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

Thank you for an insightful post.

I have the feeling that most of what you describe can also be traced back to a very deficient educational system.

We don't provide enough diversity, enough culture in education, we do not teach people that curiosity, reading and a life-long desire to know more are desirable. The results are staring at us now...

@iris_meredith

Tangentially, thinking there might be some intersection here with Cyberlyra's discussion of the notion, absent in Usian language, of a "keener":

https://hachyderm.io/@cyberlyra/116074966881545815

To wit, doing something for the joy of it, with no other motive, does not compute. Dysphoria as being what cannot be named, let alone bodily embraced.

@iris_meredith It's interesting to see the connections you make, but overall I'd say the inhumanity of the tech industry is due to the capitalist superstructure rather than attributes of information workers.

As a programmer that does think of myself more of a mental being than a body, I can't relate to the ideas that studying complex systems leads to a weaker sense of self or that body disassociation is an indicator for sociopathic violence (cf. heightened sensuality may fuel racial animus).

Very interesting read!

It has me thinking about those ricers who build this elitist culture around hprland (or whichever one is trending) being the superior way to interact with your system, all other DEs are inferior and you're a loser for using them, yadda yadda yadda. Very masculine performing.

But then the other side of this, subculture I guess, is creating beautiful, aesthetic setups. Posting screencaps of your ricing. Getting the colors of the UI to match the wallpaper. Making a custom fastfetch with custom ASCII art and colors. Getting the window animations to smoothly move things across your screen.

It struck me as very feminine. (Or at least culturally feminine.) And it felt weird to me because what these folks are actually doing is so diametrically opposed to the atmosphere they give off. There's a mismatch. I bet many of these ricers would frown at interior design or visual art, dismissing it as womanly, as part of the outside world that doesn't matter. They are artists, but label it as something else to feel distant from it, and I can't imagine that being good for their psyche. I had trouble wrapping my head around this, but your article gave me a new lens to view this through.

@iris_meredith@mastodon.social I don't know that I exactly enjoyed reading this. I most certainly felt it though. I'm lucky enough to feel generally ok in my body, but working in tech certainly creates a feeling that's reminiscent of what you describe.
I spent a good chubk of my adult life in the "disregard for the body" camp, though I did at least bathe regularly. But the concept of purely identifying yourself with your work is frighteningly familliar to me. 10-12 hour workdays where you do what you do without thinking too much about the consequences of it for society or yourself hits a little bittoo hard.

Breaking away from that is difficult. Most tech (especially the one that allows you to earn a living) exists within a hypercapitalistic environment. It felt hypercapitalistic 10 years ago, but damn qe've gone so much further since then.

To top that off you have multiple literal fascist takeovers around the world, which you need to basically ignore. That is for those of us lucky enough to not need to actively colavorate with and aid said takeovers as part of our job. I can't imagine (and hope I never have to) what it's like to have to choose between being employed and not working for neonazi cooks.

@iris_meredith@mastodon.social to be honest, I'm alao not sure how good we techies generally are, to the extent that "techies" can even mean anything beyond "knows how to make compiter go beep-boop".

People in the replies already mentioned this sort of " reactive masculinity" that came from the nerds and geeks ending up on top after it turned out computers can make you money and you can use them.to control people.

When you're ostracized for something you are you could take that trait and turn it into a badge of honor. In theory that's maybe even a healthy way to respond to bullies. But also, if you end up becoming powerful (even mildly, by virtue of something stupid like being part of a made up mew "techie cast") and keep latching on to that trait as ypur singular badge of honor, you become what you described. The "person that's in tech". Not even a " person who codes", or "person who makes hardware", " person who likes math" or whatever. Just a "person in tech".

@iris_meredith@mastodon.social maybe (and I apologize for now just going into a reply guy kind of train of thought mode here) that's the crux of it. Tech (capital T) isn't about the tech anymore. It got massively funded, it prooved it's a great tool to exert power and maintain control. That dragged in a bunch of people that only care about the power and control, certainly a lot of ego-driven people. The people who (at least used to) care about the tech (not Tech) are still mostly around. But they (we?) always desperately wanted to be accepted because they (we?) were weird geeks with little to no social circle. So what you described takes place, regardless of ypur motivation you "shut up and code" (sometimes you don't even code as much, depending on where within the wormforce ypu might have ended up), because ypu might have gone in it for the tech, but now that you're part of Tech, everyone says that's a bog deal. You're in a great position for yourself and you need to push through and keep it, regardless of what your motivation might have been initially.

@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.