In the truly terrible Techno-Optimist Manifesto by Marc Andreessen there is a lot of conversations about what technology does. What technology mines out of the world and to what ends and why those ends matter more than the means. One thing it does not mention is people making things. In the Andreessen Horowitz vision of the techno-optimist future humans are shaped, conducted, born, bred and used as resources but they do not create. Technology in the VC model is fashioned by no one, merely processed out of factories by market forces.
I think about that shitty essay too often and lately I've been wondering if this is what it felt like to be the carpenter who saw the first siege weapon ever constructed.
Recently I had a lot of fun doing a pretty bad job of putting together a trebuchet. I am not good with the associated tools, I was easily the worst in my group, and I had no previous experience. We harvested the materials to build it out of trash and left over Ikea fittings.
It successfully threw a chocolate a few feet forward. This was a big win for our group of 4. We had never put together a trebuchet, much less had it work even a little bit before this project.
It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun to assemble something with our hands, try and follow the rules of a solved problem (how to throw things far with counterweights) but do it ourselves and figure out how.
We did not build the future of trebuchets. We did not invent a novel or profitable or market-worthy product. We assembled something though, together, with our wits, capabilities, hands, and interest in an art.
Recently I noted a pretty great post about writing programming languages that had this section in it:
Programming languages are instruments of thought, frameworks for precisely specifying an executable idea, and they are designed almost entirely for humans
I think this is a wonderful description of programming languages. They are tools, which we wield with our thoughts and hands as humans to create things that we want to build.
Someone once said code is poetry. Another person said code is law. Neither of these are true. Code is a tool of art. Not every person who works with the tool is producing art. Not every person loves the work they are put towards. But it is possible to love to code. To code because you are an artist. To code art. To code because it is a joy and you are joyful.
It is possible to do all of those things and not code well too! It is possible to code for joy badly, create something that has no particular accomplishments in the wider world, or massive value, or "true craft". You can write spaghetti code of the worst sort for a janky program. Art need not be good to be art. Notably, no one will ever get to good art without playing to find their way past making bad art. That's as true with painting and woodcarving as it is of code.
The VC model of technology cannot allow for the joyful technology artist.
Joyful artistic technology is humane, useful, interesting, accomplished and occasionally it may be profitable and world-changing. It is not something that will ever be produced by AI, nor can it be produced by the apparent inhumane factory conditions that big tech firms desire to turn their programming operations into.
It is possible for the VC model to continue the status quo. To keep things running. To build the known and maintain the hierarchy. Those things are easy, they can be accomplished by people on autopilot, whether those on autopilot are factory processing wood, moving packages in a warehouse, or producing code.
The programmer as function, as a capitalist equation, will accomplish things. Occasionally they may stumble into great things, but they will never be commanded into innovation.
For all the terrible things they have done and become, never forget: Twitter was an accidental side project; Facebook was a dorm-room passion project (if admittedly for a shitty passion by a shitty person); all the best Google products you've used other than search were free-time fun side projects that the company once encouraged.
Linux runs the web and it is the passion project of dozens, if not hundreds, of people. The same is true of WordPress.
We live and work in the midst of tools, platforms and code built with creativity and passion. Even the AI programs we're increasingly subject to the slop outputs of are built standing on the backs of curious researchers with a fascination about words and brains and all sorts of interesting pieces of the world that have nothing to do with the massive server farms running software derived from their work now.
Code is a tool of art. To code is a joy.
Never forget that the "techno-optimists" have no room, no time, and no interest in that joy. All they have is cold equations for someone else to execute for them--over and over, ever faster, at ever greater scale--for pay, for a living, for food, for healthcare, for an opportunity to create art outside of them. The cold equations they are unwilling to execute themselves but all too willing to grind us through. The programmer is nothing but a process, ground through a function, into so much pulp for the fires of VCs and billionaires' hopeless and heartless worlds.
No software engineer should think that this is a future build with us. The "techno-optimists" imagine an underwater Rapture without even art. A cold space colony where our value lasts only until it is more profitable to throw us out the airlock. There is no joy in their model of the future, only an unending plague of humanity--pale, unthinking, un-wanting, working, dying, churning out more humanity and more things.
Don't ever forget, they don't think that AI can replace us. They think we are the AI, the NPCs, the machine they can control. They cannot even imagine the market as an invisible hand. All they have is a control economy at their beck-and-call, all they have is a fist, and they want us to see it.
The carpenter who saw the very first trebuchet, loaded with crushing stone, ready to kill, must have been horrified. The artist who is faced with every tool of art they have honed used to kill, control, crush, and enforce. I imagine a terrible future rolled out before them, with a multitude of horrors laid out in their mind's eye.
They could not imagine a future where building such a thing is a joy of craft. Yet, that future happened.
The artist often faces what the market makes of their craft. They would struggle to imagine that one day these terrible constructions will be just as obsolete as everything the master of the kingdom seeks to replace.
The thing is, each cycle, it happens again. New artists, new art, new weapons, new masters, new ways to crush joy into little boxes that can serve the status quo.
If we survive long enough on this burning planet, these talentless morons in charge--with so little imagination they cannot invent anything but a fist--will pass as obscure into history as their predecessors.
This time around, let us use the joy of creation to bury them. This time around, let's break the cycle the only possible way: by working for everyone, by bringing everyone along. By avoiding the fist, ignoring the invisible hand, and instead linking arms with each other to rise above.
With joy.