A series of short essays on Technical people, taking cues from esoteric treatises.
Community
Working in Big Tech is one of the most communal activities that modern humans engage in. It’s an ant’s nest brimming with diverse participants, with that gestalt capacity for achieving what no individual member can understand. And I loved working there. Tech work is satisfying and rewarding because it requires navigating this shifting web of minds and ideas. A micro-society so complex that no one can hope to control it.
Working in Big Tech is profoundly isolating. In many ways, the industry is a crowning achievement of late stage capitalism. Critical work is performed, but undervalued. Individual achievement is celebrated by virtue of preexisting prestige and only ever expressed in quantifiable metrics. Workers are burdened with emotional labor, and encouraged to carry those emotions back home with them. The problem of breakable digital systems has been solved by placing breakable workers at the failure nodes.
This tension is infuriating from the inside. The amazing potential of human community collects into narrow channels of individualism, which drive further isolation and societal self-destruction.
Rationalism
Technical [is] a structural designation that operates outside of problem-solving: not only do the structurally empowered eighty-to-ninety-percent-men of technical organizations […] get to choose emotions over efficacy, they get to do so while also maintaining the notion that they never have emotions in the first place. Actually to be fully consistent and safely within the Technical they have to do it.
Dr. Cat Hicks, “Why I Cannot Be Technical”
Technical is a rationalist culture. It holds that digital systems (being composed of numbers) must be designed using pure, refined Reason. The messy reality of emotional, social humans should – by this framing – be minimized. Digital systems should work best when humans are removed from as many aspects as possible.
Rationalism abhors spirituality. When the intuitive and (dare I say) magical work of Newton and Kepler’s alchemy and astrology is erased from popular history, we are allowed to imagine that their findings emerged from a disciplined, materialist mind. And when we seek to emulate them, we see our own beliefs and intuition as obstacles.
Similarly, when the intuitive and (I dare say) magical spirit of human communities is erased from the Technical lexicon, we can imagine that a modern society must be the product of an ordered, materialist worldview. Ergo, that the infrastructure that supports society must be built within well-defined, materialist constraints.
And so, we see – in thought leaders and engineers alike – the vision of removing spirit from the design and construction of Technical infrastructure. With the possible exception of the idea-person and the consumer, anyone who touches infrastructure should be in full control of their emotions. Disciplined. Making decisions using only Reason and Data.
Magic
Science by its very nature employs a reductivist approach that seeks to understand the world by breaking down complex phenomena into simpler, more manageable parts. This method is extremely effective for studying material and quantifiable aspects of reality, but falls short when confronted with the holistic and often intangible aspects of magical practices. Magic in its essence […] eludes physical measurement or empirical validation. Its practices are steeped in cultural, spiritual, and metaphysical contexts that are deeply personal and subjective.
[…] I don’t think we should assume that if something is very effective in one area […] it necessarily is going to be effective in every other area of knowledge and human endeavor.
Dr Angela Puca, “Why Science Can’t Prove Magic”
It is a blessing to engineers that we can claim to have faculties of reason, spirit, and desire because our work requires constantly shifting reference frames. We design systems which have small, controllable, predictable components. We ask those systems to interact in complex, chaotic, unpredictable ways. And we place them in a world whose values, goals, and need are in a constant self-contradicting flux. As engineers, we work on the boundary which none of reason, emotion, will, or imagination can hope to reach on their own.
Here’s a reductive table to illustrate my point:
| Logic & Science | Spirit & Magic | |
|---|---|---|
| Excellent at dealing with | predictable systems with reproducible results | complex systems where reproducing results is untenable |
| Approaches the world | reductively | holistically |
| Can be used to | parametrically optimize a rocket nozzle | identify who to trust as a friend |
| Or in software, to | design a minimal sufficient protocol | spot a bug before it occurs |
| Evolved for | tool use | social organization |
I think most engineers I’ve met would (reluctantly) admit that intuition, a “gut feeling” built from experience, is important to their work. They might also admit to the importance of working in a team, attending meetings, and exchanging ideas. But many will draw the line when asked to place these social and emotional dynamics front and center, on par with Technical skills.
I’ve never seen an engineer more worked up than when talking about emotional labor.
Emotional Sandboxing
Technical cultures have drainage channels for emotions. Dedicated timeslots, private discussions, sanitized vocabulary, coaching. These are placed within reach of every social interaction, so that when emotional context appears it can be conveniently mitigated. As a consequence, Glue work and other emotional labor are not only undervalued but purposefully obscured from group interactions. And work-related stress is resolved (if at all) either in isolation or outside of work. Perhaps most strikingly, engineers who come forward with effective analyses of risk or effective design proposals are sidelined and refused support until they can express their concerns in quantifiable, rational terms. In other words, Technical culture will sacrifice even its efficacy and business goals to protect its narrative.
Insisting on reproducible, quantifiable metrics while denying the usefulness of intuition and social roles has the effect of making workers seem more fungible than they are. On a spreadsheet, a Technical worker can easily be found, dismissed, retrained, or reassigned; the task becomes filling the skills they can attest to. In reality, a team’s effectiveness will suffer when a member of its social fabric is removed – though this may be invisible to management if the practice is pervasive.
I don’t believe that Technical workers are incapable of empathy or unwilling to contemplate their emotions. They are still human, and if pressed will make an effort to support each other. Rather, the culture does not provide a language capable of addressing the emotional problems its members face. It denies them the ability to express their problems and it denies their colleagues the ability to provide support.
To an extent, I suspect this structure permeates even to the psyche of Technical workers – denying their internal monologue a connection between their spirit and their work.
Spiritual Thinking
Restricting spiritual thinking in Technical work can help protect a project. A complex system (like infrastructure or machinery) needs well-documented, rigorous reasoning at each level of complexity, which can guarantee acceptable risk and efficiency. Allowing gut feeling into that sort of documentation means introducing sources of error.
However, it’s easy to take this attitude too far: to assert that every step of Technical design, labor, and validation must be contained in rigor and rationality. In this extreme, it becomes difficult to think about systems complexly or holistically; we lose the forest for the trees and fail to engage with (or question) the large-scale narratives.
An engineer who wants to build a better world must be aware of the stories, memes, and cultural assumptions baked into their project. And I believe most engineers have access to the tools to do so: the irrational, emotional, and magical cognition that Technical culture suppresses. Using these tools requires courage, vulnerability, and enormous risk to the individual who breaks the taboo – and therefore it requires a social structure willing and able to support them when they do. For software work to be fulfilling, socially useful, and efficient, Technical workers must claim collective responsibility to hear, enable, and support each other in leaving the comfort of the Rational.
Leave a Reply