Geek Sublime

by Vikram Chandra

  The media theorists Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron have usefully described this new faith as “the Californian Ideology,” which “promiscuously combines the free-wheeling spirit of the hippies and the entrepreneurial zeal of the yuppies. This amalgamation of opposites has been achieved through a profound faith in the emancipatory potential of the new information technologies.”40 This high-tech determinism dictates that through the new worldwide amalgamation of hardware and software, a frictionless “electronic agora” will come into being, allowing the profitable exchange of both goods and ideas. Individuals will be empowered, they will speak to each other across all sorts of borders and come to mutual understanding. The governments of the world—useless as they are—will fade into irrelevance because governance will be provided by the crowd-sourced wisdom of the masses, led of course by the fearless and very cool visionaries who make software and hardware, who found companies, who make billions. If you’ve “solved”—for instance—some problems in online social networking, surely you’ll be able to disrupt world hunger. Pioneering individuals will focus their skills, their genius, on one domain after another and so transform the world for the better.

  Programmers and entrepreneurs tend to believe implicitly in

  the liberal ideal of the self-sufficient individual. In American folklore, the nation was built out of a wilderness by free-booting individuals—the trappers, cowboys, preachers, and settlers of the frontier. The American revolution itself was fought to protect the freedoms and property of individuals against oppressive laws and unjust taxes imposed by a foreign monarch. For both the New Left and the New Right, the early years of the American republic provide a potent model for their rival versions of individual freedom.41

  David Barrett’s knife-wielding, Lord-of-the-Flies programmer belongs to this mythology. Despite eating lunch in company-provided kitchens “full of copper-bottomed pots and fresh-picked herbs,” he is a rugged man of action. He may complain mightily about an eighty-thousand-dollar salary two years out of college, but he is a hunter and killer. A man who leads a magnificent posse of such hardened, hardcore individuals might justly say, “My coders will beat up your coders, any day of the week.”

  This figuring of computing as agon, a geeky arena of competition in which code-warriors prove their mettle against all comers, demands a certain manly style from those who would win and be recognized as victors. Steve Jobs was famed not only for his success but also his aggressive rudeness; his erstwhile partner Woz describes him as a “real rugged bastard” who found it necessary to “put people down and make them feel demeaned.”42 The social ineptitude of the sandal-wearing, long-haired pioneers of the early days has been elevated to a virtue. Shouting at co-workers and employees, abrasive behavior, indifference to the feelings of others, all these constitute both a privilege earned by skill and a signifier of the programmer’s elite status. This is most true, paradoxically, in the open-source movement, within which volunteer programmers collaborate to produce programs (like Firefox and Linux) under licensing schemes that guarantee universal, free access. These volunteers must cooperate to produce viable programs; yet it is within open source that programmers most fiercely pledge allegiance to the legacy of the early neckbeards. And so Linus Torvalds, the “benevolent dictator” of Linux, dismissed the makers of a rival operating system as “a bunch of masturbating monkeys”; and so, Eric S. Raymond, author of The New Hacker’s Dictionary and The Cathedral and the Bazaar, once told an interviewer proudly, “I’m an arrogant son of a bitch,” and refused a hapless Microsoft headhunter’s form-letter inquiry with an e-mail that ended, “On that hopefully not too far distant day that I piss on Microsoft’s grave, I sincerely hope none of it will splash on you.”43

  These postures and attitudes are common enough that some programmers have found it necessary to protest against them, as in a recent blog post by Derick Bailey titled “Dear Open Source Project Leader: Quit Being a Jerk.” Bailey writes about “open source elite” programmers making fun of inexperienced would-be contributors to their very own projects. “I’ve seen people delete their accounts, disappear from the internet, and leave the open source community behind because of jerks that torment and belittle and tear apart the work that they are putting in,” Bailey writes. “The worst part of this is knowing that some of these ‘OSS Elite’ were the geeks and freaks and nerds in high school, that got picked on by the jocks and other popular kids … The victims are becoming the perpetrators.”44

  The financial systems which support the software industry bring their own models of masculinity into interactions with programmers. Alec Scott, a Canadian journalist who writes about the Valley, was told by a rising young entrepreneur that he was surprised how “brusque” the venture capitalists were in meetings. “At first, I was taken aback by how tough they can be, but I learned to roll with it. There’s not much time wasted when they shoot you down quickly at least.” Another start-up founder told Scott, “This is a guy’s guy world, and you’ve gotta be prepared to go mano a mano with them. You might go down in flames, and they honour that. You can’t apologize. You must be ready for the fight.”45

  Those who do not participate in this manly roughhousing are regarded as suffering from a fatal incapability which precludes them making good software. The rudeness of elite programmers—the explanation goes—is actually the necessarily blunt, no-bullshit style of problem-solving engineers who value results over feelings. And finally what matters is the quality of the code—which is an objectively definable value—and the nationality or ethnicity of the programmers is irrelevant. Culture is irrelevant. Or, perhaps, in code, culture is absent, nonexistent. So if there are no women in programming, it is because they don’t or can’t code, because they are not interested in the craft. The world of programming is as it should be, as it has to be.

  One of the hallmarks of a cultural system that is predominant is that it succeeds, to some degree, in making itself invisible, or at least in presenting itself as the inevitable outcome of environmental processes that exist outside of the realm of culture, within nature. The absence of women within the industry is thus often seen as a hard “scientific” reality rooted in biology, never mind that the very first algorithm designed for execution by a machine was created by Lady Ada Byron, never mind Grace Hopper’s creation of the first compiler, and never mind that the culture of the industry may be foreign or actively hostile to women.

  The tech industry prides itself on being populated by rational thinkers, by devotees of the highest ideals of freedom and equality. Human resources departments are rightfully leery of litigation, and try to protect the companies through training and education. Yet, over the last few years, the industry has been beset by controversies sparked by acts of casual sexism—images of bikini-clad women used as backdrops for presentations about software; a Boston start-up that announced a hack-a-thon and as “Great Perks” offered gym access, food trucks, and women: “Need another beer? Let one of our friendly (female) staff get it for you.”46 In the heated discussions that have followed, one of the main rhetorical modes used by defenders of the status quo has been that sexism doesn’t really exist in the tech industry because in this perfect meritocracy programmers who write excellent code will rise to the top. Programming is male because men are excellent programmers. As male doctors and lawyers and chefs were once thought to naturally possess certain essential qualities that fitted them for these once universally male professions, male programmers have logic and problem solving written into their DNA, they are naturals. A woman who codes is out of her realm; one might say that “to be masculine is her worst reproach.”

  Of course, as Ensmenger shows us, the personalities and behavior that one encounters within the world of programming are embedded in a contingent culture constructed by a particular history. Ensmenger’s narrative denaturalizes the maleness and machismo of American programming, and as it tells a story that takes place mostly in America, at MIT and in the hallways of American corporations, it allows
us to think of other ways it might have happened or will happen in the future.

  The pre-Independence India my parents grew up in served as a vast source of raw materials and ready market for finished goods produced by the British Empire. “Before Gandhiji’s movement,” my mother told me many times when I was a child, “you couldn’t even find a sewing needle that had been made in India. Everything came from there.” The factories over there—in Glasgow and Manchester—turned iron ore into steel, cotton into cloth, and sold it all back to the Indians, whose poverty was understood as a pre-existent fact that the current regime was attempting to alleviate. The colonial educational system of course reflected this economic imperative in its structure and methods.

  “The engineering colleges established by the British in India had a circumscribed role: to prepare Indians to work in subsidiary positions under British rule,” the historian of technology Ross Bassett tells us.47 “The British established the engineering [colleges] … as a way to produce intermediate-grade engineers for the British Public Works Department, which had control over the schools.”48 This policy, carefully designed to limit the range of technological advancement in India, meant that students interested in cutting-edge or even just up-to-date engineering education had no option but to look abroad. And so, between 1900 and 1947, roughly a hundred young men made their way to MIT, which was already famous as the foremost institution of its type. Since the colonial government would grant no aid for such students, they depended on private or family funding, which ensured that most of them came from the upper echelons of Indian society. Some of them were from elite “law, business, and government service” families deeply involved in the movement for Independence, and were therefore connected to leaders like Nehru and Gandhi.49 As Bassett points out, “The early twentieth century marked the rise of the swadeshi movement in India, in which Indians developed indigenous industries as an act of resistance to British rule and dominance.”50 The Indians who went to MIT were motivated as much by a nationalist desire to reconstruct the shattered economy of their country as by a thirst for technology. Gandhi himself wrote to Bal Kalelkar, a young erstwhile associate now at MIT:

  I have your beautiful letter. I can understand that western music has claimed you. Does it not mean that you have such a sensitive ear as to appreciate this music? All I wish is that you should have all that is to be gained there and come here when your time is up and be worthy of your country.51

  By 1944, Indian bureaucrats and politicians were trying to plan for Independence, which everyone knew was coming. That year, the Executive Council of Planning and Development announced “a plan to send 500 students abroad in 1945 to institutes in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States to meet the demands for ‘urgent needs of post-war development.’”52 How deeply Indians believed that the technological future was to be found at MIT may be judged from the fact that from the 500 who were selected to benefit from this unprecedented funding, 271 applied to this one institution. MIT admitted 16 for the fall semester, and placed 180 on the waiting list, “implicitly stating that the students were well qualified for MIT but that there was no room for them.”53

  This “technological elite” of MIT-trained students played a central role in the development of science and technology in post-Independence India:

  In the first forty years of independence, MIT graduates occupied an astounding number of the highest-level positions in the Indian technical community—more than graduates of any other single school in the United States or the United Kingdom, and quite possibly more than the graduates of any single school in India.54

  Under Jawaharlal Nehru’s leadership, beginning in 1951, the government began setting up the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), designed from the start to provide world-class scientific and technological education on a meritocratic, heavily subsidized basis. The institutes were necessarily built with foreign aid, but the manner in which this aid was acquired and used was designed to reflect the country’s nonaligned status during the Cold War. After the first institute at Kharagpur, each campus had one national sponsor—the USSR provided support for IIT Bombay, and West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom followed with Madras, Kanpur, and Delhi respectively. MIT created and anchored a consortium of nine American universities that joined the Kanpur Indo-American Program in 1961. It was through this program that the first computer arrived in India: in July 1963, a chartered DC-7 flew an IBM 1620 mainframe to a military airbase in Kanpur.55

  A photograph of the arrival of the computer on the IIT campus (figure 4.3) has all the solemn symbolism and poignant hope and pathos of a history painting. The computer itself comprises two enormous white cuboid masses that flank a large console panel. The 1620 sits on a wheeled flatbed platform that is pushed by a crowd of dhoti-clad Indian men into a building still wrapped in a framework of rope-hitched bamboo stilts (used by construction workers and painters). An older man in Western clothes—white short-sleeved shirt, dark pants, shoes—hurries from right to left with a rather supervisory air. As always, a gaggle of onlookers watches the proceedings. And at the very edge of the frame, at the bottom right, a boy in shorts—eight years old? Ten?—cups his hand over his face.

  The building in the picture is the computer center of the permanent campus of IIT Kanpur, which was still under construction. “The centrality of the computer to the plans for IIT Kanpur,” Ross Bassett tells us, “is indicated by the fact that the delivery of the 1620 was scheduled for the earliest possible date.”56 So, a small “technological elite”—the “suited and booted,” in Indian parlance—led by Nehru, made a visionary decision to pour vast amounts of wealth and skills into institutions aimed at the future and in large part motivated by the recent past, by the knowledge that technological lag in the subcontinent at a crucial historical moment had led to the defeats and depredations of industrialized colonialism, a gigantic plundering which was begun and extended for its first hundred years not by a nation state but by a modern corporation, the Honourable East India Company. The Indian leaders built the institutes and brought computers into a country that had an abundance of cheap labor—those men in dhotis—and a desperate need for development. A half-century later, the questions asked then are still pertinent: Should the nation expend its resources on such institutions while people starve? Do we need computers or tractors? In any drawing room or village square today, you can hear the rueful lament, “We can put satellites in orbit but can’t get clean drinking water to two hundred and fifty million people.” What became of that boy in the picture? Was his life improved by the creation of the institutes? The consequences—salutary or otherwise—of the setting up of the institutes are of course embedded in the tangled skein of recent Indian history, intertwined and inseparable from all the myriad ambiguous narratives of growth, corruption, hope, and disappointment that followed Independence.

  As a young boy myself, I believed the Institutes would save us; I pinned my hopes on the newly built steel plants, the irrigation projects, the huge hydroelectric dams, the factories that sprang up on the edges of cities. My mother’s mother lived in a village which still lacked electricity, but even there you could see signs of change, a tractor or two, a newly built road. I knew the Institutes had computers, but I never saw one until I came to the States. Our “progress,” our “development,” was fragmented and piecemeal—some people became very rich, but many remained poor.

  What is abundantly, unambiguously clear is that the Nehruvian vision, evangelized outwards from Kanpur and the other institutes, succeeded in its stated aim of producing “world-class” engineers, so much so that the world tempted them away from Gandhi’s country with siren songs of well-stocked laboratories, abundant resources, and wealth. This famous “brain drain,” which once so irritated some IIT faculty that they refused to write recommendation letters to American universities for their students, has been reimagined as “brain circulation” with attendant flows of remittances and expertise back to the home country. As Ind
ian geeks have gained prominence and power abroad—especially in Silicon Valley—they have been instrumental in driving and facilitating investments by international companies in India. In the American computer industry, the presence of Indians is impossible to miss—by 2005, Indians had created 26 percent of all immigrant-founded tech start-ups in the US. By 2012, this percentage had increased to 33.2 percent, more than the next eight ethnic groups combined (immigrants from China, the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Israel, Russia, Korea, and Australia).57 In a 2013 interview, the executive chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt, said, “Forty percent of the startups in Silicon Valley are headed by India-based entrepreneurs.”58 And, according to Vinod Khosla, IIT graduate and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, “Microsoft, Intel, PCs, Sun Microsystems—you name it, I can’t imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven’t played a leading role.”59

  The ubiquity of the Indian geek has been recognized even by popular American media in the figure of Raj Koothrappali, a character on the television show The Big Bang Theory. Raj is an astrophysicist at Caltech; he is mild, socially awkward, especially around women; he is effeminate by American standards (the other characters frequently suspect him of being gay); his parents try to run his life, so his attempts to live as an independent adult form one of the show’s running gags. “Koothrappali” is a Malayalam last name, or at least “Koothrappallil” is, so I’m guessing that Raj is supposed to be a south Indian, but he could well be the modern version of Sir Lepel Griffin’s hapless Bengali. These broad strokes catch precisely the larger culture’s notions of geeky Indianness, which—especially within the machismo of the IT industry—sometimes become a liability for Indians. In his autobiographical book, Dude, Did I Steal Your Job? Debugging Indian Programmers, N. Sivakumar recalls the advice he received when he first arrived in the US for a programming gig: