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Tech mystification

(in progress)

$ dict mystification

3 definitions found

From The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 [gcide]:

  Mystification \Mys`ti*fi*ca"tion\, n. [Cf. F. mystification.]
     The act of mystifying, or the state of being mystied; also,
     something designed to, or that does, mystify.
     [1913 Webster]
  
           The reply of Pope seems very much as though he had been
           playing off a mystification on his Grace. --De Quincey.
     [1913 Webster]

From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:

  mystification
      n 1: confusion resulting from failure to understand [syn:
           {bewilderment}, {obfuscation}, {puzzlement},
           {befuddlement}, {mystification}, {bafflement},
           {bemusement}]
      2: something designed to mystify or bewilder
      3: the activity of obscuring people's understanding, leaving
         them baffled or bewildered [syn: {mystification},
         {obfuscation}]

From Moby Thesaurus II by Grady Ward, 1.0 [moby-thesaurus]:

  108 Moby Thesaurus words for "mystification":
     Chinese puzzle, amorphousness, anagoge, anagogics, anthroposophy,
     apparent soundness, burial, burying, cabala, cabalism, casuistry,
     circularity, closed, clouding, college of Laputa, concealedness,
     concealment, corruption, covering, covering up, covertness, dark,
     darkening, darkness, deception, disingenuousness, distortion,
     equivocalness, equivocation, esotericism, esoterics, esoterism,
     esotery, evasive reasoning, fallaciousness, fallacy, fog,
     fogginess, fuzziness, hiddenness, hiding, hocus-pocus,
     indeterminateness, indistinctness, insincerity, interment,
     invisibility, jesuitism, jesuitry, masking, misapplication,
     misdirection, misguidance, misinformation, misinstruction,
     misknowledge, misleading, mist, misteaching, mistiness,
     mumbo jumbo, murk, murkiness, mystery, mysticism, obfuscation,
     obscurantism, obscuration, obscurement, obscurity, occultation,
     occultism, opacity, oversubtlety, perplexity, perversion,
     philosophism, plausibility, plausibleness, putting away,
     rationalization, screening, secrecy, secretion, shapelessness,
     sophism, sophistical reasoning, sophistication, sophistry,
     special pleading, speciosity, specious reasoning, speciousness,
     subterfuge, subtlety, symbolics, symbolism, unclarity, unclearness,
     uncommunicativeness, unplainness, vagueness, vicious circle,
     vicious reasoning, why, yoga, yogeeism, yogism

This was initially to write about the way technology is sometimes presented as a complex thing that is only for the smarter-than-thou folks.

I don't mean to deny that it can be described as complex. But that is arbitrary. Anything can be broken to pieces. The interface that most people use to interact with tech is made accessible from a previous interface, where that one was developed.

In such a cycle, one can always keep going back until they are back to card-punching non-structured programming.

Developers depend on the code of others to do their work. No one, not even the one developing something alone, can rely only on themselves. When I say this I mean to include everything, from the cook to the janitor to the miner to the infrastructure worker. And the work of other developers, who develop the software used to make more software.

But in a context of tech mystique the walls of code and terminal screens are called 'unix porn' for a reason. Porn shows something exaggerated beyond the real and into a manifestation of reproducible desire. It feeds one' sense of personal power. The terminal screen is then a validation of one's importance, talent, intelligence.

To me that reads as the hoarding of knowledge, as the appropriation of an actually collective work to oneself simply because at that limited time it's operated under one's control.

The repetition of this leads to the building of a wall. Collectively, nerds will protect their fantasy by making documentation either unavailable or cryptic. They will give condescending answers to those interested in learning because they are unwilling to spend time making it understandable but willing to spend countless hours making it increasingly mystified.

So coding becomes a performance of self-grandiose.

This is a farse obviously, since no one person can hold very much on their own when it comes to code. No one can compare themselves individually to the amount of code that is constructed by the hive. And that is not something to be ashamed of. But when someone grows from the anglocentric soil where the web has grown, it's bound to be riddled with such achiever shame.

Coding is not difficult. It's just large. Vim is not difficult. There is nothing impossible about learning that pressing colon brings up a comand line and that qa! is how you quit. When you press I you enter edit mode. Everything can be learned in its proper pace.

I don't mean to dismiss our differences and appeal to an universalized ideal where everyone can do everything. The way knowledge is thought of is filled with mystique, going back a very long time. What I mean to point out is not that there are no differences, but that they have been constructed to designate power, and not capability.

It took me many years to believe I could code. And then it takes you many years to actually learn how to do it. And then it takes your whole life, as with anything, to actually live up to that intention. Anyone mystifying this into a personally-centered code-messiah story, or pushing the idolization of some code genius, to me is doing the work of a capitalist.

There are no such separations and they only serve to keep people away from coding and the development of it slowed down, only benefitting some. This may seem trivial for the anglo-centered reader, but if you consider how the rest of the world relates to tech, outside of the US-Europe axis, and I can speak only for one of those regions, this effect is expanded ten-fold.