Authoritarianism of Code
Authoritarianism of Code
An essay on the pervasive internalized authoritarianism found in the programming profession.
By Zed A. ShawAuthoritarianism of Code<br>It's my belief that authoritarianism is so ingrained in the fabric of software development that it has been internalized to such a degree that even the most anti-authoritarian people cannot avoid being authoritarian. This essay is an attempt to outline a framework for evaluating software development practices, organizations, and communities on the basis of authoritarian and totalitarian policies and behaviors.<br>My goal in writing this series of essays on authoritarianism is to give people in the software development world--and specifically in open source--the information they need to make a fully enthusiastic, informed, consensual decision to continue to be a part of an authoritarian system. What I want is for people who are currently involved in a project to avoid wasting their life working for leaders and a community that ultimately will simply exploit them as all authoritarian organizations do.<br>In short, I believe there is no such thing as a Benevolent Dictator for Life, and that by learning why that's true you can better decide to for yourself how you want to spend your free time.<br>Caveat Emptor<br>Programmers have a propensity to use the Fallacy of False Equivalence to discredit or promote nearly anything. If you create a fantastic system for people to communicate, the people who hate it will says, "That's just Twitter." No matter how different your system is from Twitter, they will use False Equivalence to discredit your work by abstracting the definition of "Twitter" to be "Any system where people talk". However, if this Twitter hater invents a new chat protocol that they want to promote they will declare it a completely new invention of pure genius that is nothing like anything before. This random false equivalence allows programmers to use abstraction to redefine nearly anything they want to mean anything else they want.<br>To prevent this fallacy of false equivalence I'm going to narrow the discussion to communities that do not gain Informed Consent for their authoritarianism. In fact, another essay will make the case that a defining criteria of authoritarianism is removing people's right to informed consent, so if a project is honest about being authoritarian, then they are most likely not authoritarian, even though the community may be.<br>This means that if you're reading this, and then you attempt to apply the false equivalence trick to make it seem like everything is authoritarian, then you're wrong. Or, maybe you're right, but I'm narrowing this discussion to specific communities and projects that are:<br>Attracting people to join without enthusiastic informed consent.<br>Utilizing this disparity in information to create, support, or promote authoritarian goals.<br>For example, if you want to say that all corporations are authoritarian, then while that may be true in an abstract sense, it wouldn't be true for this discussion because people who join corporations definitely know that they're authoritarian. Same would be true for an educational institution. People join universities and know that it is an authoritarian system by its nature. They're clearly informed before joining, and enthusiastically pay to be there. This changes however if the organization doesn't inform people of things that would have changed their consent.<br>I will also separate analysis of authoritarian leaders from authoritarian communities. By separating the community from the leaders we can start to make a more distinct and accurate analysis of authoritarianism. We can have situations where the people in charge may be doing everything right, but the community is rampantly authoritarian. We could have the inverse where the leaders are completely authoritarian but the community is not behaving in any authoritarian way. It is frequently both, but there are a few instances where there's a separation. Once we understand where the authoritarianism is coming from then we can start to make plans to change the situation, or simply leave now that we are more fully informed.<br>Not Fascism<br>You'll notice that I deliberately use the word "authoritarianism" rather than "fascism" in this discussion. From a programmer's viewpoint I see fascism as a subclass of authoritarianism, and I want to discuss authoritarianism in a more universal sense. I also avoid the word fascism because it tends to allow authoritarians to dodge the substance of accusations against them with claims of conspiracy theory. The tactic is to wait for someone to scream "Nazi!" or "Fascist!" and then to say they are not a Nazi because they are not even remotely as bad as Hitler. They never killed anyone "you crazy conspiracy theorist!"<br>Accusations of mental instability are a favorite of fascist regimes, so if you see that you know immediately that person is definitely a fascist. But, not being as bad at Hitler...