#iris meredith

Convicted Woman (1940) Nick Grinde

Well, it was bound to happen eventually, I guess. A little while back, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber approvingly tweeted a post by Jerry Chen about a person bursting into a Waffle House and shouting "oh, so you hate pancakes?". In the replies, someone asked her why she'd not yet banned notorious transphobe, fascist and serial instigator of harassment campaigns Jesse Singal from the platform, to which she replied with only "Waffles!". And since then, it seems that a large part of the Bluesky staff have descended into posters' madness, arbitrarily banning users that were critical of them even when they were highly prominent, treating their userbase with contempt and openly mocking people who were complaining about why fascists seem to keep getting a pass on blatant Terms of Service violations on Bluesky, and generally causing a massive wave of drama on the platform. This raises so many questions. Does Bluesky have a communications team (apparently not)? Why do so many of the Bluesky staff treat their (very queer, very trans, very liberal) userbase with open contempt? Why are they so attached to having bigots on their platform? And does this perhaps indicate that a fair part of the Bluesky staff have fascist sympathies (unclear, but we would do well to assume the worst)?

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And this raises the question: why the hell does this keep happening? Why does the tech industry consistently generate fascists and fascist sympathisers? And is there any way we can stop them from melting down like this? Yes, we have a fascism problem

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But let's face it, even with all that, it's a systemic issue. To take the most trivial objection, there are an awful lot of people in tech with fascist proclivities who clearly are highly technical. Eric Raymond, to give one example, is both a highly capable engineer and clearly has a strong attachment to hard-right politics, racism and homophobia. And more recently, David Heinemeier Hansson has both created Ruby on Rails (an accomplishment in tech if ever there was one) and an outright white nationalist. Further examples are trivial to find (James Damore comes to mind), and it seems clear that, at a minimum, being a fascist is no great barrier to being popular in the tech world. I've no hard data on whether fascist ideas are more common in publicly-facing tech figures than they are in other fields, but they certainly seem more open about it. Furthermore, while I don't believe that most of the tech industry or most "tech people" are outright fascists, reactionary centrism of the debate-bro flavour, or what noted race scientist Scott Siskind calls the "grey tribe", is distressingly common. A lot of people in tech think that, even if they don't agree with the ideas, there are no harms associated with the free discussion of race science, eugenics, and the benefits of dictatorship and fascism. The sense I get with this group is of a general sense of flippancy: people who act like this simply don't think that their speech can have any real consequences, and even if it does, it's certainly not going to happen to them.

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So, why? After all, it's not clear that there's much of a structural reason why the tech industry has almost entirely given itself over to fascism, given that a lot of us individual people working in tech are liberal, progressive or outright socialist? Surely this great mass of people should have much more of an impact than it does on how tech-the-social-construct behaves and how it's perceived? To understand this, we need to first understand what "tech" and "the tech industry" actually is, and that means understanding what coding is and how it relates to the work of technology as a whole. Writing code, in itself, is a literacy skill: the closest skill to writing software is, unsurprisingly, writing. When you write code, you're writing a series of symbols that are going to be interpreted by a machine developed by other people in such a way that it will make the machine behave in certain determined (though highly complex) ways. Coding, just as much as writing, is first and foremost an act of communication and the skills are, in all honesty, quite a lot more transferable than you might think.

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The real value in software, counter to what one might think, is in domain knowledge. Software is useful inasmuch as it has effects in the real world on real people: it lets you design a bridge, write a document or run a web server that lets all of you fine people read my words. This is basically a universal, even for things like cryptography: hell, even Mark Zuckerberg, for all that he's lauded as being a tech genius, was able to make Facebook successful not because of any coding skills, but because he was able to monetise being a massive fucking creep. It follows from this that being a "coding genius" in the abstract is not a thing that actually exists: even people specialising in things like high-performance embedded systems computing are leaning more on the domain knowledge of the systems they're working on and their idiosyncrasies than any particular level of "I can write arcane symbols that much better than anyone else". Coding, as such, therefore has almost no actual substance to it.

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The obvious conclusion is that "tech" and "the tech industry" are more cultural constructs than they are useful descriptors of what people actually know or do. I believe that this is largely a historical artifact: in the early days of computing, all computers were large, specialised machines in the way that high-performance compute clusters are these days. You couldn't just get a small team of developers together and try things out: you needed a fairly large, fairly specialised team. In that situation, it makes quite a lot of sense to create "computer engineering" or "software engineering" as a specialised group of people who focus on getting the machine to work. In that kind of workflow, also, computers tended to only be used for the most obviously computer-related stuff, mostly the storage and processing of large volumes of information for bureaucratic and administrative purposes: automated scholar-bureaucrats, essentially. Even as late as the 90s, the primary purpose of personal computers was to run spreadsheets and do word process, with Excel, WordPerfect and Lotus 123 being the killer apps that led to the widespread adoption of the PC. All of this was instrumental to creating a distinct "tech industry" construct with an associated culture and perceptions around it. The issue, of course, is that none of the conditions that created this construct exist any more. I can write a basic web application in a few days on my work laptop and deploy it basically immediately, and there is every chance that it'll actually do something useful. Even with the recent profusion of LLM slop making the learning process harder, it's really easy for anyone to learn to write a bit of code online and do something useful with it, in a process that started with HTML and has only accelerated since then. People don't need a large body of specialist skills just to keep the computer running and basically functional, and as a result we've seen an explosion in the number of people in the world who are doing cool things in code, many of them not a good fit for the traditional "tech" stereotype. This has resulted in a dispersal and deconsolidation of the cultural "tech" grouping.

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It's worth digressing briefly here to ask ourselves what kind of person has a real incentive to gatekeep "coding skills" or "technical identity". The first point to note is that obviously the people with an incentive to gatekeep are people who have been a part of the "technical" in-group for a while now: for historical reasons to do with patriarchy and a bunch of other shit (which is mostly patriarchy at one level of remove), these people are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately white and well-off. The classic 80s and 90s hacker stereotype who learned while computing was highly centralised and their descendants are a pretty good mental model for the kinds of people we're thinking about. However, people who've developed a niche and some domain knowledge, and who are consequently secure in that identity regardless of who else might take part in it, are unlikely to care much about gatekeeping: it's a waste of time and effort.

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By now, you've got a pretty clear picture of the gatekeepers in your head, don't you? White, male, mediocre, leaning younger but with some old and embittered people in the grouping, sheltered and having limited contact with the real world... these are the people working the hardest to delineate what tech is and what it isn't. And unfortunately, what they say kind of sticks, because to an outside observer, a proper understanding of the arcane runes is what writing software looks like.

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So yeah. That's why the Bluesky waffle discourse keeps happening. That's why notables in the tech space so often wind up coming out as explicitly fascist, and why so much of the field is either sympathetic to fascist ideas or insists on keeping them around in the interests of "diverse viewpoints" or some such shit. It's how a social network can be so caught up on open protocols and whatever that they don't register that their primary job is running a social network, meaning that they don't bother to do things like hire communications staff or invest in trust and safety. It's how the CEO of said social network can then start arbitrarily banning people and taunting her userbase because she's not willing to enforce the site rules when it comes to fascists and transphobes, and she doesn't like this being pointed out. It's how OpenAI keeps doing what it does despite the fact that Sam Altman is, by all accounts, credibly accused of sexually assaulting his sister. It needs to end.

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As you might have guessed from the heading here, fixing this starts with killing the concept that typing arcane runes into a machine is anything beyond a literacy skill. It's useful, it's helpful, but it's no good without knowledge and experience of actual substance behind it. We need to demonstrate loudly, clearly and publicly that tech is fundamentally not about this, and to centre domain knowledge front and centre in every way we teach software engineering skills.

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All in all, I think it's much healthier for us as engineers to identify ourselves first by the industry and field that we work in in a domain sense, and as "people-who-write-code-good" a distant second. When all's said and done, we aren't that different from other knowledge workers, and there's nothing that innate to us that makes us different: we simply have a slightly different skillset. Believing otherwise, however much we might like to think otherwise, lets fascism slip in through the gaps. And then, when what we've become eventually hits us, we start saying strange things about waffles.