Coding in a material world

I wrote this in a week in which several things happened. First of all, Thomas Ptacek's article My AI skeptic friends are all nuts was brought to my attention again, and I was annoyed by the sheer detachment of it from any perspectives that I hold. Secondly, Bibi and Trump repeatedly bombed Iran, largely, it seems, because of the vibes of the thing. Finally, I encountered some truly, spectacularly bad takes on Bluesky, of the "you are technically correct but Jesus Christ" variety. All of these situations had one thing in common: they have people seemingly making decisions as to how to act that are completely untethered from reality. This got me thinking: we encounter a lot of detachment from reality these days, and it seems to be at the core of our lot of problems. People lying habitually and shamelessly, dunces being placed in a position of real power over experts, people in high positions making deeply stupid decisions... people act as they are unconstrained by materiality, consequences or the laws of physics. This essay aims to figure out why.

The common ideological kernel of all of this behaviour is a deeply embedded trope in anglosphere societies: a contempt for materiality, or the idea that the material world that we eat, sleep, drink, fuck and die in is somehow beneath the notice or the care of sufficiently important people. In cases where this belief is deeply held, it can even extend to an unwillingness to even pay attention to materiality, with the person preferring to live in a world of ideological constructs, gut feelings and half-remembered lessors rather than observing the conditions and phenomena that are actually happening. In short, they tend to prioritise ideology over material realities, and have nothing but contempt for those who persist in pointing these realities out.

Unfortunately, thanks to said contempt and the consequent focus on status above all else, people who think this way can effectively outcompete the rest of us, who are constrained by having to say things that are broadly true, or when we lie, having to be a good bit more deliberate about it. While the rest of us also have material domains that we have to focus on mastering, these people can also focus full-time on the cultivation of status. This is, to say the least, something of a problem, because we rely on the material world to feed us and shelter us, and the material world is where our families and our friends are. Moreover, so many of the things that make us happy and that we really value live in the material world: good food, music, nature...

Having contempt for the material, by contrast, leads to a closed-in, stunted existence: the Stanley cup as an entire mode of life, essentially. While the people exhibiting this contempt might be superficially rich in wealth and status, the emptiness that this way of being induces leads to a deep, abiding resentment of those of us who engage with materiality on good terms: Elon Musk, who can't make anyone love him no matter how rich he is is an excellent example of this, with his cybertruck being an obvious example of design done by people who hate physics. And this emptiness, in turn, leads to some deeply, deeply pathological actions.

Understanding this contempt for the material has the potential to explain a large part of what's wrong with our world at the moment. It is thus worth subjecting to analysis.

Why do we hate materiality?

The natural question to ask from here is where this hatred of material realities stems from. This is, as always, really complicated: cultural phenomena have many causes, and it's difficult to pinpoint exactly how the phenomenon came to be. That said, there are a few phenomena that definitely contributed, and I'll discuss them here.

The first plausible cause is the introduction of the Friedmanite dogma in the 1980's after oil shocks led to significant inflation. While whole books have been written about this shitshow, the salient point here is that the doctrine states that the sole duty of the managers of a company is to maximise shareholder value. Shareholder value as a concept is deeply ephemeral and immaterial, so maximising it at the expense of the material actions that go into running a company is naturally going to do some weird shit: after all, materially damaging one's ability to actually do the thing that one's business does in order to make a number go up is hard to square with most ingrained human instincts about how to do shit. If you're going to take this idea seriously, then, you have to do some serious work towards reshaping the people. Which we did. We've spent so long pushing the idea of a personal brand (as an aside, the person who came up with that idea should be [comment removed by reddit]), lauding companies like Nike that are, in essence, a brand with no real expertise or manufacturing behind them and generally elevating the symbolic over the material everywhere we can that a certain bundle of ideas stuck in the general consciousness. The idea, in general, is that working hard and developing expertise is pointless, but you should ruthlessly cultivate your image and your vibes to be able to effectively convince the people whom your economic well-being depends on. This idea pops up everywhere these days, to the extent that it's mostly just taken as common sense (which it isn't).

The Protestant (I'd probably say Calvinist, but I'm a nerd) work ethic also has a lot to answer for here. Quite a lot has been written on this, but the logic here is a little different from what I'd usually try and draw out. In this case, the core issue of the work ethic is the idea that material wealth is a sign of divine favour. This is fucked in many, many ways: in this case, the key issue is that it implies that material effects have supernatural causes: for example, Christopher Luxon is prime minister of New Zealand because he is so very devout and so God gave him the position to reward him. Of course, if material effects have supernatural causes, they can't have material causes, so worrying about understanding the material world and trying to change it is pointless and a sign that you aren't saved. For people in that kind of cultural sphere, therefore, taking an interest in the material makes you automatically suspect.

Finally, the degradation of literacy we've seen in developed society over the last few years probably administered the coup de grace. Words on a page are fixed: in a sense, they're more real than words that are spoken, recorded and transmitted. You can't change them after the fact (well, you can, but it's harder than you might think), and they remain after the fact as a record of what you wrote. Words, in a sense, create a reality and tie you down with it. Spoken words and videos are much more slippery: they can mutate, they're much easier to misinterpret, and people tend to subject spoken words or video to significantly less scrutiny than they do text. Speaking personally, it's also much harder to extract the thread of an argument from spoken words: I usually have to transcribe and then close-read afterwards to catch everything. Given that a significant chunk of our population struggles to read a newspaper and thus gets most of their information from spoken and video sources, it's unsurprising that a lot of these people will struggle to get a grasp on what is actually, materially happening (at least beyond what they personally experience).

Between all of this, the social and ideological pressure to abandon materiality and treat it as something that only people beneath you should deal with is intense. Treating material realities with contempt has actively become a status symbol. And we all know what people do with status symbols: they imitate them. In short, if you want to be a high-status person in this society, you are almost required to denigrate the material work that the people beneath you do.

Vibe coding as contempt for materiality

While it almost certainly wasn't the root cause of this contempt for materiality (I suspect, as stated above, that a large part of this was due to the Friedmanite dogma and managerialism), the tech industry is deeply entwined with it and has a lot to answer for.

It makes sense that the tech world would develop a contempt for materiality and material realities: as I've discussed before, the basic materia with which we write software (programming languages, the internet, even hardware to an extent) are far more labile than the materials worked with in any other craft. We work day-to-day on machines that are capable, in theory, of computing anything that's computable. Trying things out is quick and easy: with two hours of work, you can usually spin up a proof of concept for an idea you've had. Making your work available to others is as simple as setting up a VM and a reverse proxy on your favourite cloud, and making changes can be as simple as pushing to a Git repository. In such a situation, it's easy to start thinking that whatever you believe about tech must be true and that you can bring it to being with only a little effort.

Naturally, therefore, an ideology arose around this stating, in essence, that code can just create value out of nothing and without interacting with the material world. The idea, broadly, is that because tech is magic, it can somehow simply create value without having to interact with anything that might constrain it. In this worldview, value is created by creating an app: questions of deployment, maintenance and actually making the thing available to people are of secondary importance, and never mind the question of whether it actually makes anyone's life easier or makes them more productive. It can even make everyone's lives actively worse (C.F. Facebook) or cause investors to lose money (I'm almost entirely convinced that VC funding actively decreases the chances of a tech start-up being successful); so long as the app is created, it's rewarded with prestige and glowing write-ups in the press. With the long period of money to build basically anything being readily available for people of the right colour and gender, and with the culture of tech, it quickly became easy for a lot of tech people and those parasitic on them to adopt the idea that anything dealing with real, serious, constrained applications was boring and beneath them. Even vital tasks like cloud engineering, systems administration and DevOps were, to a great extent, pushed onto more marginal people in the industry, allowing the founders, the managers and the application developers to live in a world where they never had to deal with anything mucky, difficult or real.

... if only this shit were that simple.

The fact is, software is only useful inasmuch as it's able to affect material realities. Payroll software, for instance, enables people to be paid for their work and thus buy food, pay rent and do all the other things that people do with money. Finite Element Modelling software allows engineers to design bridges, buildings and all the things that make up the urban environments that we, for the most part, live in. Discord allows me to message my friends, chat with them, organise dinners and network to find work. Even video games allow people to have fun, relieve stress, spend time with friends and tell random people that they fucked their mother over voice chat. All of these are important, material impacts that software has. And importantly, once you start writing software that has to engage with material realities, you begin to face material constraints.

This doesn't sit well with a lot of people in the general tech sphere. After all, having to deal with constraints, for a person of a certain mind, is dreary and boring. If you're doing engineering for the love of the craft, working within constraints can be actively enjoyable (I like it quite a lot, for example), but if you're mostly in tech for the large salary and the social prestige (as so many people are), having to deal with all the details of a domain can be a real drag. Why, after all, should a tech-bro worry about accounting software or the grimy details of dairy farming when they're here to write code?

Given the sheer number of people in the industry and its investors who share this view, it's unsurprising that the bulk of the industry has turned towards encouraging largely unconstrained applications at the expense of material ones: a contempt for materiality if every I saw one. LLMs are a prime example of this; as I've discussed previously, LLMs are difficult to constrain when writing code, as the only option you have for constraining it is the prompt. This means that LLM-generated outputs almost definitionally cannot have the material impact that useful, purposeful software or any other output needs to have. The only situation in which LLM output can be put to use, therefore, are ones in which there are no real constraints on the output. There are a whole lot of other technologies out there that are similar: blockchain, for example, quite directly claims to create value unconstrained by reality or interactions in the real world. It's thus unsurprising that when placed in a material context, it struggles to do anything useful and mostly just winds up being used in various scams (the subtext, of course, being that to a greater or lesser extent, so is a lot of other tech stuff). More prosaically, checked-out engineers that want to write code rather than actually solving a problem with code wind up writing products that simply don't align with reality in any meaningful way. Utilities and government services can be particularly bad for this: a lot of the time, the people involved in writing the software underpinning their online services and the people above them just had no interest in actually helping people interact with their services better. Rather, they just... kinda checked out, and don't give a shit that pensioners can no longer access their superannuation.

And that brings us to the end-point of this ideology: vibe coding. Vibe coding is the contempt for the material boiled down to its essentials. You tell the machine to make you an app, and it makes you an app and you have an app that is like what you told the machine that you wanted. It doesn't matter that it's not fit for purpose, because the purpose is to have an app and the idea that anyone might actually have to use it in the real world to make something happen is unimportant. The general view seems to be akin to "use this, you peasants, and be grateful that your betters made it for you". This is dripping with contempt for things that happen in the material world, and for the people who are primarily preoccupied with it.

Contempt in business

If that was an end to it, that'd be bad enough: the tech industry does, after all, control far too much of the world at the moment. Unfortunately, the rot's spread far further than that. From industries as diverse as media, construction, oil and gas engineering and fucking Boeing, the people in power in these industries and the bulk of the practitioners in the same industries have adopted this same contempt for the material.

Obviously this can't directly be a result of tech cooking peoples' brains in the way described above: most of the people doing this have not worked enough with computers for that to happen. On the whole, however, there are three main reasons that this has happened everywhere, not just in the tech world.

The first mechanism stems directly from the Friedmanite dogma. I don't think that Friedman et al. deliberately set out to create this situation, to be honest: these economists were capable (if evil) thinkers with at least some connection to material realities. In fact, I think that's a large part of the problem: if you're sufficiently materially rooted, it's extremely hard to understand how someone with nothing but contempt for materiality thinks. Thus, inadvertently (though what these thinkers were actually trying to achieve is just as abhorrent), Friedman et al. created an ideology and a business environment where grifters could flourish like never before. So long as stock prices went up or something else went right well enough that investors were convinced, and so long as the grifter could lie effectively and convincingly enough, they would succeed. This means that, consciously or unconsciously, a lot of the people in the workforce at present are basically grifters. They get into positions because they can say the right things and have the right vibes (there's that vibe thing popping up again), and then well... it doesn't matter much what they do, so long as they can convince the stock market to approve of them. There aren't even real consequences for failure outside of really egregious fraud that hits people that are considered "important". This created a population of people who are basically untethered from reality: what happens in the material world, outside of a very rarefied social circle, simply doesn't matter to them. No wonder they see it as beneath them.

The second mechanism stems, I think, from managerialism. Managerialism meshes extremely well with the Friedmanite dogma as interpreted by grifters: it is, after all, an ideology that say that managers trained in "management" are automatically going to be much better at managing any given task than the people who, you know, actually do the job. This means that managers and high-ups in businesses tend increasingly to become the kinds of people who don't know how to do shit and think that this qualifies them to speak over us on subjects that we know more about. This contempt for the material, in fact, is a large part of what I suspect causes the stupidity and malice that I describe in my epistemology article (linked above). Putting those two together, we find people who are pressured to bullshit relentlessly for extremely gullible audiences from above, and who are pressured to think they know more about the process they're managing than the people actually carrying it out from below. That seldom ends well, and thus you wind up with a group of people who deliberately have to ignore materiality in order to avoid massive psychological breakdown. And psychologically, as we've learned to our great cost, dehumanising the people who do the thing you don't like is vitally important to being able to ignore it.

Finally, tech does have a certain level of cachet in this society. Modern computer technology (partially coincidentally and partially due to deliberate guidance) has developed along lines very similar to what the Friedmanites would suggest is correct, with the focus being on finance and technologies of control: technologies that deskill people, that ignore existing legal constraints, technologies that can replace workers with unbelievably shitty automations and extract more and more "productivity" from the few that are left (LLMs strike again!). Between that, the explosive growth that technical companies have experienced and the fact that tech, from the outside, looks even less constrained than it does from the inside, it's very easy for a lot of people in other fields to develop tech envy. One way that people tend to try and cope with this is by emulating the people whom they envy, and in this case, it means other companies trying to emulate what tech companies do. If you think SCRUM is bad in software engineering, you should try it on a civil engineering project.

Taken together, the image is unflattering. We have people who know nothing and who have no skills of note attempting to assert their superiority over skilled experts by regurgitating meaningless words and pretending to do what tech companies do without bothering to check the purpose of an already highly flawed process. Decisions are mostly made on the basis of vibes, status and what makes these people feel good. This is not how a sensible person would run a society.

The main thing to note here is how persistent this ideology is. Companies and those who work for them stick to this contempt for materiality while share prices drop (share prices aren't exactly material, but sometimes they're still too material for people to tolerate), planes fall out of the sky, oil rigs explode and people die in droves, even people who are important in their eyes and have political pull. And yet nothing changes. People still can't see past their own belief that the material is beneath them and keep acting out the patterns they've learned while everything falls apart around them. Part of the reason for this is likely a lack of direct consequences for all but the most egregious malfeseance: there's no way to judge whether people are doing well or not, therefore people largely rely on self-reporting, and consequently the people to blame get off scott-free, but even with that, uprooting this kind of viewpoint is strikingly hard and likely requires a lot of social pressure to achieve. Which makes it all the more worrying that it's seeped into our politics.

The political consequences

The triumph of vibes over reality is at its most visible on the fascist right: the Trump regime operates with a complete lack of regard for material realities. Elon Musk is particularly guilty of this: his rockets and his cars are build with a complete lack of regard for basic physics, giving us a Cybertruck that even some of his cultists will refuse to buy and multiple launch sites that have been burnt to cinders. Trump appears to be attempting to start a war with Iran on the basis of vibes and wanting to watch cool explosions on TV with no regard for the material consequences of this on the USA or the world, Stephen Miller is deporting immigrants willy-nilly and destroying a materially important workforce (goddamn farm workers: you know, the people who feed the country) in the process, and I don't even want to go into what's happening to trans people too much; suffice to say that it is a material fact that we exist and that we can and will transition and demand rights, and this runs up against the vibes of the fascist right to an extent that they'll try and eradicate all of us in a desperate effort to avoid encountering material reality.

In a way that's less viscerally upsetting but rather more of a problem for actually getting rid of the fascists, large swathes of the forces of progress have already fallen into this. I imagine that large parts of this have to do with the collapse of Marxism as a totalising ideology in the early 90's: while I hold little love for Orthodox Marxism-Leninism in the soviet style, the way the left reacted to the sudden loss of the system they relied on was less than ideal. One response, was the white-knuckle belief common to fundamentalism: tankies and the like held onto the idea that soviet-style communism was the perfect system in defiance of all available evidence, relying on vibes to deny anything that challenged their position. On the other hand, we have those sections of the progressive population that allowed themselves to observe that Marxism in the soviet mould had failed, but as a result threw out any efforts to observe, reason or systematise in their politics and morality. This, being the majority position, has done far more damage.

The issue is that vibe-based politics simply don't work, because due to the fact that our leaders think the material world is dirty and for the peasants to concern themselves with, they lose the ability to identify real problems. Therefore, when people do vibe-based politics, we all get materially poorer, the state falls apart and we elect fascists while the richest people among us loot the country blind. We deserve politicians that can observe a social situation, make some reasoned guesses as to the causes and try to make policies that might actually fix it, but then again, that very statement clearly demonstrates how much care, observation and messy material stuff goes into governing effectively. People who don't want to have anything to do with the conditions obtaining in the field aren't going to be willing to do that.

Contempt for the material considered immoral

This is usually the part of the essay when I'd discuss how we might solve the moral issues identified in the rest of it. Being honest, however, I don't know how to solve this one. I don't know how to fix the fact that people refuse to reason or observe, or how to persuade people to do at least one of the above.

What I will assert, however, is a moral norm. Going forward, we should treatwillingness to observe and reckon with the world as it is rather than as we want it to be to be a core component of morality. Consequently, we should also treat an unwillingness to observe the world as it is as moral cowardice, and contempt for and denigration of empirical observation of the material world as a deeply immoral act. In short, we need to treat an unwillingness to see and interact with the material realities in front of you as being outright evil.

This concept borrows a lot from the Catholic concept of crass or supine ignorance. The idea of the concept in canon law is that if information about whether or not something is sinful is readily available to a person and could easily be sought out, but a person just doesn't bother, ignorance doesn't count against them when they commit a sin. This is, on the whole, a useful concept: we would naturally judge a bigot with limited access to resources about bigotry and limited contact with other people differently from one who has full access to those resources and comes into contact with other people regularly, but still maintains that same level of bigotry.

What I'm suggesting is that we generalise this concept to the idea that maintaining deliberate ignorance about the world and how it works, refusing to engage with material realities and holding contempt for the people who do should in and of themselves be considered moral evils and immoral behaviours.

The most basic reason for this is that refusing to engage with material realities bespeaks a lack of care or concern for other people, which really is the core idea behind almost all moral systems. You cannot directly engage with people through having the correct ideology or believing the right things: you have to talk to them or, goddess forbid, actually do something to help them. To deliberately not pay attention to the material realities affecting other people is therefor a tacit statement that you do not care about other people and their well-being: that they are less important to you than your ability to continue believing what you want to believe and acting as though you already live in the world you wish to live in. You are willing to make their lives materially worse or even end them, without even being aware of it, because you wish to hold onto your illusions about the world. What is that, other than evil?

A much more pernicious issue is that refusing to engage with material realities means that, even when you sincerely desire to do good, what you do to bring that about will almost inevitably turn towards evil. Rejecting materiality means rejecting the very thing you'd need to look at in order to figure out how to do good in the first instance, because spiritual forces are not real in that way. God will not help your fellow humans if you simply pray hard enough and believe all the right things: you have to go out there and do things in the material world. And doing that without being careful to identify what help your fellow humans actually need... well, it's easy enough to start thinking that if you just hate certain groups of people enough than the people whom you want to help will automatically benefit. Unfortunately, this doesn't work: launching antisemitic attacks against Jews in the USA helps Palestinians in precisely zero ways. In short, vibe-based politics inevitably trend towards fascism: without a strong prior commitment to the material benefit of the people around you, politics-by-hating-the-people-with-off-vibes becomes irresistibly tempting. You simply cannot do good in this world unless you understand what the world is.

In the end, we live in a real, material world that pushes back against us. Some things aren't true no matter how much we might like them to be, or are true no matter how much we'd wish otherwise. There are observable facts of existence and facts of reality where ignoring or suppressing them will lead to real, serious consequences. And if we want a better world, we cannot simply pretend that we already inhabit it; we need to do effective things to bring it about, which means observing materiality, understanding it and acting in ways that are effective at changing it.

And when all's said and done, I like the material world. It's often harsh, painful and endlessly frustrating, but in the end, it's glitteringly, beautifully real. There are beautiful views, food, drink, people to love, an endless number of ideas to explore, clear winter mornings... all the multifarious little things that make this world worth it. Destroying it, often without even paying attention to the fact that you are, because you prefer your vibes and your ideologies to looking around yourself and dealing with the world as you see it, is something that I will happily call evil. And I will oppose it til my dying breath.