{"id":33600,"date":"2015-11-17T03:00:08","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T08:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33600"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:32:55","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:32:55","slug":"the-cult-of-meritocracy-in-hacker-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/11\/17\/the-cult-of-meritocracy-in-hacker-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"The “cult of meritocracy” in hacker culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric S. Raymond<\/a> on the demands for political correctness even within the hacker community:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to analyze SJW ideology here except to point out, again, why the hacker culture must consider anyone who holds it an enemy. This is because we must<\/em> be a cult of meritocracy. We must constantly demand merit \u2013 performance, intelligence, dedication, and technical excellence \u2013 of ourselves and each other.<\/p>\n

Now that the Internet \u2013 the hacker culture\u2019s creation! \u2013 is everywhere, and civilization is increasingly software-dependent, we have a duty, the duty I wrote about in Holding Up The Sky<\/a>. The invisible gears have to turn. The shared software infrastructure of civilization has to work<\/em>, or economies will seize up and people will die<\/em>. And for large sections of that infrastructure, it\u2019s on us \u2013 us! \u2013 to keep it working. Because nobody else is going to step up.<\/p>\n

We dare not give less than our best. If we fall away from meritocracy \u2013 if we allow the SJWs to remake us as they wish, into a hell-pit of competitive grievance-mongering and political favoritism for the designated victim group of the week \u2013 we will betray not only what is best in our own traditions but the entire civilization that we serve.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t about women in tech, or minorities in tech, or gays in tech. The hacker culture\u2019s norm about inclusion is clear: anybody who can pull the freight is welcome, and twitching about things like skin color or shape of genitalia or what thing you like to stick into what thing is beyond wrong into silly. This is about whether we will allow \u201cdiversity\u201d issues to be used as wedges to fracture our community, degrade the quality of our work, and draw us away from our duty.<\/p>\n

When hackers fail our own standards of meritocracy, as we sometimes do, it\u2019s up to us<\/em> to fix it from within our own tradition: judge by the work alone, you are what you do, shut up and show us the code. A movement whose favored tools include the rage mob, the dox, and faked<\/em> incidents of bigotry is not morally competent to judge us or instruct us.<\/p>\n

I have been participating in and running open-source projects for a quarter-century. In all that time I never had to know or care whether my fellow contributors were white, black, male, female, straight, gay, or from the planet Mars, only whether their code was good. The SJWs want to make me care; they want to make all of us obsess about this, to the point of having quotas and struggle sessions and what amounts to political officers threatening us if we are insufficiently \u201cdiverse\u201d.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

It has been suggested that djangoconcardiff might be a troll emulating an SJW, and we should thus take him less seriously. The problem with this idea is that no SJW disclaimed him \u2013 more generally, that \u201cSocial Justice\u201d has reached a sort of Poe\u2019s Law singularity at which the behavior of trolls and true believers becomes indistinguishable even to each other, and has the same emergent effects.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric S. Raymond on the demands for political correctness even within the hacker community: I\u2019m not going to analyze SJW ideology here except to point out, again, why the hacker culture must consider anyone who holds it an enemy. This is because we must be a cult of meritocracy. We must constantly demand merit \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[53,15],"tags":[1235,129,93,351,997,92],"class_list":["post-33600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-technology","tag-esr","tag-hack","tag-opensource","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-socialjustice","tag-software"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8JW","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33600"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33601,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33600\/revisions\/33601"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}