Being a Dung Beetle Considered Harmful

I agree with Donna that we should be grateful we're not dung beetles. However, Buddhism tells us that if we don't act right, we will be reborn as, perhaps, a dung beetle. Part of right action is right livelihood, and the language of "be grateful you are not a dung beetle", whether or not accompanied by a Dr. Phil backrub administered without warning by a senior manager who has his equity in Swiss banks reconciles us not only to bad jobs but also to wrong livelihood.

Donna, by all appearances, is one of those wonderful, strong ladies whose great-grannies, along with barbed wire, civilized America and who today make their communities almost livable. She puts me in mind of a gal who as an executive headhuntress found me a great job as a developer in Idaho, and who followed up to make sure I was happy.

However, her thought-experiment can be dialectically turned on its head. Sure, you might be working in a pork processing plant digging on swine, or picking 'baccy.

But, you might also be working in Hollywood every day as an "extra" with special skills and access to a daily buffet. You might be the author of a successful children's book or the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft.

Or something.

Reciprocal in other words to the beautiful feeling of acceptance in which you thank your G-d that you live in beautiful North Carolina (and in my direct experience, it's a beautiful place) is the ugly feeling of "if only", which has led many people to places like Hollywood, which Heaven can of course be a Hell: the mind is its own place.

My own experience was that I worked as a developer for so long a period and in so many different regions of the USA is that I was able at last to discern some Structural elements of what it means to be a "software developer" in America, most of which I've identified at this site.

As a developer, your ideological job is to communicate the contingency of employment, and the message that any job can be in principle automated: that over and above communities and families, there are abstract legal persons called corporations with rights, which have an efficiency and rationality to which we can only aspire.

The mad woman Margaret Thatcher said, famously, "there is no such thing as society" to a British magazine (Woman's Own) in 1987. Her ravings are worth quoting in full:

"I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. 'I have a problem, I'll get a grant.' 'I'm homeless, the government must house me.' They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation."

What's interesting, here, is that she forgot to enumerate "the elephant in the living room", with the ability to destroy American and British families with an airy phrase such as "you're fired".

Lady Thatcher, are there any such things as corporations? And, where do they fit in your cozy picture?

A man or woman can indeed be dutifully meeting his or her obligations, going to work in a timely fashion each day in North Carolina or Yorkshire, only to hear one fine day that his company has an "entitlement" to destroy his ability to meet obligations, an "entitlement" empowered by his own work in which he's set up the global network that allows the job to be shipped to Shenzen or Bangalore.

The mad woman exhorts the little people to always balance their expectations with their fulfillment of obligations; yet they do so by helping corporations through automation, perhaps not to positively evade obligations, but to make the burden minimal at all times, and to externalize costs onto powerless customers and low-level end users at ATMs.

Furthermore, the mad woman had a son, Mark Thatcher, about whom the less said the better: his biography may be found in wikipedia. Suffice it to say that at no time did Lady Thatcher's son ever meet an obligation, and he consistently traded on his Mum's status as a complete bounder, who expected the world to give him what he wanted when he wanted because, as he snarled at an American waitress, a mere servitor in his eyes, "I'm Mark Thatcher".

[The waitress' reply was Her Finest Hour, for this Molly Pitcher said, "I don't give a fuck if you're Mark Twain, wait your turn", or something equally apposite.]

In fine, to actually believe Thatcher, that we should not demand what we need for ourselves and our families from some misplaced shame that somehow we've not fully met obligations (which are continually jiggered using electronic means) is foolish.

When something for nothing is found, as it often is (from the discovery that Fortran compilers could do a better job of object code generation than programmers, in 1954, to the discovery of the Web) the programmer within the corporation has the job, not really of helping to improve and to extract this Golconda, but to make sure by almost any means possible that it has a minimal effect on the comfort and pleasure of the corporation considered as a legal person.

The Web administrator within a corporation has to admit that part of his or her job is to conceal anything really informative about the corporation and its officers in a glitzy and polished package.

Thus (of course) Boeing's page on the Boeing Business Jet won't divulge that one of the biggest customers for the Boeing Business Jet is the US government. The BBJ is too expensive for most corporations, therefore Boeing is currently amortizing its costs by selling it to US intelligence agencies, which use it to render blindfolded and hidden suspects to Third World countries, and then ferry their hired thugs to R & R islands, because abusing people on expensive jets is hard work, I guess.

In a just society, the chief designer of the BBJ would be hopping mad that this is being done, and would set up his own Web page in protest. Need I say this isn't done. Need I say that you can omigosh lose your job if you do this. Need I say: alienation retains its root meaning, of theft of that which is mine or yours.

What Donna names is alienation, that sick feeling that we really don't control our work product much if at all: but for the same reason that a modular program is "better than" an integrated program, alienation produces the goods, whereas if we all lived in communes, we'd subsist on herring and potatoes.

Our lives, to the extent we are not financially independent, or able to live on less, or both, are dependent on the myth of the corporation: that combinations of people have rights in excess of people. We give those combinations our power because those combinations heretofore have produced the goods.

Despite Lady Thatcher's mythos, that there are thousands of people who demand entitlement without meeting obligations, the reality is that most people want to meaningfully participate in the work of the world. Britain's "Angry Young Men" (who created the mythos of the irresponsible yob in the British subconscious) were not demanding a dole, they demanded meaningful jobs which even in the hey-day of the Angry Young Men were being "rationalized" into a series of meaningless gestures.

In a New Left Review series on Work in the 1960s, a computer programmer in a British nuclear plant essentially described the crazymaking pressures of programming, here, on primitive, underpowered ICL mainframes on which the programmers had to exercise a considerable amount of creativity in shoe-horning requests into storage sizes measured in kilobytes...even as today most corporate jobs have some strangely necessary irrationality (such as the demand to use HTML, a non-Turing-complete language).

Of course, as programmers, we welcome this irrationality. It has a strange way of making our jobs fun. For the money Roosevelt was wasting in 1971 on leasing an IBM 1401, it could have upgraded to a 370/125 but its irrationality empowered me for a few years to show how even in 8K one could do meaningful computation.

Despite the adult choice and intellectual depth of the British programmers profiled in New Left Review, the managers treated the programmers like children, using only one criterion of success, their own narcissistic feeling, as middle managers, that things were under control, and the programmers were increasingly playing the bloody minded game of job-hopping and salary demands, acting childishly in response to the managers' own narcissism.

Programming brought out the worst in me because of the unique character of alienation in programming. I made my family uniquely miserable with my crazy work hours and the fact that on the job frustrations led me to purchase programmable calculators and personal computers, working desparately in the 1970s to "catch the wave" out of the mainframe world...only to fail to do so because in the 1970s, small businesses preferred to steal and not pay for software.

[I think Gates was right in 1976 when he called a spade a spade, saying that Paul Allen and he hadn't been properly compensated for their work on Altair Basic, and thieves masquerading as liberators were responsible for this.]

We're forced, at Weinberg's seminars, to focus on individual psychology. But the problems of programming won't be solved until seen in the context of social psychology, and the dissolving of fixed myths which constitute, in a programming group, the limits of thought (for example, "the needs of the user" stand like Cerebrus, many-headed dog, at the gates of thought in programmer hell, making it impossible for him to actually help real users).

In ancient empires, the only fully human man was the Emperor. We seem to be regressing to this point whereas in the 1970s there was a possibility that ordinary people could exercise real control over their lives, at least in developed countries.

But my experience in programming was that in the late 1970s, the myth of the arrogant, out of control programmer imposing his vision was born and used as a tool of control.

Don't get me wrong. There were arrogant, out of control programmers, like me for example. But a story that focuses on their arrogance conveniently ignores whether they were right, or emplaced-in-society in such a way that their arrogance was useful.

People like Mark Thatcher and Donald Trump were the real story in the 1970s, because some of them saw in computers a way to empower and aggrandize themselves, which they proceeded to do.