|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Scott Martens
||
||
|| I'm trying to marshal better against this point of view then
|| that the rich
|| are still rich, because I'm not convinced that those are good enough
|| arguments. You, Carrol Cox, Cian O'Connor and others, I think, have all
|| basically made that argument.
||
Not sure what you mean but what I'm trying to say is you - we - have to find a better definition for the Dilberts of this world than "knowledge class" and, while doing so, we have to clarify what this knowledge is and where it fits into the mode of production. Cian says there's an ideological carry-over from the technical knowledge of programming. Coding makes you free, as it were.
It would be interesting to explore this interaction between the technical knowledge of the programmer - his means of production - and his ideology. There's no question, e.g., that coding can produce its own aesthetic, as evidenced by John Lions's literary criticism of Unix. This ideological aesthetic often informs the programmer's personality as a whole, and then re-articulates itself as technical knowledge: The programmer generalizes principles of elegance and economy to his whole experience, and then uses these new experiences to program better.
But fascinating as it is, this process is not unique to coding, and there are a lot of 9-to-5 coders who don't invest themselves in their work enough to be ideologically influenced by it.
|| The idea that intelligence and education ought to get you
|| somewhere, rather
|| than wealth, does run deep among the rank and file in the tech
|| industry. It
|| runs, perhaps, as deep as the Lockean notion of liberty did in the
|| bourgeoisie in the 18th or 19th centuries.
||
All coders, designers, architects, and "creatives" want to be able to do their thing _and_ get paid. Nothing really revolutionary about that. In fact, they are the very people who create the MacRosoft obnoxiousness of everyday life. But I do sense there's some truth in what you say somewhere, something specific to coders that you just don't see in other technical-creative professions.
Anyway, I'm all for exploring coder subculture.
Hakki