Why I’m a hard ass with programmers

You may not want the parasocial, but the parasocial wants you.

Earlier today, an Indian friend sent me a 1½ hour talk by Casey Muratori entitled The Thirty Million Line Problem. The title is a sensationalist reference to the Linux kernel, and it’s a great jumping-off point for me to tell you about the rot in programmer culture. Maybe, by the end of this explainer, you’ll see why I’m hard on people who engage into this kind of fantasia.

I don’t know why this kind of shit is so popular, other than the usual diagnosis of the deaf leading the blind, but this kind of content-free content has taken over the mainstream Web pretty much without opposition. It’s done this because it leans into the parasocial, which we have seen in many places already outside of tech. While that may be a tolerable thing when the goods are delivered, Muratori is coming up quite short.

I don’t have an hour and a half to waste on this, but I did have a few minutes to look over the automatic chapters generated by YouTube and surmise enough qualitative issues with this post to get my point across. This is fair since even screencaps and thumbnails have wealths of information in them due to the production being a carbon copy of an IRL tech conference.

‘Key moments’ and their timestamps.

Full screencaps of the aforementioned ‘key moments’.

Muratori’s thesis is that operating systems can be vastly simplified because SoCs are common enough and provide the utilities once requiring an operating system to perform anyway. This was the ingenuity of Sun in the 1980s, now recycled into a boring TEDx talk by someone thirty years later who passes it off as their own idea.

Muratori is far from alone in his predilection of picking on perceived cracks in the megaliths holding up computing as we know it today. Former Googler Justine Tunney has gone all-in on their Actually Portable Executable binary format with its associated libc, and in much the same way is suffering from the classic tech phenomenon of being a solution looking for a problem. Absence some breakthrough with graphics, what friction with CLIs is this solving anyway? None, but you won’t hear that on any spaces hosted or administered by them, and that’s the problem I actually have with all of this.

The Web has been poisoned with the cancer of parasociality, and programmers are not immune to it. For shame, they had more latitude to see this coming than anyone else. I guess the real flaw is that most people just don’t give a fuck. In any case, to whatever extent this criticism of mine would gain traction, it will be uncharitably leapt upon by partisans of Muratori, or partisans of Tunney, who will try to rip it apart instead of taking it for what it is and understanding the problem I identified. Everyone who doesn’t really care will respond to the inappropriate insanity with silence because they don’t want to be attacked themselves for appearing to support the other side. This happens because parasociality is occult, and people who reorient their lives around parasocial relationships have usually given up on real relationships entirely. Any threat to their belief about their parasocial darling is an existential threat to their whole reason for being. It’s as intense as it is disgusting.

To their credit, parasocial losers have gotten better over the years at ignoring the righteous folks who happen to make them mad. They all share blocklists of wrongthinking fellow e-celebs and try their hardest to pretend they’re the discredited losers, and they take glee in pummelling down the prospective rises of people like me who hoped to make a name for myself through at least offering a new perspective and ideally by offering answers everyone else overlooked. Unlucky for me that those answers were overlooked for a reason.

This leaves one small problem for the rest of you, the undifferentiated masses of the world who are probably normal and trying to make sense of things: you’re being kept in the dark and fed shit by mentally ill professionals who have yet to fall off the wire. More and more the cacophony grows, louder and louder the discontent becomes. You know the state of computing is bullshit. I know it’s bullshit. But who can you listen to? You don’t know what you don’t know, and algorithmic social media must love the parasocial because all it can seem to give you is shit like this:

I’m going to copy-paste the first text I sent to said Indian friend when I found this thumbnail.

I held out reservation [on Muratori] due to your judgement but my god
they’re leaning into their stink as branding. people know that this is bullshit and they want to pre-emptively spin it in their favour

here’s my message to every asshole like this in tech: EVERYONE WANTS TO SEE TECH THAT IS GOOD
YOU ARE NOT SOME SPECIAL GENIUS FOR NOTICING THAT OR WANTING THAT

Tech is filled with fraud. Everyone knows this by now. So what do the jabronies do? They take a page from Sheryl Sandberg apparently and lean in. Enter The No-Frauds Club, interviewing for 2½ gruelling hours the famous non-fraud, Casey Muratori.

To be clear, I don’t think Muratori is a fraud. I think he is a jabronie, a try-hard, and there is a big difference. I just want to highlight for you how thick the dissonance is at this point, and then underscore the video upload time was three years ago. This is very permanent stuff.

That by itself wouldn’t be an issue, but because the entire Web is being increasingly spoken for as it devolves into ten thousand shithole echo chambers led by various fanatics, it becomes clear that the only way to get mindshare is to go directly to the people who own it. Good luck doing that, though, because accessing them has been made hell through their cult building habit, and even if you do manage to get their attention, they’re not going to let you contravene the pecking order and take credit for your own originality.

Everyone has to listen to these voices—whoever gets the most views or has the most social media followers—and they are helpless when those voices come up short. Everyone is forced to pretend that this is all the world has to offer, as if we were still living in the 20th century and the Web did not exist. If Harvard couldn’t do it, no one can. We know that’s not true, so what the fuck are we doing?

I’ll tell you what we’re not doing: exerting humility and putting the work above people’s egoes. We have a social situation here showing considerable resilience where ego is coming clear ahead of the work at hand that we all ostensibly tune in for, and it’s hurting humanity. As sure as I’m sitting here writing this and telling you I’m not the only one, it’s true. The Web literally destroyed all of the practical barriers to instant collective collaboration, and upper-class folks who grew accustomed to the privileges the old systems afforded them have found a collective interest in re-erecting those very same walls to keep out whoever they deem as undesirables or annoyances. In the old days they held court, and now they give us The Algorithm™ which basically just rigs recommendations so they can never be ignored. In the old days us outsiders would be called street rats, but now we’re smeared as trolls, which is sad considering that’s not even what the word meant until around 2014.

I’m working on other stuff now because I’m not interested in learning how to bow before the emperor. This stupidity is not a burden that the rest of society can bear, so instead of submitting I’m going to light a torch and find an army. In the long run, everything usually balances out, so I’ll be part of God’s hand in that. This is the best I can do.