Books For a Talk

I’m finally turning my proposal for a book titled Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code: What Everyone in Tech Needs to Know About Politics, Economics, Justice, and Power into a talk. The sources I plan to mention are listed below; I’d be grateful for pointers to ones I’ve missed.

Note: my target audience is undergraduates in computer science and software engineering who have never taken a class on politics, sociology, anthropology, or organizational behavior, but dismiss those disciplines as “soft”. If forced to wade through something dense and dull they will dutifully parrot what they think they’re supposed to in order to get a grade, but not change their view of the world in any substantial way. In order to have impact, this book must be engaging; serious academics may therefore dismiss it as “light” or “shallow”, but there’s no point being right if no one hears you.

• Examples of humanist analyses in software engineering:
  • Petre: “UML in Practice” (2013)
  • Steinmacher et al: “Social Barriers Faced by Newcomers Placing Their First Contribution in Open Source Software Projects” (2015)
  • Sedano et al: “Software Development Waste” (2017)
  • Hicks: “It’s Like Coding in the Dark” (2022)
  • See The Fourth Tradition for more background
• What software engineering management books don’t talk about:
  • Labor rights
  • Workplace discrimination: less than 8 pages between 12 books
  • Professional liability (or rather, why there isn’t any)
  • Regulatory capture
  • Co-operatives and other organizational models
• Books that are earnest but will put most programmers to sleep:
  • Steen: Ethics for People Who Work in Tech (2022)
  • Goltz & Dowdesell: Real World AI Ethics for Data Scientists (2023)
  • Schlossberger: Ethical Engineering: A Practical Guide with Case Studies (2023)
  • Wendorff: Politics in Software Development(2022)
• Books that prove these topics can be interesting:
  • Levitt & Dubner: Freakonomics (2006)
    • Preaches the neoliberal gospel that the only valid way to analyze individual behavior is maximization of wealth…
    • …which is provably wrong, but their writing is so engaging that this is possibly the most effective piece of propaganda in English in the last 30 years
  • Wainright: Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel (2017)
    • Turns out that marketing and HR are big challenges for crime syndicates…
    • …and you can learn a lot about how legitimate business works by looking at ones that ignore the legal system
    • I’d like to see a book comparing big tech to drug cartels
      • Big tech companies sell deliberately addictive products…
      • …treat the law as a business expense…
      • …and are frequently run by narcissists
  • Raymond: The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
    • Popularized a compelling but misleading myth about the social organization of open source development
    • Part of the point of this book is to get readers to the point where they understand why it was wrong and why it was popular
  • Bellotti: Kill It With Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) (2021)
    • A critical but compassionate look at legacy systems, why they persist, and how to change them
• Books that I think every software engineer should read (but know they won’t, hence the needed to summarize):
  • Douglas: Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (2002)
  • Davies: Lying for Money: How Legendary Frauds Reveal the Workings of the World (2022)
  • Baetjer: Software as Capital: An Economic Perspective on Software Engineering (1997)
  • Scott: Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
  • Phillips Rozworski: The People’s Republic of Walmart (2019)
  • Wilkinson & Pickett: The Spirit Level (2011)
  • Achen & Bartels: Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (2017)
  • de Mesquita & Smith: The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics (2022)
  • Linklater: Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership (2015)
  • Bracha: Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790–1909 (2019)
  • Igo: The Known Citizen: A History of Privacy in Modern America (2020)
  • Young: Abolishing Fossil Fuels: Lessons From Movements That Won (2024)

Abstract

Most young programmers have only ever been exposed to one worldview: the toxic strain of neoliberal capitalism favored by venture capitalists and their gushing fans in the tech media. As inequality widens and racist nationalism makes a comeback, as we do everything in our power to make climate change worse while companies like X, Facebook, and Shopify tie themselves in knots to avoid responsibility for their actions, most programmers don’t have the intellectual tools to understand what’s wrong and how we might fix it.

Lots of books give cogent answers to these questions, but programmers who have never done a civics course are not going to read nine thousand pages on a whim. However, they might sit through a one-semester course that explains why the human side of software engineering is harder than the technical side. This talk outlines what such a course might cover: why “flat” organizations make power imbalances worse rather than better, why discrimination persists despite its economic inefficiency, how regulatory capture works, why Americans keep shooting one another, and what can we learn about big tech by studying drug cartels.