6I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software. He pointed out all the way back then how much power programmers had and now have lost culturally to relinquishing the narrative to AI so heavily around software and programming. He was trying to say “THINK about what your industry is doing, organize, use your power while you have it.”. Well, it is mostly too late now, still necessary to do but programming will never be seen as a highly skilled and respected profession again the same way it used to because of how thoroughly programmers did not organize to resist the fundamental capitalist narratives being imposed upon them that have now been set in stone culturally.
The methods that you have at your fingertips and deal with every day in the normal course of events are perfectly designed to do this so that if you have the interest, you have the capacity and you have the means. I heard a rumor at breakfast that some of the people in this room begin to worry about their jobs. I have no idea if that’s true, but I was told there’s a sort of undercurrent of unease of where is all this going? There’s this huge expanding phenomenon, programming and so forth, and yet an uneasiness about well, where is it all headed? What is it going to do?
Please forgive me. I’m going to be very directly blunt for a horrible second. But it could be viewed that the technical way in which you look at programming at the moment is almost like guns for hire. In other words, you’re the technicians. You know how to make the programs work. Tell us what to do, Daddy, and we’ll do it. And what I’m proposing here is something a little bit different from that which is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you are capable of creating, managing, making available and which could then have the result that a living structure ructure in our towns, houses, workplaces, cities is an attainable thing which it has not been for the last 50 to 100 years. That is an incredible vision of the future. I realize that you probably think I’m nuts because this is not what I’m supposed to be talking about to you and you may say, “Well, gosh, great idea, but we’re not interested.” But I do think you are capable of that and I don’t think anybody else is going to do this job. I’ve enjoyed uh talking to you very much. Thank you. Wow.
If programmers and computer culture had actually organized and treated leftist ideas without an air of superior condescension as if understanding computers and factorio made the need to unionize obsolete… we would be in an entirely different world right now. People believed in the power of computers and programming in a way that gave computer culture the possibility to positively transform the world, but that trust has been irrevocably broken and computers will never have that same transformative potential again because people will never trust the profession of programmers the same way again.
The public trusts engineers to build bridges because even though the public doesn’t understand how to build a huge bridge they know at some level engineers would throw a collective massive fit if people started demanding they build bridges in a dangerous way. On the other hand that trust is PERMANENTLY gone in how people look at software engineers and honestly the industry deserves it for being so obsessed about only focusing on the details and never thinking about the broader impact of the architecture being created.
Software engineering has culminated in optimizing software for Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and it is stain on the entire industry of programming and software engineering.
6I really wish people actually listened to the crazy architect Christopher Alexander when he shat on the entire programming industry in 1996 for not having a value system around the basis for beginning to build architecture and systems in software. He pointed out all the way back then how much power programmers had and now have lost culturally to relinquishing the narrative to AI so heavily around software and programming. He was trying to say “THINK about what your industry is doing, organize, use your power while you have it.”. Well, it is mostly too late now, still necessary to do but programming will never be seen as a highly skilled and respected profession again the same way it used to because of how thoroughly programmers did not organize to resist the fundamental capitalist narratives being imposed upon them that have now been set in stone culturally.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_QzdKci6OY
If programmers and computer culture had actually organized and treated leftist ideas without an air of superior condescension as if understanding computers and factorio made the need to unionize obsolete… we would be in an entirely different world right now. People believed in the power of computers and programming in a way that gave computer culture the possibility to positively transform the world, but that trust has been irrevocably broken and computers will never have that same transformative potential again because people will never trust the profession of programmers the same way again.
The public trusts engineers to build bridges because even though the public doesn’t understand how to build a huge bridge they know at some level engineers would throw a collective massive fit if people started demanding they build bridges in a dangerous way. On the other hand that trust is PERMANENTLY gone in how people look at software engineers and honestly the industry deserves it for being so obsessed about only focusing on the details and never thinking about the broader impact of the architecture being created.
Software engineering has culminated in optimizing software for Ethnic Cleansing in Gaza and it is stain on the entire industry of programming and software engineering.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/9/26/microsoft-cuts-israeli-militarys-access-to-some-cloud-computing-ai