Techies Who Don't Read Fiction

Geeks Bearing Gifts

A guy at work suggested I was nuts for disliking Facebook because they created React to make building web apps easier.

I was tempted to suggest that he sounded like a Trojan looking at that big-ass wooden horse sitting in front of the Scaean Gate and saying, "See? The Greeks weren't so bad after all."

However, I didn't think he'd get it. He's one of those techies who don't read fiction. It might as well have been Darmok at Tanagra to him.

But React wasn't created for our benefit, but to solve a particular problem — and other shops are just cargo culting to their own detriment.

Getting to the Point

How can you tell that a techie doesn't read fiction? The same way you identify a vegan, an evangelical Christian, or somebody who doesn't own a television.

It's easy: he'll tell you.

It's almost always a guy, too, as if they're afraid no woman will have them if they so much as touch a novel or read verse that isn't song lyrics. Never mind that women are clamoring for men to read more fiction, especially by women and POCs.

Admittedly, I caught a lot of shit from other boys as a kid for reading. A lot of guys do. It's not easy to withstand that sort of bullying.

Nor can boys expect much support from the adults in the room. Apparently since most teachers are women and supposedly have an unconscious bias in favor of girls, they grade and discipline boys more harshly and boys react by treating school, academic, achievement as un-masculine. That sounds like a bullshit post-hoc rationalization by people who wish the "He-Man Woman-Haters' Club" actually existed, since girls also get a raw deal at school. They just get a different raw deal from the one boys get.

I could be wrong about all of this, of course. I am, after all, only a man.

So, What's My Excuse?

In my case, however, I didn't let being bullied stop me from reading. Since I had let Satan into my heart I kept reading whatever the fuck I wanted. Of course, that also annoyed the teachers, too. Boys in my class thought I was a homo for reading Anne Rice, and the teachers thought I should be reading J. D. fucking Salinger. Never mind that you don't probably need The Catcher in the Rye if you've already read a decent translation of Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther. Goethe tackles many of the same themes as Salinger in their respective works, but Goethe's novel was made with German Engineering™.

I've read that a lot of autistic men in particular don't like to read fiction, with a panoply of explanations for why this is the case that are probably arrant bullshit since the replication crisis in psychology suggests that it's a science so soft it barely withstands experimental scrutiny. In any case, the suggestion that autistic men in particular don't like reading fiction makes no sense to me. I'm autistic. I read a metric shitload of fiction. Did I just not get hit hard enough with the autism stick? Or is this just propaganda from hate groups like Autism Speaks?

I suppose this rant comes out of a broader frustration with people in my trade — again, mainly men — who seem to have no liberal arts background at all. Admittedly, my own liberal arts education is a half-assed DIY patchwork because I didn't have rich parents or adults willing to give me decent advice and actual guidance. Nevertheless, I'd like to think that I've exposed myself to sufficient philosophy and have enough of a sense of history that I'm a little harder to bullshit than many techies are. I want to believe, for example, that I know better than to go Nazi, not only because going Nazi would debase me as a human being, but because guys like me get purged as soon as we're of no further immediate use.

Silicon Valley Sarumans Building the Torment Nexus

I find it particularly telling that there are so many tech corporations with names out of Tolkien's Legendarium like Palantir and Anduril. The personalities behind these corporations all seem to be of a type. I don't think they realize the extent to which they resemble Saruman after his determination to claim the One Ring for himself had corrupted him. I would not want to work for such people. Nor do I think such people should have the ear of public officials or senior officers in the armed forces of the United States. They're the sort of people Dwight Eisenhower might have been thinking of when he warned us against the military-industrial complex, and they have no shortage of little Eichmanns willing to help them.

I think these techies are somehow worse than the techies who won't read fiction because they're afraid they'll end up replacing their boxers with rainbow-colored jock straps if they do. For starters, I suspect that the only women they've ever read are Ayn Rand and J. K. Rowling, and I'm not sure which is worse. One writes about misunderstood rugged-individualist ubermenschen and the women who love them as a trauma response to seeing her parents lose everything under Soviet Communism. The other romanticises child abuse and neglect in English boarding schools and seems to be utterly terrified that the woman in the bathroom stall next to her might have a cock. They're both fucked in the head, which is the only diagnosis I'm qualified to offer.

These techies who name their businesses after Tolkienien stuff seem the sort who only read on the most literal and superficial levels. They're the sort of people who would misread Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus — if they didn't outright refuse to read it because the author's a woman — by treating Frankenstein as some kind of victim when by creating a kind of artificial general intelligence and then abandoning it to figure out the world on its own they set the stage for all of the atrocities to come. They're the sort who seem to willfully misread fiction like Snow Crash, The Handmaid's Tale, or even 1984 and Fahrenheit 451. They're also the same sort of people who watch Fight Club and miss the point by mistaking Tyler Durden for an aspirational antihero.

These are the people who took "meritocracy", a word created to satirize the concept it described, and turned it into something too many people mistake for something worth having. Many of them are also the sort who think that not only is IQ real, but it is heritable and that somehow white people, Jews, and East Asians are naturally more intelligent than other "races" (never mind that race itself is arrant bullshit) and thus believe that in the technocratic hell they think they should be permitted to build in the ruins of our democracy they'd be our rulers by sheer natural merit.

A rather convenient ideology, isn't it? Almost as if it were a new divine right of kings. That's no coincidence, incidentally. Never mind following the money. Follow the ideas. They'll eventually lead you to small-souled bugmen like Curtis Yarvin (aka Mencius Moldbug), who think entirely too highly of monarchy because they hope to serve in the new king's privy council. (They'll be lucky to keep their heads after the revolution.)

If you handed these assholes a novel entitled Don't Create the Torment Nexus, which documented in detail how the titular technology worked to illustrate the horrors its implementation would create, they'd fall over each others to be the first to create the torment nexus and bring it to market.

It was one thing to have social networks created by people who sat alone in the high school cafeteria. It was one thing to see dating apps created by people who have probably never dated anybody but Rose Palmer and her daughters. But these assholes keep getting more ambitious, without getting smarter or wiser or kinder, and I'm surprised they haven't ruined more innocent people's lives or gotten more people killed. If I'm laying it on thick, it's because merely knowing these people exist has proven to be a reliable laxative. They, quite literally, scare the shit out of me.

Runestaff, Inc.

Then again, I might not be much better. If I had a monetizable idea and financial backing from rich people who aren't Nazis, I might start a business called "Runestaff". I'd be borrowing from Michael Moorcock instead of J. R. R. Tolkien.

In Moorcock's fiction the Runestaff is a quasi-sentient object of power, rather like the One Ring. Whereas the One Ring is imbued with so much of Sauron's power and malice that the Dark Lord is little more than a shadow without it, and was made specifically to dominate all life, the Runestaff is rather more benign. It was not made to rule or dominate. It is not a weapon. It can only exist under particular physical and metaphysical conditions, and it uses its power to create a field around it in which it maintains the conditions that permit its continued existence. And it sometimes appears as the Holy Grail.

The conditions that sustain the Runestaff are also the conditions in which humanity best flourishes: a harmonious balance between law and chaos. I would like to think that I'd be capable of running a business that sustains itself by helping sustain a world in which all life — including human life — can flourish. Fortunately I'm not likely to ever be tested and found wanting.

But if somebody else starts a geniunely sustainable and beneficial business called "Runestaff", and needs a techie or three, hit me up. Hell, call it "Hawkmoon Enterprises" or "The Von Bek Foundation" if you can get away with it.

My rate's $120K/year for remote work, or $180K/year for on-site presence — and may Arioch have mercy on your soul if you ask me to go on-site and then make me use Zoom, because I'll have none to spare. If you want me to relocate for on-site work you'd better be willing to buy my fucking house; I'm seven years into a thirty year mortage with a 3.5% interest rate, and I want to outlive my mortgage so I can retire.

Literary Masculinity

Don't tell me that a literary man can't be masculine, lest I start dabbling in necromancy so that I might summon from Hell the shade of Norman Mailer.

He couldn't spell "fuck", as observed by the perennially delightful Tallulah Bankhead, who might not have known that he was substituting "fugg" for "fuck" at the behest of a publisher with overtender sensibilities.

Michiko Kakutani in her capacity as head critic at The New York Times Book Review did more for his career than he ever admitted despite his racism and misogyny toward her. Nor is his misogyny limited to Ms. Kakutani, but given a book-length exploration in his attempt at a rebuttal of feminist Kate Millett's criticism: The Prisoner of Sex.

Nevertheless, he returned from the Pacific Theater of WWII to begin a literary career by writing The Naked and the Dead. That's more than macho misogynists who denigrate reading as unmanly — like Andrew Tate — ever managed.

Why Did You Write All Of This?

To get it out of my demon-ridden head. Isn't that why most writers write? Sometimes my brain is so full of shit that the only sensible course is to open up an empty text file and drop trou.

Seriously, though, whenever I run into something that tech has made more dangerous, or even more unpleasant or more inconvenient, my default reaction is that somebody didn't think this shit through. Somebody didn't work out all the angles. Somebody didn't consider all the implications. Somebody had such a monumental hard-on over what they could do that they gave no consideration to whether they should do it at all.

Who elected these assholes, anyway? What makes them qualified to change the world out from under us? What kind of "better world" are they making, anyway? These fuckwits can't even persuade people to tolerate online ads. But we're supposed to entrust our future to these people?

Apologists for capitalism as implemented in the US have some fucking nerve. They tell us that communism inevitably fails because it depends on a command economy and central planning by unelected bureaucrats. What they don't tell you is that capitalism also depends on a command economy and central planning by unelected billionaires. Does it make the slightest difference to the average working-class citizen if the economy is centrally planned by a Politburo in Moscow or Beijing or by Wall Street?

We get fucked over either way, but try telling that to the so-called "best and brightest" who mistake themselves for the new "masters of the universe". The same people who brought us "move fast and break things" love to invoke Chesterton's fence if anybody makes a serious case for regulating the undead Christ out of them. If any of them had thought to ask me if they should be given free rein to remake the world in the image of their secondhand science fantasies, I'd say, "hell no to the power of fuck you for even thinking this is a reasonable idea".

I mean, it's almost as if they want the Butlerian Jihad to happen. They're practically begging to be put up against a wall while we smash their machines and sing "Up Against the Wall, Motherfucker" to the tune of "Uncle Fucker" from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. No doubt they imagine themselves martyrs for defying legions of ungrateful Luddites hellbent on holding humanity back.

Seriously, though: if these chucklefucks want to get ideas from pop culture, here's a doozy for them from Mad Max: Fury Road — WE ARE NOT THINGS. We are not the means to their ends. We do not live for their sake. Our lives are our own, and this is no less our world than it is theirs. They have no right to kill the world for their own gain.

What Do We Do to Change the Future?

This isn't about the future. The future is here and now. Cyberpunk dystopia is now literary realism instead of science fiction, though it's not yet evenly distributed. It's both shittier and more mundane than Gibson, Stephenson, or Effinger dared imagine. No manic pixie nightmare razorgirl is ever gonna come to rescue any of us. There's no Dr. Light to build us a savior.

Why should a hero save us when we stand for nothing? If we deserve life, we must stand for ourselves. We've got to rescue ourselves and each other.

Put on the sunglasses and see for yourself the truth about our rulers: if they are monsters, they are human monsters. The class war is on, and we haven't been fighting back. Let's change that, shall we? We can start by understanding that it is precisely because our enemies are only human that we can fight them. Remember too that Moloch is just a metaphor, a reification of capitalism that seems all-encompassing but is nevertheless man-made. Because it is man-made, it can be unmade by men. We have the tools. We have the talent. We need only realize that there are only two kinds of deicide: justifiable and praiseworthy, and as Ambrose Bierce observed the distinction is mainly for the benefit of theologians.

There's no Morpheus offering red pills to wake you up. Nobody's gonna set you free if you don't do it yourself. Start by freeing your mind; your ass will follow.

What If This Offends Someone?

Does anything in this rant strike a nerve? Does it offend you? Dial 1-800-B-DAMNED. We're ready to dismiss you!

Seriously: Don't complain to me that the shoe doesn't fit, or I'll call you Cinderella for being an even prissier princess than my cat Smudge — a pretty princess indeed. Or maybe I'll favor you with an a capella cover of "You're So Vain" since you think this rant is about you.