Sex & Drugs & Guns & Code

Most of the young programmers I know 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, as white nationalism comes roaring back, as we do everything in our power to make climate change worse, and as companies like X, Google, and Meta tie themselves in ever-more-contorted knots to avoid taking responsibility for their actions, most programmers don’t have the intellectual tools needed to understand what’s gone wrong and how we might fix it. How does regulatory capture work? Why do “flat” organizations make power imbalances worse rather than better? Why do gender and racial discrimination persist despite their economic inefficiency? And why do Americans keep shooting one another?

Lots of books give cogent answers to these questions, but asking a programmer who has never done a civics course to read nine thousand pages about something they’re not yet sure is real is functionally equivalent to telling them to piss off. We need something that tells a story that coders will actually listen to, and that will entertain them while they learn. Call it Sex and Drugs and Guns and Code: What Everyone in Tech Needs to Know About Politics, Economics, Justice, and Power, get it upvoted on Reddit, and we just might change the world. These are my notes; if you’d like to suggest a fix or an addition, please get in touch.