The Code of Life

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/the-code-of-life.html

by sblawrie • 13 years ago

34 4 13 years ago

There's a lot to love about this article. She finds a common thread between reading/writing literacy and code literacy, which I think exists and is rarely discussed. She also suggests that for all the doom and gloom about tech corporatism, there are many fascinating counter-examples to the common Googlization / Facebookization of everything theme in the media.

It's interesting that the author chose Github and Automattic as exemplars of "next-gen" startups.

She fails to mention that both also happen to be fully distributed remote teams (as I wrote about in http://bit.ly/distributed-teams).

When she describes Automattic's vision as a "a city of interconnected developers and designers with varying skill sets" and Github as "a flat organization model that aims to eliminate middle managers by trusting that every employee can be a manager", she is not referring to the companies' missions as much as to their organizational structure, which happens to be fully distributed and high-trust.

She gets the business side of these companies wrong: she calls Github an "open source repository" when it's really better described as a "hosted code collaboration service"; and, she says Automattic doesn't "serve the profit motives of a few" when in reality it's a VC-funded profitable business, which pretty much by definition, serves the profit motives of the few.

I am not sure if there is a common thread between distributed teams and the nature of code as an artform/medium.

Perhaps it's that programmers, through the open source / Free software movement, pioneered many of the approaches to collaborating through the web that have now been applied to other domains, including non-profits (Wikipedia) and for-profit businesses (Github, Automattic, even my company, Parse.ly). Since code is the artifact that programmers care most about, perhaps the way programmers collaborate around code gives an indication of how other creators will collaborate around their medium in the future, once tech enables that collaboration. I think this is what the long-term bet behind Github is all about.

zethraeus• 13 years ago

I'd never given much thought to how corporate the tech world must seem to the uninitiated. I really like the author's observation that this misunderstanding could be behind a lot of anti-tech sentiment.

It makes sense that without any insight into how code works or what it makes possible it could be hard to differentiate popular tech from (in the author's words) its embedded corporate agendas.

Tycho• 13 years ago

Millenniums ago, Socrates warned his students against the rapid spread of a technology that would lay waste to their memories and their instinct for the truth: the written word. In some ways he was right. We’ve lost the memory skills that oral storytelling cultivates, and we’re often manipulated and distracted by seductive writing.

But how many of us would give up the profound gains — scientific, economic, social and artistic — yielded by the collective knowledge, dispersed across the planet and the ages, that writing made possible?

I see this sort of mistake/fallacy a lot. Someone is worried about something they cherish (in this case, oral history), they identify a threat to this cherished thing, and then decry that we should all fight against this threat. Ignoring the possible gains, as highlighted by the Socrates example above. I think there's two factors which contribute to this mistake:

a) the person delivering the warning appeals to 'the greater good' without having to be too rigorous about what that is

b) the upside is hard to imagine. It's easy to see the risk, ie. the things we have which we stand to lose, but hard to see all which we might gain.

Recent examples include resistance to Bitcoin/cryptocurrency on the grounds that we need to be able to manipulate the money supply to sustain our modern economies, or the worry over Apple's 'walled-garden' iDevices.

bsirkia• 13 years ago

Great response to Franzen and Eggers article/novel, she articulated a lot of the feelings I had about their works.

In general, you can pick any innovation in history and find naysayers at the time:

“The automobile as a death dealing instrument was unanimously decided upon as the greatest present day menace to public safety.” Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1920.

There were critics of the radio, telephones, television, the Internet, and there will continue to be critics of every new innovation. By learning about it and embracing it, Ms. Waters takes the right approach to coding and technology.

The Code of Life

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