From GamerGate to Learn to Code
Talia Lavin explains the profound meaning of “Learn to Code.”
Last Thursday, I received the news that the HuffPost Opinion section—where I’d been opining on a weekly basis for a few months—had been axed in its entirety. The same opinion column had had a home at The Village Voice for some 21 weeks before that entire publication shuttered as well. “This business sucks,” I tweeted, chagrined at the simple fact that I kept losing my column because of the cruel, ongoing shrinkage of independent journalism in the United States. Dozens of jobs were slashed at HuffPost that day, following a round of layoffs at Gannett Media; further jobs were about to be disappeared at BuzzFeed. It was a grim day for the media, and I just wanted to channel my tiny part of the prevailing gloom.
I follow a lot of journalists and columnists so I saw a lot of tweets about that grim day for the media.
Then the responses started rolling in—some sympathy from fellow journalists and readers, then an irritating gush of near-identical responses: “Learn to code.” “Maybe learn to code?” “BETTER LEARN TO CODE THEN.” “Learn to code you useless bitch.” Alongside these tweets were others: “Stop writing fake news and crap.” “MAGA.” “Your opinions suck and no one wants to read them.” “Lmao journalists are evil wicked cretins. I wish you were all jail [sic] and afraid.”
She looked at the mentions of a lot of other journalists and columnists and saw the same swarming. She suspected a coordinated attack.
My suspicions were confirmed when conservative figures like Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump Jr. joined the pile-on, revealing the ways in which right-wing hordes have harnessed social media to discredit and harass their opponents.
Been there, seen that, got no T shirt.
Often hatched in the internet’s right-wing cesspools, these campaigns unleash a mass of harassment on unsuspecting targets. 4chan’s /pol/ board—a gathering-place for people who want to say the n-word freely, vilify feminists, and opine on nefarious Jewish influence—has an oversize role in organizing brigade attacks, in part due to the fact that all its users are anonymous.
While it’s difficult to trace the origins of brigading—like most of internet history, its beginnings are ephemeral—the term, and its tactics, came to new prominence during the loosely organized and militantly misogynist harassment campaign known now as GamerGate, which unfolded over the course of 2014 and 2015.
I remember it well. First GamerGate, then Trump. It’s almost as if there’s a pattern.
WTF has ‘learn to code’ got to do with anything?
Rob #1
I think it means something like “learn a useful skill so you can get a real job”.
As if there isn’t a glut of surplus programmers…
@chigau:
Yes, but it’s also misogynistic, the implication being that a man wouldn’t sit about whining, he’d learn to code, problem solved. And anyway, women can’t code so ha ha ha you’re fucked.
@BKiSA:
Actually, at the moment there is a general shortage of experienced software developers. It’s not exactly difficult to perpetrate some spaghetti in Python but that’s not what the industry needs at the moment (there are times when it is). So yeah, there’s a glut of programmers but a shortage of employable ones. The difference? Employable (currently) programmers need to be able to play nice with others, to be enthusiastic about what they’re building, to have good abstraction and problem-solving skills. Some of those are skills that require training and experience. Others are about not being a dick. I think I can guess which these people would find the harder to achieve.
I’m not sure that’s valued in software programming, at least from what I’ve seen (granted, from an outsider’s perspective).
I think it’s more than just being able to get along with people, though. I have a son who is knowledgeable and experienced (and not a dick). He has had trouble getting/holding a job because he is an introvert that doesn’t know how to play networking games. He can get along with most people, but he doesn’t go out of his way to be around them, to socialize, and he doesn’t waste a lot of time flattering other people’s egos. I suspect that last is his biggest “failing”.
@ikn
And also from the perspective of many programmers, as we’ve seen over recent years. That was broadly my point. The industry is rife with horrible attitudes and the kinds of horrible people who sustain them, no doubt about that.
In my experience toxic software development environments (mostly) happen when there’s a bubble. Someone invents a new thing that everyone suddenly likes and the company recruits like crazy and with a necessarily low bar to exploit it without considering how that growth is going to work or be sustained. And then every other company panics and does the same thing until everyone realises nobody wanted that thing in the first place.
The result is developers ruling the roost. They are perceived as absolutely crucial to getting the product out days before the competition do and they come to believe they are superstars even while the company is running them ragged, expecting more and more of them. In some ways, they’re right. The company inevitably gives them more and more freedom to act because they are the only ones capable of making immediate decisions about design or bug-fixing or testing or operational matters.
Then the company either folds or rapidly expands, putting in layers of management above those people. Either way, developers feel disenfranchised. Some of them get promoted, spreading their arrogance in the new, higher levels of the company. Some move to other companies, resentful of their loss of status.
That’s how this sort of toxic environment tends to grow, spread and fester in the software industry in my experience.
I’m certainly not saying that there aren’t masses of misogynistic arseholes in the industry, because the evidence speaks for itself. I’m saying we can fix that. Probably.
That is certainly a manager’s failure, not your son’s. I was describing the current market in software development, not defending it.
Like everything that comes from the bowels of 4chan, it is not a sincere-but-misguided exhortation, but rather an appropriation of one into a weapon. Almost none of the trolls, but volume at least, are actual software or software-adjacent people; a few of them just saw ads for code camps and online learning platforms and saw that the phrase could be used to destructive ends.
The origin is that allegedly news organizations wrote many articles suggesting unemployed coal miners could learn to code and get new jobs. So now that journalists are losing their jobs they’re being taunted with “learn to code”.
There are several problems with this, the most prominent being the articles more described retraining programs rather than advocating coding as the solution for everybody, and also it doesn’t make sense to go after every journalist for what a few wrote.
If a specific journalist condescendingly suggested all coal miners should switch to programming then got fired themselves, then the taunt would make some sense, but that’s not the situation here.