The culture war that we won
Daniel Lemire's blog
Culture wars are real. They occur when a dominant culture faces a serious challenge. But unless you pay close attention, you might miss them entirely. As a kid, I was a “nerd.” I read a lot and spent hours on my computer. I devoured science and technology magazines. I taught myself programming. “Great!” you might think. Not at all. This was not valued where and when I grew up. Computers were seen as toys. A kid who spent a lot of time on a computer was viewed as obsessed with a rather dull plaything. We had a computer club, but it was essentially a gathering of “social rejects.” No one looked up to us. Working with computers carried no prestige. Dungeons & Dragons was outright “dangerous”—you had to hide any interest in such games. The 1983 movie WarGames stands out precisely because the computer-obsessed kid gets the girl and saves the world. Bill Gates was becoming famous around that time, but this marked only the beginning of a decade-long culture war in which hacker culture gradually rose to dominance.
Today, most people can speak the language of hackers. It did not have to turn out this way, and it did not unfold identically everywhere. The status of hacker culture is high in the United States, but it remains lower in many other places even now. Even so, in many organizations today, even in the United States, the « computer people » are stored in the basement. We do not let them out too often. They are not « people persons ». So the culture war was won by the hackers, the victory is undeniable. But as with all wars, the result is more nuanced that one might think. Many would like nothing more than to send back the computer people at the bottom of the prestige ladder.
Salaries are a good indicator for prestige. In the USA, in Australia and in Switzerland, « computer people » have high salaries and relatively high status. In the UK as a whole? Not so much. I bet you do better as a « financial analyst » over there. What is worth watching is the effect that « AI » will have on the status battles. In some sense, building software that can do financial, political and legal analysis is the latest weapon in the arsenal of the computer people. Many despair about what AI might do to software developers: I recommend looking at it in the context of the hacker culture war.
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