learn to code with captain ned
I actually think that a lot of these technologies, a lot of these systems, that we see as immensely complex, so complex as to ward away anybody from thinking that they can understand how a machine-learning system works or how a . . . deterministic algorithm does its thing, or whatever it might be: I think a lot of that is complex by design, right? It’s not inherently complex in the sense of, like, people can’t grasp it. ‘Complexity,’ there, is a lot of warding people away from it — it’s forbidden knowledge, right, or it’s secret knowledge that you can’t get to unless you’re part of the priesthood or whatever it might be, or unless you have passed the right test and entered the right guilds, or whatever . . .
Unless you’ve ‘learned to code’ and . . .
Unless you’ve learned to code!
And I think the kind of old idea of a guild is actually a lot more appropriate, because part of the guild was as a way to create social protections around specific skills and forms of knowledge. So that you can then, you know, for whatever reason, for good reasons but also for bad reasons, have control over who has access to those skills, who has access to that knowledge — and that might be so that you can be in a better negotiating point with employers or with lords or with whoever it might be, to say, ‘Well you need the skill of a carpenter, but all carpenters are part of the carpentry guild, and we have very hierarchical and formalized systems of what that means, to acquire that skill, to sell that skill,’ and so on, right? But I think part of the guild system, as well, is to ward away . . . . ‘You can’t possibly understand how two pieces of wood are joined together, it’s far too complex for your mind.’
And we see that same kind of thing happening with forms of engineering, forms of programming, and so on. So for me, . . . what I do like about the idea of the mechanic is that it does have in it a bit of a hobbyist idea, that you can . . . be a mechanic who just, like, tinkers on the weekends, right? — acquires these kinds of skills and knowledge through the act of doing it, through . . . being mechanically curious. And I think that is something that has been really robbed from us, is the mechanical curiosity, the idea that we should be curious and interested in how the things around us work, and that that curiosity and interest can actually be fulfilled without having to enter a guild or enter into, you know, the rarified halls of academia or a corporation, or whatever it might be.
One of the reasons why I didn’t call it ‘The Engineer and the Luddite’ is ’cause the engineer already emerges from, as a profession, a highly formalized set of skills and knowledge, which is itself also — as we know from the work by people like David Noble, who’s a historian of engineering and technology, and he has a book, America by Design . . . — the origins of the engineer as a profession come out of industry needing to create certain kinds of knowledge and skills, and people who hold those knowledge and skills who can then contribute to the motivations of industry. And so the engineer is deeply and integrally related to Capital — from its origins up to today. . . .
And it feels like the engineer also comes in to, like, remake these systems in such a way that the mechanic, or the workers who are more involved in this, are having their power over the system, their understanding of how it all works, you know, degraded or reduced, so that Capital has more power.
Jathan Sadowski and Paris Marx, above, mid-way through the most recent episode of Marx’s podcast Tech Won’t Save Us, below, on aspects of being in a position to get how stuff works and also of finding oneself barred from it, things Sadowski considers in new book The Mechanic and the Luddite.