I'm done being mad about computer science majors
Published on 2025-09-14
Previously:
Spectres of What Came Before (re: "Reverberations of What Came Before" by winter)
Registered Computer Professionals
The Leetcodification of everything you love
Studying computer science at the end of history
Over the last two years I've written many articles critical of computer science as an academic discipline, the tech industry and the culture that forms it, and I really like to think the focus of all these articles was to critique the material conditions and social forces making it problematic. But like, I'd be lying if I didn't say it came from a place of personal resentment. If I wasn't personally so wrapped up in this world then I wouldn't care, just like most people don't care.
Nobody cares about independent digital infrastructure
The truth is that I've always had a sort of personal resentment towards the people of the tech industry. I always felt betrayed by the people of the tech industry—this place that felt so straightforwardly good when I was a kid, where I saw a future for myself. I'm sure I'm not the first person to feel this way either. Something about growing up being told that you're a man gives you a unique and fleeting opportunity to see yourself living comfortably in a man's future. It got harder when I came out to myself.
This isn't to say that things are fine, and I'm not trying to apologize to anyone who ever made transgender people feel less safe in the tech industry. It's just that I'm not convinced any of these people-level problems are unique to the tech industry. There are material conditions in tech that I worry promote a sort of vicefulness you don't see as often elsewhere—there's a lot of gate-keeping, egotism, ladder-kicking, and so on—but obviously it's not fair to broadly condemn people for it. As far as changing the culture goes, I might get further by showing how things could be different, than by complaining about how things are now.
This is also not to say I blame anyone else for doing the same thing. I think more than anything, I'm just tired of it. I probably would have gotten tired of it a lot sooner too if I hadn't spent the last year and a half on work terms, away from the classroom. Now that I'm back in classes, I look around the lecture hall and see a lot of people who are normal, who don't really care, who are maybe in it because they like going on the computer, or maybe because someone, sometime, thought it was an easy way to make lots of money. The world of the Thiel Foundation, SoftBank, the bottomless pockets of the people subsidizing LLMs and the constant stream of propaganda keeping it in the news cycle… These days it's harder to convince myself many people actually care about this stuff, let alone know about it. Basically every time I've mentioned Thiel's name to someone I've had to explain who he is, and that's really hard to do without pulling out my cork board and tacks.
"But isn't that the problem?" I ask myself. "People should be organizing against technofascism!" Yeah, but people are already successfully organizing against fascism all over the world, and their organizing typically has little to do with the tech industry.¹
But that's a tangent. If I have any intention of changing the culture of the tech industry I'm going to need to be a lot more productive about it than being angry on the internet.
Footnotes
¹ The Tesla Takedown protests were an exception to this, but it's also pretty exceptional that the likes of Elon Musk put themselves so squarely in the public political sphere.
Respond to this article
If you have thoughts you'd like to share, send me an email!