New post, and this one's definitely one of my weirder ones: it's about how most of the tech industry shows symptoms of something that looks like gender dysphoria.

@iris_meredith Wow, this one makes me so glad that I wound up dipping out of programming into being an academic sysadmin, and on top of that I always had outside interests, even if a bunch of them were stereotypical nerd ones. The "sucked into programming work" could have been an alternate me where I wound up being pressured to work long hours and those outside things dropped away.

@iris_meredith heh just today I posted re: "vulnerable among educated and professional people to being taken in by propaganda" (but without making the distinction between software and other engineering)

https://social.treehouse.systems/@valpackett/116075805782450692

@iris_meredith
This is utterly fascinating.

@iris_meredith I think you're onto something here, but I disagree with a basic premise: there's nothing wrong with simply not liking or enjoying food, or sex, or whichever other bodily experiences you pick. (but then I don't consider myself human and take pride in it, so make of that what you will...)

edit: I wrote an extended reply here.

@chrisamaphone @tinybird @iris_meredith one contrarian data point: my proprioception has always been near-perfect (eg I can use my hands effectively while blindfolded), but my interioception is almost nonexistent (have to focus to tell whether I am feeling bad, very hard to figure out what kind of bad / what part of me hurts).

Perhaps “helpful, but not the whole picture”?

@whitequark I've given a bit of a longer response myself: in short, I think you're entirely correct on that point and for the fedi audience, it's a somewhat sloppy way of writing. The issue is that writing "disordered relationship with desire" in the abstract lands well with the Bluesky philosophy crowd, but most people find it a bit incomprehensible.

@iris_meredith yeah, that makes perfect sense.

@beadsland @iris_meredith

I was thinking about this post while reading as well. I feel like both situations are rooted in the death spiral of capitalism. in the u.s. we are taught the only thing that matters is making as much money as possible. we're being raised, and raising, people to only care about their financial status. this does not leave room for self improvement and/or self discovery. disassociation is the inevitable coping mechanism and that is the path to madness and cruelty.

@iris_meredith As a former infrastructure engineer who worked in varying degrees of proximity to software developers, this rings painfully true.

Having done that while unaware that I was trans makes it all the more relatable (and painful).

That crack about MongoDB being webscale, though...

The mentality is far from new, though. From Neuromancer (1984): "the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh." It seems unlikely that Gibson made that up out of whole cloth, however ignorant he personally was with regard to computers.

Seeing what's now coming to fruition after several decades, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that deliberately inducing this kind of dysphoria has been an intentional strategy. It would fit as a way of disrupting tendencies to organise and demand more control, and it only needs to be demonstrated by a few high-profile examples in order to be adopted by the rest of the management herd.

@iris_meredith this is a pleasant and relatable post, thanks for writing it!

@iris_meredith Thank you for this, article of the year so far.

I'm going to have to sit with this one for a while - I'm Disabled, my relationship with my body is fraught at the best of times and the "being of pure intellect" is... tempting, to say the least.

@iris_meredith
I agree that IT industry demands we make things that suck, I feel the pain.

However

You say that "Precision, diligence, carefully working through a dull task and making sure that things are going to work in all cases" are feminine skills.
But aren't those same skills needed in engineering disciplines?
Ok, maybe real engneering disciplines don't have this pressure for masculinity. But then shouldn't that lead to more women becoming aerospace, civil, structural, etc. engineers?

@iris_meredith@mastodon.social

it excludes so many possibilities for having fun, such as food, drink, combat sports, Warhammer, kinky sex and music

If you can simulate/dream them, does it really matter much?

The main advantage of a body is that you can run away if the place is burning down, but if you've got backups, does that even matter?

Not that this is pertinent as more than a thought experiment, such technology is beyond our century certainly.

---

I don't much like having a body which has as its main distinguishing trait that it persistently betrays me. It has almost all the nanomachinery required to do most things I'd want... and then it just completely ignores user input to commit to aberrant designs (even when it isn't actively malfunctioning on a medical level like organ failure or whatever). The betraying flesh denies my right to morphological freedom and I greatly resent it for this.

Modern medical technology also fails to correct for all the deviations from my intended designs. I am not particularly hopeful I will live long enough to see this change.

In the meantime, all maintenance merely makes me more aware of the deviations. And yet it is necessary.

---

It's as though many people in the tech industry have no real desires at all beyond the desires that they're told to have by their wider social circles.

I believe this is a result of those who let their thoughts be contaminated by the dictates of corposcum rather than hold to principles.

They get used to believing what they're told from so-called "figures of authority".

An awful lot of tech people don't read, don't listen to music, don't appreciate art or really do much of anything all.

That is strange. Especially since a lot of that can be done & had for free in ample amounts.

That some of it doubles as escapism in my enjoyment is not a coincidence, but some of it I do find genuinely endearing and pleasant without any envy or relation to escapism. Interesting or fun in its own merit.

The existence of soylent suggests that a significant minority of tech people don't even really like or enjoy food all that much

The enjoyment is typically far secondary to the sheer annoyance preparing it and cleaning afterward can bring. Restaurant is far too expensive to ever justify, especially how short it lasts. (If I had perfect memory and could simply relive the experience from that, I would reconsider.)

That being said I'm not rich and do not trust soylent to be adequate, so I have to manage by other means.

Ideally, I would eat only when I am in the mood for it and then I could justify paying somewhat more for better, since it wouldn't be a constant drain on me.

when you don't much desire or value anything, rejecting propaganda on the basis that it conflicts with your desires or values isn't a thing that really happens

On this, to me, the rejection is easy. Not just in term of values (which would be enough on its own), but that any desire for morphological freedom on my part sees its likelihood of being enabled decrease as bigoted projects hinder any possible progress.

People expect behaviours and emotional responses of her that don't come naturally to her, and when she's open about her actual emotions and desires, they're quickly shut down.

Gets even more "fun" when neurodiversity comes in.

what the general opinion tells them to do rather than out of any real care for their bodies or how they want to look.

Maintenance is necessary. Dying early makes the likelihood of enablement and freedom lower. (I live in a waiting room, haha.)

The first hypothesis is that merely being cis doesn't exclude you from having dysphoric experiences

There are other kinds of dysphoria indeed.

there's constant pressure to be the best, use the newest most cutting-edge technology and earn the most money and much of the power structure

Which makes so very little sense to me. What use do I have for money if it cannot buy what I want?

In the meantime, if it covers basics & maintenance it is enough.

As for the tech, if it's more expensive than I need or disrespects my freedom as a user, it can go get scraped.

While there have more recently been a fair number of people who went into the field of software engineering because it's a well-paying job, these people don't tend to form the core of the people who form or go along with general opinion in the tech world

Huh, I'm mildly surprised.

they suppress those underlying desires and pursue, for the most part, what general opinion, heavily influenced by propaganda actors, tells them they should be pursuing

Huh.

MongoDB (which we all know is Webscale)

lol, good times

try and fill the void in the socially accepted and encouraged ways

Ah... so that's where the cult vibes come from.

they are often placed in a situation with remarkable structural similarities to the ones that trans people find themselves in, and thus, humans being human, react in similar ways.

Address cognitive dissonance by first making it worse and then finally muting it through indoctrination. There's no way that could go wrong⸮

But that, in turn, means that building anything that creates value for your average human goes out the window

Ever underfunded Free Software.

(the open-plan working space is one of many examples of this kind of thing)

[hissing]

Dysphoria will really fuck you up, and unless you can resolve it in some way,

Haha.

Morally, I think creating a large workforce that we force to do work that's fundamentally opposed to what they want is abhorrent.

Capitalist exploitation in a nutshell. Or maybe just exploitation, all types.

Perhaps we could do compulsory opera outings or something, but I doubt that's going to land all that well.

With a persistent pandemic I sure wouldn't. People seem to care about the ravages of biological malware about as much as they do digital, despite the fact we have no backups for biological bodies.

VR attendance is fine though.

a salary grant program for developers working on projects likely to be of benefit to civil society

Nice as it would be, the state being a body of oppression is likely to conflict with this.

a state-funded and state-run tech ministry aimed at employing software professionals and putting them to use for the good of the state and its people.

What's good for the state asserting its "authority" is rarely good for the people.

bodies are fun

Let's agree to disagree. I'm not having much fun.

Exercising just for the sake of it, for the sake of being able to see how fast you can run that half-marathon

All that uncomfortable proprioceptive feedback.

how far you can throw that javelin

That has low-enough feedback to still be fun.

Dancing, learning how to move your body fluently for the sheer joy of it is really worthwhile

The annoying moment when one actually enjoys it on an artistic level but cannot deal with the feedback.

as is training your voice

Sadly, voicebox replacements have range comparable to Microsoft SAM's, rather than a vocaloid. If your flesh made decisions you disagree with to a sufficient degree, your options are few.

learning how to handle a musical instrument

That is fun. Sadly expensive for the ones I find most neat.

Bodily intimacy, in both the platonic and the unashamedly sexual forms, is something that's worth enjoying to the fullest

It must indeed be nice to be able to cope with the notion of one's form sufficiently for that to be palatable.

@wolf480pl@mstdn.io @iris_meredith@mastodon.social In my country, aerospace is heavily tied into the military and is very sexist and traditionalist. One would not have a good time there.

I'm not sure if the others are subject to the same dynamic.