Why I code (Part 2)

In the first part I wrote about why coding matters. That covered the cultural reasons. Now I want to talk about personal reasons.

But first, a true and perhaps inspiring story about the real nature of learning and education;

"An old woman was learning French. Beside her bed lay a pile of books she struggled to read. She loved the MP3 player loaded with French conversation that her great grandson had bought her. As the doctor approached she took out her ear-buds. "Comment allez-vous ?", he asked. "Fine! Very well. Bien, merci!". She laughed. "Daisy, listen…", said the doctor, "I know you say the French 'keeps you going', but may I ask… You're 98. Your mind is sharp. You know what's happening and that after I send you home there's not much more time. Why do you spend so much on learning a new language, at this hour?"

She replied, "I like the sound of it".

I said it before; coding is like physical exercise. Code is dancing. You don't need a reason to do it. You can feel parts of your mind getting a healthy work-out as you switch between tasks like writing an awk regular expression, installing a new program, debugging a network issue, reading the documentation on a new operating system. With fitness in readiness it does not matter that the calling may never come. You hope it won't. The point is, "I like the sound of it". It makes me feel good.

Some people can't imagine how any of these tasks aren't tedious "work". Why would you do anything so masochistic as to practice code and basic systems administration for any other reason than being paid a ton of money?

Why do you clean your house?

In truth, a lot of what we do in life is preparation for weakness and death; Saving money. Building a secure, comfortable home. Exercising. Learning and self-improvement continue to the very end. They become part of "maintenance" rather than preparation for an extrinsic purpose. They're the self discipline of an ordinary life.

Though one gets a little slower, coding and computer skills improve greatly with age. You tend to need a few more mnemonics, notes, comments and "exocortex", but the change in speed is really about thoughtfulness, which is the ability to hold larger and more complex systems in mind.

Taking time to think things through yields an order of magnitude improvement on long-term outcomes. By contrast, people in business make decisions very, very fast, and most of those decisions are wrong. Most commercial work is putting things right that shouldn't have been done, and "AI" vastly accelerates that.

In general ones life is, and should be, limited by what one can hold in mind. And that doesn't necessarily scale linearly in a team, community or organisation for reasons Fred Brooks noted in 1975. You never really had 300 Facebook friends, admit it. You have the five or six people who'd drive you to the hospital in a crisis. Everything else is beyond your control, which may not be a bad thing, and to which we'll return shortly. However, the US American tech culture became about selling you an illusion of greater control and influence than any person can manage in reality.

As a digital citizen I no longer think in terms of individual programs or devices, but the whole ecosystem into which my digital dealings fit - backup disks, remote "cloud" mounts, update provisions. Where I keep the password for that phone SIM…

Are these not part of the fabric of modern life? Like plumbing and electricity? Would I be so ignorant, lazy and infantile as to not know how to change a light-bulb or fuse. Load the washing machine?

Can I make that "somebody else's problem"? Only a delinquent teenager still living at home would think that way, no? But remember, most of the technology that came out of Silicon Valley was designed by young men still living in their mom's basement and it shows in the values of that technology. It's a view of technology that is:

• entitled, prideful
• omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent
• over-compensating
• highly individualistic
• based on fear
• lazy

This is a distorted view of technology. It claims to offer something for nothing, which we know is never true.

We all say that we want a technological society. That it's "progress". But that costs. When I shrug responsibility for my digital affairs it means the cost of my digital luxury, my lifestyle within a technological society, is saddled on to society. Energy guzzling data-centres harm the environment. Buying new devices every year is poisoning the planet with e-waste.

Big Tech and "AI" is something that's great for the few, so long as nobody else uses it. Universalising it is a catastrophe for all humanity, and that is a tragedy of the commons.

We've built a technological society that is an expression of our extraordinary laziness and lack of concern. Yet we hold it up as a trophy of our industry and cleverness.

Most of this can be avoided if people get more involved in their technology, even if that is simply an active rejection of it (yes - paradoxically using less technology is a positive intellectual engagement with it not a rejection in principle). Something as simple as being able to install Linux on an older device and extend its useful life by years is something a 12 year-old can do.

We want a technological society, but at someone else's cost. "AI" is not just slop, it's technical sloth. It's the protest of an intelligent adult population that has grown jaded, cynical and tired of the technology it so performatively pretends to love.

I think this way of slovenliness is not to "embrace" modernity but to retreat from it. Convenience is not the path of the technophile and gadget geek. "Convenience" is a rejection of technology in place of "magic". It is throwing oneself into wilful superstitious ignorance and primitivism.

We must restore practice of everyday technical skills and knowledge. Code, in its simple text-based form, is a Gospel. It remains the ultimate interface between humans and their machines, in which the human is in control. We should teach it starting at age 5. It should remain compulsory until at least 18.

By contrast, teaching "AI" interaction is no substitute. Worse, "AI" is literally the antithesis of code. It saps and undermines logical, structured and formal modes of thought.

Systems thinking as an ordinary life skill, as something to use in a daily way to solve real problems, soon feels effortless and natural. It's a joy. But it's something we're "frightened out of" (especially young women) as a way to chase us away from our agency. Why? Because individual agency is not desirable to those with power in a surveillance capitalist regime. In the next part we'll look more into the political dimensions of "why to code?", but for now let's finish on the personal, individual benefits.

Consider code as something no more taxing than reading and writing. As a maturing person, it's no different from doing DIY to make your house how you like it, or gardening to plant nice flowers, useful herbs and vegetables, and pull up the weeds. That doesn't mean I need to become a professional bricklayer, grow all my own food or sell flowers - such is the disingenuous nonsense spouted by those who rail against common technical literacy.

Sure, some days you may not feel like doing DIY and gardening. Or doing the dishes. And as you grow very old like Daisy, you may not be able to. You will eventually be very vulnerable and need to rely on others to book appointments and travel - even (especially) using "AI" which will predate most aggressively on the vulnerable. Hopefully you taught your children some technical skills to help protect you ¹.

But outsourcing everything about your life to a global corporation from the day you're born? You're eating at the MacDonald's of life.

For many though, this is all stuff to be quite deliberately put "Out of mind". The typical Apple user seeks a managed digital life. They want their affairs "taken care of". Note the enormous distance between the passive creed of Apple in 2026 and the 1984 Superbowl casting of technology as liberation.

A "digital care-home" would be fine for 98 year-olds, arthritic and half blind, but my problem is with 18 - 60 year-olds who eagerly abdicate responsibility in their prime of acuity and cognition with the claim that "it's too hard".

They would like to be "free" of burden. But in fact this is antithetical to freedom, because freedom is responsibility. It's a paradox well illuminated by that famous passage of Alexi De Tocqueville which I've quoted so many times but will reproduce here again ²:

I see an innumerable host of men, all alike and equal, endlessly hastening after petty and vulgar pleasures with which they fill their souls. Each of them, withdrawn into himself, is virtually a stranger to the fate of all the others. For him, his children and personal friends comprise the entire human race. As for the remainder of his fellow citizens, he lives alongside them but does not see them. He touches them but does not feel them. He exists only in himself and for himself, and if he still has a family, he no longer has a country. Over these men stands an immense tutelary power, which assumes sole responsibility for securing their pleasure and watching over their fate. It is absolute, meticulous, regular, provident, and mild. It would resemble paternal authority if only its purpose were the same, namely, to prepare men for manhood. But on the contrary, it seeks only to keep them in childhood irrevocably. It likes citizens to rejoice, provided they think only of rejoicing. It works willingly for their happiness but wants to be the sole agent and only arbiter of that happiness. It provides for their security, foresees and takes care of their needs, facilitates their pleasures, manages their most important affairs, directs their industry, regulates their successions, and divides their inheritances. Why not relieve them entirely of the burden of living? – ( De Tocqueville Democracy in America 1835)

Being able to code and understand computers is digital "living". In the 1980s we called it digital literacy and assumed that every child would be taught it at school. A technological society without it is a tyranny only fit to be torn down.

Big Tech has done everything in its power to rob you of "digital life". Whether that's locking-down and restricting what you can do with your phone, sabotaging open knowledge repositories, crippling search with pallid "AI", buying repressive laws, or attacking software freedom.

Digital living is actually the reality version of the fantasy that "agentic AI" people dream of - only without the randomly deleted production databases, drained bank accounts, leaked secrets, and ruined livelihoods. It's the ability to use computers as tools and make them do the things you want, in a purposeful way. It is to enjoy more than the push button choices made for you by someone else from the vending machine of life.

I hope I'll be blessed to keep learning and coding until my last days, just to be "useful around the house". I hope you will too. As for LISP. I just like the look of it.