Programming

I always enjoy your writing.

I agree with the emerging schism between those two different kinds of developers, and about the Marxist analysis of the different forms of alienation. I’m thankful that you put in the time to identify this and put it into context.

About the premise of “don’t blame the LLMs; the real enemy is capital” though…

There’s a folk wisdom phrase (and maybe thought-terminating cliche) “just a tool” that has always bothered me.

Because as a species, our behavior has changed drastically over the past few thousand years. And it’s not because of genes. It’s because of tools. They shape who we are, and who we can be.

And increasingly, in the digital age, tool-makers are able to embed their philosophies deeply into the tools themselves. Sometimes it’s a top-down deliberate effort, but sometimes it’s a bottom-up battle of random mutations.

Like the gesture priority on the iPhone. They were all-in on touchscreen. So what’s it gonna be: user taps and flicks just a tiny amount… is that a selection event or a scroll event? They chose scrolling.

And thus the inflection point for getting people to keep a mini PC in their pocket at all times carried with it a tiny UX nudge, away from text editing and towards scrolling content.

You can still compose on a phone! But is it fair to say it’s “just a tool”, and you could easily choose to write instead of scroll, when the device itself is running an event handler every time you touch it, just waiting to steer you towards scrolling?

If I can’t convince you (couldn’t blame you), there is a large body of philosophical work on this topic: Heidegger, and Do Artifacts Have Politics? are two good threads.

“The essence of technology is by no means anything technological”