Studying computer science at the end of history
Published on 2025-04-01
Some of the coolest computer people I've met over the last few years have been students of creative and critical studies.
Sometimes people ask me what I'm studying, because ostensibly that's one of the stock phrases neurotypical people pull out when they're trying to fill the air. I have a few rehearsed answers I like to give. One of them is that "I'm an environmental computer scientist." If we're being honest I'm a lot more of the latter than the former in practice, but I like to keep the word "environmental" in there as a safety measure. In my mind, telling someone I'm a computer scientist is a bit like driving a car at highway speeds into a wall, and "environmental science" is my crumple zone.
The truth is I find being a computer science student incredibly embarrassing. I blame my industry, my colleagues and myself for a lot of the problems we as a society are facing today. Obviously it's more complicated than that, and I do think an amount of self-criticism is healthy and productive in any space, but a problem I keep having is that I really don't have any alternatives, except maybe… to use computers less? While I think I resonate a bit with the degrowth movement, "use computers less" is the sort of take that necessarily comes from a place of privilege.
To an extent I have to believe this comes from a place of insecurity more than anything because I can't say that anyone's ever picked on me for being a CS major. Most of the time people say nothing at all. When people do say something, it's often to the effect of "I could never." Like engineering, people think working with computers is hard, and I disagree. Computers aren't hard, they're scary.
Software development has a lot more to do with hiding complexity than unravelling it. I think a lot of the visceral horror at things like "vibe coding" comes from a place of knowing that we're so far removed from the bare reality of what a computer really is that, assuming this all doesn't fall flat on its face as I'm hoping it will, we may very well be witnessing the death knell of computer science as a system of knowledge in and of itself.
Software development is antiscience
There's a sort of chauvinism that comes with knowing so many others who've walked this path have unceremoniously left in search of something better and as ever, it's not a particularly good kind. I can't stop interrogating why I'm studying computer science because after all these years, I'm still not convinced I've come up with a good enough answer. Seven Academiologies later and the best I've got is maybe this is just the path of least resistance.
Academiology¹: Institutional betrayal
Clearly there's a sort of hauntology that comes with knowing that for many of the coolest CS people I know, "greener grass" has been the creative and critical studies department. Especially as someone who came to the university considering studying CS alongside gender and women's studies, and who ultimately chose data science instead not because I cared about it more, but because it seemed like the more pragmatic decision at the time.
I have this one friend who wants to become an actuary. We've talked a lot about how power might be best thought of as a network of flows—flows that can be wielded by the powerful. If power is an expression of will, then it follows that the world as we know it is the product of many people's wills acting together, albeit not always in unison, to create something bigger than any one of us. You could call one of those flows "Capital," and it's one that matters quite a bit to a lot of people.
So if Capital is just a flow of power, is there a way to wield it to do good? If you can't truly live out or without the world as it exists today, how can you best slot yourself into existing, harmful power structures in order to make the world a better place? How many mutual aid asks could you cover in an afternoon making over six figures working for a company whose actions you need to overlook?
I'm told it's complicated, but god damn do I wish it were simple.
I remember reading a post a while back by someone complaining about that sort of sardonic characterization of the "golden handcuffs," keeping high-paid workers in their job by exploiting their greed more than their passion for their work, whereas for them, the thing that kept them from leaving their job was the slew of people in their found family who depended on them being financially stable lest they go without food.
I suppose if you're the type of person interesting in building something new, something better, that necessarily requires at least a little bit of extraction, even if that's just to keep yourself alive long enough to see your project through to its completion. There's ways to do it better, to do it within the limitations of the natural world and the people you depend on, but building "on the periphery" never means building outside the world as we know it.
These conversations with myself often ignore the obvious: despite how embarrassed I am about being a CS major, I really love computers. They're like, one of my favourite things. They enable whole new kinds of expression. They've established a whole new watershed of power. Sure, that power has usually fallen into the wrong hands, but that's not to say it couldn't be used to build something so much better than we can even imagine.
I guess this is probably why lots of people like me come up with really fancy-sounding titles for themselves that place a little distance in between what they do and what people usually associated with software development: the software "artist," or "craftsperson," rather than the engineer. I guess that's why I like to call myself an environmental computer scientist.
But, in the end, it all flows from the same source. If you can learn to forget everything you were told about the way things are, maybe we can start trying to come up with new ways to be.
Respond to this article
If you have thoughts you'd like to share, send me an email!