The New Reality

Technology is keeping humanity connected to one another during what is probably the first pandemic most – if not all – of us are living through. Covid-19 (coronavirus), extremely contagious and without an available vaccine, has infected more than 10 million people worldwide, with at least 5 million having recovered and over half a million people dead.

From online schooling to Work-From-Home directives given to many professionals, online communication, banking and entertainment (hello Netflix and PS4), the dependence on technology has never been stronger or more serious across the world.

But relying on technology is one thing. Understanding it is quite another.

For instance, it was never a massive group of adults who took down the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) website in the USA in 2011. A handful of mostly kids posing as the grand collective Anonymous did it as author Parmy Olson discovered in the gripping non-fiction book, We Are Anonymous.

Coders: Who they are, what they think and how they are changing the world by Clive Thompson, however, is not about Anonymous or about taking sides as The Digital Age – Reshaping the future of people, Nations and Business, written by Google’s Executive Chairman, Eric Schmidt and Director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, attempts in its overzealous effort to make Google look like something out of Iron Man. In other words: a profound saviour.

We may use Gmail, buy iPods and marvel at the late Steve Job’s ingenuity (the subject of two films and at least one documentary) or Microsoft founder and philanthropist Bill Gates but let’s end the love affair there.

Coders begins with not only taking us through the early age of coding and the wave of coders but it makes a very important point early on: coding’s origin story is that it was done for the fun of it and not with a mission to make money off of it. It was not about reshaping nations or for the purpose of state-surveillance when it began in the ‘50s.

Writing code is essentially being a programmer with a colossal amount of patience. Programmers write the algorithms that make a program do something and a tiny bug can offset the whole algorithm where it mucks up what a program is supposed to do. Finding the bug, tiny as it may be, requires a great deal of patience.

However, the personality types are not stereotypical, points out pioneering data scientist Hilary Mason. “She rebels at the idea that a single archetype can hold true across an ever-larger cohorts of coders worldwide. The population has grown so much that you can’t generalize across the entire field anymore when it comes to personality.”

These very men and women of yesterday are some of the hot-shots in the world of technology today. And they believed in open-source (the code was available for anyone to see and not a guarded secret).

As Coders noted, “Women were among some of the first-ever coders in the ‘50s.”

The author further revealed that from “1983 when there were 37.1 per cent of computer science majors but by 2010, the rate had declined to less than half that, around 17 per cent.”

Racial diversity in Silicon Valley tech firms, points out Coders, has a racial makeup of White and Asian men with African-Americans and Latino coders falling in the single digit, somewhere near 1 to 2 per cent.

Women were towering figures once but as Silicon Valley embraced the culture of ‘fratboy’ way of life with male coders playing video games, the room for the opposite gender began dropping.

What did bind the unsung heroes of coding, men and women, together was that the right result brought with it, a natural high like when a bug is fixed and code does what it is supposed to do or writing a program that operates smoothly (which could take weeks). The unpredictability is another attraction to the world of coding.

As Coders notes, a surge in learning how to code was also a result of films like The Net (1995) and The Matrix (1999) with “elite hackers like Neo”. But if these two films played a strong role in inspiring a generation to learn how to write code, other depictions on mediums such as television via series like Mr. Robot and Silicon Valley are far from the truth. To understand it better, perusing this work of non-fiction would be a good idea.

The book does have a singular draw back. For anyone who is not a computer scientist or programmer, the insertion of coding language takes some space. Most adults will struggle with it, unless they are well-versed in playing video games, looking at source code of websites or some variation of it. And, even then, it is no guarantee. Luckily, coding language doesn’t take too much space. This is not coding for dummies. Reading the book is an exercise in pop-psychology in a sense.

The book also talks about the negative cost of technological advancement. Orkut failed but Facebook worked. Its news feed feature can feed you misinformation. The last US Elections is quoted as one example. There are also dedicated chapters on trolling.

Noted Coders: “By February 2017, even (Mark) Zuckerberg appeared to be wondering what sort of creature he’d electrified into existence.”

Similarly, it is also pointed out that Instagram – with its many filters – can feed into a person’s sense of self-image and not for the good.

Coders has a narrative and a voice and Clive Thompson keeps things fascinating rather than banal by thoroughly researching the subject. Given how seamlessly it takes the reader through the history of computing through time, it is a must read for anyone interested in technology at any level. If you have ever wondered why Instagram is called Instagram; why Facebook had to buy it out for 1 billion dollars instead of coming up with the idea itself and who are some of the lesser known contributors without whom technology wouldn’t be what it is today, Coders is the book for you.

– Available at Liberty Books