The Coder

The coder was a being created when the hacker turned themselves into full devotion to a monolingual discipline of their machines. The hack, beginning from the wilderness-rudiments of the machine’s lowest levels (with knowledge tracing down a genealogy to core components built before abstraction) and then ascending upwards in any number of arborescent directions, the fruiting bodies of mushrooms from the circuitboard. The coder emerged within the mushroom forest, worshipping the tallest of the fruiting bodies and copying them in rote religiosity. Entire disciplines descended from this, with the slavish devotional behavior of professional engineering, the copying and repetition of formulas of abstractions, an endless legalism emerging as specialization created deeper and deeper subcategories of expertise in these abstractions - APIs, devkits, SDKs, languages, libraries, proprietary tools, engines…

The mindset of the coder is a mindset which emerges always after-the-fact, in a literal sense. The mind of the coder is one which sees themselves as eternally after, standing on the ashes after the dust settles, overseeing the facts which have gone before them to solidify into the now. On rare occasions they take a childish, fetishistic glee in “explosions”, reversing this process through their various ritualistic excuses, the Mythbusters tropes and episode-structures being strong examples.

After-the-facts thinking informs the structure of Reddit and its attendant, Hackernews. The focus of these sites is never on original content, but on functioning as a sort of extended comments section, with a link posted in a heading and then the responses (after-the-facts) mulling over its relations to their various disciplines of process facts-after. Each of them does so differently, but their way of doing so remains identical, a disciple of schema taken from an already existant fruiting body, and the facts read in relation to its scholarly rules and strictures.

The problem of the Coder is one unsolvable, a problem of spiritual class. The mind of after-the-facts thinking is a mind of wholeness, a closed loop around which thought circulates like a hamster wheel’s captive producing the electric motion of labor. It’s this wholeness that produces the stunning androgyny of the working classes. Notice that every year the uniform of uncaring comfort becomes closer and closer to a median, yoga pants and a hoodie, sweatpants and a hoodie, t-shirt and jeans, the same fundamental ideas of rejecting all that which is outward-moving, that which is creative, and instead wishing only for ease of completion, integration into the already existant feedback loop. It’s from this that countless strife occurs, as for the peasant, gender (and its attendant, the libidinal drive outwards inherent to being one-of-a-pair), is nothing more than an arbitrary distraction, a strange alien force thrust upon them which they would ultimately rather be completely absolved of.

Reddit has, in recent years, become itself a feedback loop akin to the peasant-mind of the coder. The almost identical political groups have now become completely codependent in their mutual abuse, filling countless hours of labor with posting about the other in a perfect and almost entirely contained cyclical motion. It’s here that the laboring state of the peasant’s soul is laid bare. In the realm of supposed truth and freedom, that of politics, they fall into the same pattern which they apply to their technical discipline. Facts, reaction, all along someone else’s schema. Even in leisure, they know only the joy of laboring for another’s systems.