@thomasfuchs — it really blows my mind how much of an emphasis there has been on turning the writing of software into a kind of gnostic cult where you can’t learn the secret knowledge until you’re in so deep that you no longer care when the big reveal is that nobody has a clue about what’s going on & it’s just about amassing power.

@erikvorhes @thomasfuchs Right. When I started coding in ‘83 there was a woman who became famous for debugging her son’s compsci homework. She knew nothing about coding. She was a poet. She just looked at the structure. Like…an LLM. But now the cult of “being technical” is so thick theres no way to join unless you have already joined.

@graymattergrcltd @thomasfuchs — I wonder how much of that was her having an understanding not just of intentional language but of symbolic logic? (For what it’s worth, my own background is in literary and textual studies, and I think it maps well, if not inuitively, to the world of software.)