Heroes and Villains

Earlier this week I asked a question on Mastodon: “Who are the Jane Goodalls and David Attenboroughs of software?” Goodall was a primatologist best known for decades of research on chimpanzees, and Attenborough has been making nature documentaries longer than I’ve been alive. Both are well-known to the general public (at least in the English speaking world) and have been powerful forces for good.

Which means that the answer to my question is, “We don’t have any.” If you ask someone who isn’t in tech to name people who are, they will say Gates or Musk or Zuckerberg. They know our corporate super-villains, not the people who have been trying to make the world a better place. It’s as if the only people you knew who had something to do with the environment were the presidents of oil companies, none of whom I could name without doing an online search.

I don’t know why this is, how to change it, or whether changing it would matter. Now that I’ve noticed it, though, I can’t stop thinking about it. If there’s someone outside the Anglosphere who fits the bill, I’d be grateful for a pointer.