as computing professionals, we should identify code literacy as a civic skill; it is a prerequisite for recognizing domination in software ecosystems.

from Kartik's piece:

There's a tight analogy here with prose literacy: anyone can read a novel, anyone can write an email, anyone can write a short critique on a novel, but only a few "vendors" can write novels. [...] I want above all to bring code literacy to a similar point to prose literacy: anyone can drill down to understand a large program as it affects them, anyone can write short programs for themselves, anyone can modify large programs in small ways for themselves.

the difficulty I encounter is that code literacy has many other guises: AI literacy (Long & Magerko 2020), visualization literacy (Börner et al 2019), and data literacy (Pangrazio & Sefton-Green 2020), to name a few which don't immediately contradict each other

the ability to read and write is ill-defined for texts, of course, but librarians over time managed to form an adequate consensus. now we (as educators, broadly) have to do the same for computing! somehow

Maybe a more succinct way of putting it: I'm skeptical that coding is emancipatory.

e.g. seeing like a technical person, and seeing like an interface designer.

> I'm skeptical that coding is emancipatory. @Ivan Reese One example I think about in this regard is how our community here, with tons of expertise on producing software, has failed to to "free" ourselves from Slack's lock-in and increasing decay

So in this case, where my desire is to build a software tool to solve a software(+more) problem, coding skill is I would argue necessary but not sufficient.

A lot of those problems are symptoms of domination! But I hate to see "enshittification" shade directly into boring entitlement in folk (consumer) discourses.

In my experience there is this kind of fish in water phenomenon where people treat things like siloed apps, implicit feudalism (i.e. governance), lack of ownership, etc. as laws of physics. It's hard to pop this bubble that there is nothing inherent about these things in software

I appreciate that @Kartik Agaram concludes that essay be saying "we are all illiterate". There is still so much we don't know about how people use software day to day. Some of the few studies we do have on how people use (or really don't use) keyboard shortcuts might be revealing of computational literacy. It's sort of hard to imagine the average person "drilling down to understand a large program as it affects them" when reportedly 40% of people don't know about copy and paste shortcuts. 😅

I also wonder if we are putting the bar too high (or in the wrong place) for satisfying our own needs. Community-owned tools are by definition not industrial tools. Writing our own Slack clone may solve the problem of Slack dependence, but it won't make a community-owned communication medium. It would still be out of the reach of most of us.

The closest I have seen recently to a community-owned communication medium is org-social. I didn't get it initially, I though it was an elaborate joke. But if you consider it as a medium for Emacs power users, then most of them can understand and hack on all its aspects, relying only on an infrastructure consisting of Emacs itself and git. Better yet, even an alternative implementation outside of Emacs is a reasonable project even for an individual. Of course such a network will never scale to the level of Slack, BlueSky, or the Fediverse. It doesn't have to. So maybe our starting point should be different. Could we build a communication medium around the git-backed Slack archives run by @Kartik Agaram and @Mariano Guerra? Building just as much as we need, as the needs become progressively clearer?

Yes, you can make something quickly and cheaply, and you'll own that thing. But that thing will be quick and cheap. I don't want to live in a community that's quickly and cheaply made.

I would be okay living in a community that's under construction, if there's a desirable end state and a clear path to get there. "Make our own platform" is the desirable end state, but "spend a year worth of nights and weekends building it" is not a clear path.

I too am unworthy of the Liberated Computing Medium, for I am not free of compromise. We should still coordinate on why we want it, and how we would build it, and what compromises we need to make with each other so that everyone can live there eventually.

Then again, I feel like I've fallen into a trap along with everyone else and started focusing on the Slack question rather than the broader question that started this thread. Is coding emancipatory? Coding might be emancipatory if you assume people are rational and constantly thinking about their self-interest, and willing to change behavior once they're convinced of a superior alternative. But it's definitely not emancipatory assuming a behavioral model of people as bundles of irrationality, ruled by rationalization, subject to cognitive fallacies of sunk cost, lazy and unwilling to change habits. Above all, it's easier to see the flaws and limitations of others rather than ourselves. I think I'm ready to grant this. Coding is not emancipatory. I'm not sure any other

.*

is emancipatory either. Unclear where to go next.

Now I'm thinking about the word "emancipate". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/emancipate https://www.etymonline.com/word/emancipate There's a connotation here of giving up control over someone one had control over. Which doesn't really fit in the code sense. "Empower" seems more apt. Perhaps empowerment isn't some obvious shift in category but a more messy, gradual process. That would explain why it's sometimes hard to see any progress. Perhaps if coding doesn't seem empowering, it is empowering, but just hard to discern. Usually when progress it is seen, it is in economics. Perhaps the concrete way to make something more empowering is to show how it yields more economic leverage. This at least points at a direction to go next. Most of the stuff we do isn't empowering because it depends on the reader/listener to hear what we say and then... somehow... use it to better their economic life. We could claim it's empowering if we could better connect the dots between knowledge and economics. But I dunno. I'm just thinking aloud. Perhaps there's more than economics to think about. This way leads to coding bootcamps? 😬

Similar to how self-hosting doesn't seem like a viable path for getting off the cloud neither does the sound of self-scaffolding, as @Ivan Reese suggests he will undertake himself to get us off of slack. I'd love to see us have stronger values around community stewardship to take small steps towards the future we want, in some ways similar to communities like May First Technology Movement and servus.

If it means anything, I'd love to hear more about your ideas around the new space and help anyway i can. 😄

Oh and bots. I think linen uses a bot. It's wild that "bots" exist, and predate LLMs, in this enterprise product. What a weird thing, Slack is.

FWIW, I’m currently reading this paper and it feels like the first few pages could not possibly be more relevant to our conversation.