Elegy to programmer culture and other trash heap thoughts

hello world, is there anyone out there?

My lame party trick is that I type very fast. I probably got good at it because I spent so many formative years on the computer either programming or chatting, and often found that I could type much faster than I could speak or even think unaided.

Usually, when I type notes, I want as much as possible to be types verbatim: I try to accurately capture what is said, by whom, and separate it from what I thought, how other people responded to what was said, how that was interpreted later on and so on.

I don’t know why I have a need to do this, or why it feels so wrong to be imprecise and disloyal to the reality of the moment, regardless of whether they are client meeting notes or emails or replays of something funny someone said or transcriptions of conversations that I have with friends. I feel disappointed when I read old notes and can’t get a real sense of what had actually happened or what it was like at that time because it had all been rolled over with a falsely uniform point of view, or scattered by a lack of care and specificity.

This longing for a source of truth is a sort of abstract dragon that I chase. When I used to program, I was too much of a purist. I didn’t really like frameworks that abstracted away the way something really worked, even if it made building easier. I wanted my work to be transparent, its most fundamental mechanics made evident by its structure.

We had a course where we were supposed to build a high-level Perl to Python translator. You could easily (and were expected to) hack it by pumping a hundred or so brainless lines that matched word patterns with regex, but it made me angry to do this.

Instead I stayed up all night in front of my offensively neon-purple themed text editor to figure out how to build an abstract syntax tree with a module from the 90s so that I could build a parser and a system of grammar. It required building a new dev pipeline and unearthing ancient git repositories, carrying risks that it might not execute properly and a whole host of niche bugs to solve on the way, but I was happy, because when I ran it I could imagine the neat and seamless flow of information cascading down from its holy source.

The way I track my goals now looks a lot like how I used to theme my editors, which looks a lot like the computer games I used to play in the 2000s. It really works!!

I could imagine possibilities for the program branching effortlessly from the solid core that I had built. Every query that I put through this program would travel through the boundaries created by every careful thought and micro-decision I had put into it, like a light shining through an intricate underground labyrinth. Putting in the extra effort meant my program could understand so many other things with very little further effort, and that made it, in some sense, alive. Yes…… I really felt like my program had feelings. I handed it in and my tutor wrote, “Weird but technically correct.”

You should probably realise what a compliment “Weird but technically correct” was. Unlike the pragmatic, commercial tech world, the formal study of computer science was full of bizarre, whimsical jank that made it endearing; “weird but technically correct” was kind of the heart of it. Highly rigorous textbooks were interspersed with garbled, nonsensical philosophical metaphors, like “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny as a metaphor for the history of the operating system”. The best, most clear-minded professors were completely insane.

This is of course a pretty stupid approach to programming as a paid profession. Elegance is looked down upon as oppositional to efficiency. It’s not good for web development, or debugging, or doing boring important little maintenance tasks. Ironically, at that time I was seriously considering specialising in computational linguistics — before AI was a thing — which I mentally rejected because I figured it would never have real world, commercial application lol (I probably would still hate it honestly (and maybe be bad at it), because work in AI seems mostly based on statistical rather than semantic models that I’m more interested in).

My interest was very innocent: I was just very impressed by how things like Wolfram Alpha or Google Translate worked, and I wanted to know very badly how meaning was constructed, which I figured must be the same way that electrons somehow become bits, and bits somehow become part of memory, and memory somehow propels process, and many processes become a program, and so on. How do ts which are so meaningless in separation become legible?

Part of it, though, was also sort of arrogance. A very obscure sort of arrogance. I loved my programs so much that I didn’t want to use anything that someone else had built unless I understood it and liked it just as much as my own. It’s probably the most ‘masculine’ delusion that I’ve had, and sometimes still do: that great things can emerge from my sole, isolated genius — the ‘Great Man’ theory of invention — rather than a recognition that my success is also a matter of luck and exploit of all the work done before and around me by those willing to surrender the need to be credited.

It’s very ironic, to have obsessed so much about how small, isolated units become something greater than the sum of its parts, while also having delusions about my personal genius. I think somehow this push and pull goes both ways: the more connected to the world I become, the less ambitious I feel, and the less I feel a need stake my claim in some parcel of land in order to assert the false permanence of my existence.

Perhaps that sounds like maturity, but I frankly am ambivalent about that.

I don’t often articulate this feeling, because I don’t know many other people who possess such sentimental feelings about machines, at least not in so many words. I think it was much more prevalent during Web 1.0 (the internet era which probably ended when ‘content creation’ became a concept), where it was only really nerds who cared about software, and the internet was only really nerds talking to other nerds on forums. Being a nerd then actually meant something — you didn’t really make money being a nerd, and you weren’t on the path to it either, so being a nerd came with an actual cost, it meant that you were obsessive and isolated and practically useless, and you hardly got anything in return for it except the joy of hanging out on forums hacking away at obscure, un-monetisable bits and bobs that would make other online losers happy, a bizarre sort of escapism and unarticulated seeking of community.

Me, I had slid into this naturally because I spent my childhood making websites and graphics and moderating forums, my formative mind contained and ricocheting squarely within the perimeter of bars ‘URL-’, ‘scroll-’ and ‘task-’, the light of my consciousness shining upon the pinprick apex of a tiny LCD cursor arrow, and so I was genuinely surprised when the ‘cool kids’ started joining software classes because it… made money? Was now the stable, secure option? Was kind of, cool?

It’s not like being a nerd was virtuous or anything, or that being a loser was actually great. It’s just that building things online back then wasn’t about sharing things so that you could then monetise it, it was about sharing things full-stop. You shared because you were a loser-nerd making friends in your loser-nerd way, not because you were a loser-nerd hoping to make millions and finally prove to Veronica that she really fucked up by laughing with all her girl friends about your pizza face in year nine. Well I don’t know, maybe you were both. Or you turned into that guy because you realised you could make millions. So at that time I felt alienated from the burgeoning culture wars surrounding tech culture, which back then felt like programmer culture, not tech (tech describes the commercial product/function, not the subcultural identity) culture, which conflated being awkward and nerdy with being misogynistic and creepy. It was so irritating to be badgered by women who weren’t software engineers ‘what it was like to be a woman in software engineering’, and never about the work that you did. The answer was always the same: ‘I don’t know. I’ve only been a woman in software engineering.’ What’s it like to exist? What a question.

I guess this starts veering into territory that plausibly feels like it’s political — in the hollowed out sense of the word — but that’s not even my point. My point is that it felt good to care mostly about what I was doing than who I was, and that sort of blissful lack of self-awareness I think also underpinned the infamous social awkwardness of programmer culture. It was sad to see how outsiders imagined that all the men were malicious creeps, or that all women programmers were helplessly victimised by their pizza-faced peers, and not that there wasn’t, say, something that we all actually also happened to love and enjoy and have in common through it. Not to say that it didn’t have its cultural problems, or wasn’t particularly hard for women (it was), but just that it also was like many other subcultures (of which many… are also usually particularly hard for women anyway): an attractor for a certain type of misfit which amplified the strengths and weaknesses of that archetypal misfit.

I feel alone in harbouring this goofy nostalgia for programmer culture, and that love of building something well for the sake of it, which probably means it is on its way to extinction.

The websites I made are all gone now, I can’t even find them on Wayback Machine. ‘MaraFrenzy’ turns up no results and Google suggests that maybe I was looking for ‘MAD FRENZY’, a hypewear brand which offers free shipping over $200. 'MatMice', a webpage builder for children, created by three Australian sisters 10-16 years old closed in 2008 and is thankfully memorialised on Wikipedia, one of the corners of the internet that still feels like Web 1.0 (even if it commercially- and politically-speaking isn’t). Photobucket, the piece of shit photo server where you used to have to upload your images one-by-one to make them hostable on the web is being sued because they changed their privacy policy to be allowed to sell user's photos to companies training AI models. It was also acquired by Fox in 2007, which seems to be about when profit incentives started to proliferate and transform the internet into Web 2.0.

Amazingly, I did find people who remember this, and the way they write is weirdly detailed and specific like the way I write:

There are weirdo freaks out there who port MS-DOS terminals into browser-friendly Javascript just for the vibes:

But other than these breadcrumbs of nostalgia, all the Web 1.0 nerds have gone underground and emerged something changed, some of them having picked up arms and become part of the corporate machine, some of them becoming psychedelic rabbit-holing hippies, and others just became even more underground losers. Or I don’t know, probably also a bunch of hard right wingers.

There is of course an air of dishonest nostalgia about all of this love of Web 1.0: the internet was heavily motivated and progressed by military motivations, and it was as equally a free-creator utopia as much as it was an unhinged shithole. I remember like it was yesterday the Day of Horror when the beloved Spongebob Squarepants screensaver I download gave my computer a porno virus. Many programmer men worked hard on improving loading speeds on the internet probably for porn-related reasons. Remembering that this stuff was crawling around my brain also has me thinking though… Maybe the TikTok kids are gonna be fine?

This whole writeup has been a total clusterfuck I can’t be bothered to edit, so I’ll end on something cute.

I took a look at my goofy old Perl translator and honestly I still love it, I still remember how happy I was when it worked, and I love that I can still recognise the decisions and structure I had put into it. It… reminds me a lot of poetry?

I don’t really know what to do with this part of personality or where it’s gone; I feel like there’s no longer a place for the type of programming I loved, so its largely gone into my writing. But also in a weird way my early writing had also gone into my early programming. I can’t remember which came first, and I don’t know if I am scientific or artistic, or if I’m fundamentally a feeling or a thinking creature, because I seem to have so many feelings about thoughts and so many thoughts about feelings, and upon those feelings and thoughts more feelings and thoughts furthermore, but it’s OK. I might just be a creature that is curious, I suppose that’s what they call that a human being. I let the recursion of my imagination run. All possibilities are OK.