Donna's Shock and Awe: The Politics of Mere Code

I am sorry if I ever offend. I use "sexist" language because men are disempowered: because their natural aggression threatens unfair social and on the job arrangements, it is discouraged and this makes them into failed women on the job, who bring nothing, as men, more to the table than women.

But I don't blame hardworking wimmen. Cf. Susan Faludi, STIFFED, a book that places the blame for the destruction of men where it belongs: on the powerful men who tell the little man to follow him to the land of Balls where he will surely get his Balls back, especially if he minds the Lieutenant Colonel with PMS to show that a man can "take it".

We have to compromise and make nice with and listen to that which doesn't compromise, that doesn't make nice, and doesn't listen, and that is the "administered" world.

Considered as a legal person with a *telos*, the corporation acts in bad faith consistently, because it is torn between making use value (things that are useful) and exchange value (money).

The programmer wants to make use value in the form of "good code" but is placed into competition with people who know that if they produce hard to maintain code, this is a shorter path to exchange value.

As a result, successful programming artifacts are only produced when management backs off from its demand for immediate exchange value and creates (whether in the form of a government agency or something like Bell Labs) an exception to the Market, in which people aren't judged by exchange value.

But then Bell Labs or Bell-Northern Research becomes like a government agency whose mission is helping people rather than killing them or putting them in jail.

People, who are naturally brutalized at some convenient level by their relationship to the means of production, are naturally, if irrationally, willing to support obscene levels of incarceration (1 in 32 Americans are currently imprisoned, most for victimless lifestyle crimes such as drug possession) and obscene levels of international mayhem (13000 Iraqis dead last year of "sectarian" violence that was the direct result of Paul Bremer's deliberate destruction of the Iraqi military, police and government in May 2005) because this means that someone else is getting nailed.

Whereas a human services agency might "waste" money by letting big ol' welfare mammies buy Chivas Regal on Saturday night, and this is a bad thing, specially if Ah gotta drink Old Helmsman because mah wife done took the kidz.

Basically, if all you care about is exchange value, then buggy software that helps the rich and fools the poor is all you need.

Of course, buggy software exists in Communist societies because pure markets would exclude buggy software, whereas in Communist societies you were forced to lie to survive, just as in the socialisms of large corporations, you have to lie as well.

But pure markets exist only in a peaceable kingdom whose sovereign has created the preconditions. For example, the Caliphate of the Turks created nearly-pure markets throughout Asia when in Europe they could not get established because of the squabbles of would-be ruling families (Bush's shithead ancestors among them).

Venezualan Yuppies happen to flourish, doing the Yuppie thing, under *monstrum horrendum* Chavez because a care for the poor can in fact coexist with pure markets contained within a clear and transparent regulatory framework.

But in American programming, the American programmer is consistently taught his isolation as the coder versus the machine, and is given a job sourly and with poor grace in most cases. He's told, no matter how much education he has, that the company is unwilling to stand for much nonsense.

If he has an associate degree, he's told that he's lucky to even get an interview given that he's such a dumbass. If he has a PhD he is correspondingly told that he's to forget all that useless academic nonsense in a sort of Zen in which the management-master will teach him the "realities" of business.

If he has a Master's degree he is expected to perform Yi, San, Er Kow-Tow to academic work performed elsewhere because he hasn't been prepared for original work.

This alone, this minefield of crazymaking expectations, creates bugs and bad software.

Conservatives cannot code, because they wish to use the product of society for private ends.

The earliest computers were Socialist artifacts. The calculated the payroll fairly so the yard boss couldn't cheat the men. They figured out how much the State will give old Ella Mae after she worked fifty years down at the insurance office.

Liberals, such as my father's colleague Norbert Weiner, wanted to use computers to design a fair society.

In Britain of the 1950s, Clement Atlee actualy called for a society that would "protect the weak and foolish" from the consequences of their own actions, and British computer men of that era naturally hoped to use computers, not to get rich, but to assist the Labour party in this goal...by tracking welfare payments and making sure that entire families didn't fall through the cracks, as they had in the 1930s (cf. Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes).

We've been taught to laugh at this language and to strike macho poses in which we say we "take responsibility" for our actions, especially when we have money in the bank from a job we hate.

[News fa lash: when you have no money you have no money: cf. George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris in London and The Road to Wigan Pier: cf. my own note in Build Your Own wherein I wrote a module in VB-6 because my Vaio was in the pawnshop.]

But I remark that the two gains won with such enormous difficulty in the UK and USA, National Health in the former, and Social Security in the latter, are the "third rails" of British and American politics, respectively. Politicans dare not touch them!

A British colleague with a very serious disease wasn't immediately bankrupted by surgery: yet in America, it's become very common for this to happen to people, or, they go without treatment and then they die. Even Margaret Thatcher couldn't touch this "third rail".

In America, damned few conservatives willingly fail to collect Social Security when they are old. For the poor, it's all they have. For the rich, it's a basis for their private planning.

Neither National Health nor Social Security would exist without software. Social Security's initial data systems were designed by IBM in the 1930s using tabulating equipment, and the work flow planning and board wiring (by means of which calculating machines were wired to calculate payins and payouts under the law) constituted software: when the earliest real computers came out, Social Security was an early adopter.

Likewise National Health was automated at state of the art, from the start.

Both systems happen to have worked very well, because they were programmed by liberals, socialists, and Communist party members who were delighted to use their skills for ends other than killing people or putting them in jail.

The real Enigma, Alan Turing, perhaps hoped to show that you didn't have to be a Man to be logical, for the Turing Machine has no gender.

US and UK government data systems started to develop pathologies in the 1980s, because in the 1980s, Thatcher and Reagan, not able to directly touch third rail systems (which by this time included basic welfare systems such as Nixon's food stamps) appointed instead Senior Executive Service men with the real mission of destroying National Health and Social Security.

This is because the rich of neither society had never, as they had in Scandinavia, reconciled themselves to the idea that poor people had dignity or that surfers should be fed.

Thus, in the 1980s, a strange and curiously untethered-to-anything-verifiable-or-real language of "high technology" took on life in projects to "reinvent" nondefense and noncriminal administration.

Like Donald Rumsfeld's "plan" for invading Iraq (which simply jettisoned the need for an invasion of the Northern regions, a mistake any wargaming geek could see), the language unmoored itself from any actual basis in the underlying science and technology.

The base was delegated to people who were occasionally recruited to use Power Point to tell the suits what they wanted to hear, and only that.

Real, substantive objections, from "you should provide the welfare claimant with a form in her own language, if you want valid entries" to "the voter needs a paper ballot" to "null values will exist in the data base because the patient may be too drunk to respond", all the way up to the (Colin) Powell doctrine, were characterized as "old" without argument, while fantasy, such as "Peoplesoft will support us because their marketeers say they will" and "the Iraquis will love our butt" became cutting edge texts, issued by men who, because they graduated from Princeton and/or acted on the way to power like gangstas, were given a free pass to run their stupid mouths about "progress" and "high technology"...a free pass that was denied to actual operating people, from programmers to Marine officers.

It's unremarked, and Dilbert sanctifies it: we sit in "staff" meetings and we Listen to stuff that is the most arrant nonsense, and we don't speak up, and we return to our little seats, and we then start doing something that directly contradicts the vision, such as rewriting the code of a hated coworker because he annoys you. And we have bugs, gee I wonder why.

The free pass to run the goddamn mouth was denied to National Health physicians or Social Security "bureaucrats" (where a "bureaucrat" is often code for "does a dirty job which we, the goddamn suits, can't do because we don't know jack"). They were coded and assumed to be as money-mad and as crazed by exchange value as the suits had become, even as the manager transfers his own sloth and greed onto his programmers.

The "fourth generation" software systems created by this sordid process have been a disaster, from "child support" systems in Illinois that don't pay single mothers to reporting systems inside the Green zone that to this day tell the "Coalition" that most of the Iraqis still love Americans and Estonians and Poms, or at least the decent, god-fearing, Protestant Iraqis...all two of them.

Conservatives can't code.