. Ensmenger’s narrative denaturalizes the maleness and machismo of American programming, and as it tells a story that takes place mostly in America, at MIT and in the hallways of American corporations, it allows us to think of other ways it might have happened or will happen in the future.

The pre-Independence India my parents grew up in served as a vast source of raw materials and ready market for finished goods produced by the British Empire. “Before Gandhiji’s movement,” my mother told me many times when I was a child, “you couldn’t even find a sewing needle that had been made in India. Everything came from there.” The factories over there — in Glasgow and Manchester — turned iron ore into steel, cotton into cloth, and sold it all back to the Indians, whose poverty was understood as a pre-existent fact that the current regime was attempting to alleviate. The colonial educational system of course reflected this economic imperative in its structure and methods.