The Filter Bubble

void main()
{
cout << “Hello, World!” <<
endl;
}

Although the code differs from language to language, the result is the same: a single line of text against a stark white screen:

Hello, World!

A god’s greeting to his invention—or perhaps an invention’s greeting to its god. The delight you experience is electric—the current of creation, running through your fingers into the keypad, into the machine, and back out into the world. It’s alive!

That every programmer’s career begins with “Hello, World!” is not a coincidence. It’s the power to create new universes, which is what often draws people to code in the first place. Type in a few lines, or a few thousand, strike a key, and something seems to come to life on your screen—a new space unfolds, a new engine roars. If you’re clever enough, you can make and manipulate anything you can imagine.

“We are as Gods,” wrote futurist Stewart Brand on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “and we might as well get good at it.” Brand’s catalog, which sprang out of the back-to-the-land movement, was a favorite among California’s emerging class of programmers and computer enthusiasts. In Brand’s view, tools and technologies turned people, normally at the mercy of their environments, into gods in control of them. And the computer was a tool that could become any tool at all.

Brand’s impact on the culture of Silicon Valley and geekdom is hard to overestimate—though he wasn’t a programmer himself, his vision shaped the Silicon Valley worldview. As Fred Turner details in the fascinating From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Brand and his cadre of do-it-yourself futurists were disaffected hippies—social revolutionaries who were uncomfortable with the communes sprouting up in Haight- Ashbury. Rather than seeking to build a new world through political change, which required wading through the messiness of compromise and group decision making, they set out to build a world on their own.

In Hackers, his groundbreaking history of the rise of engineering culture, Steve Levy points out that this ideal spread from the programmers themselves to the users “each time some user flicked the machine on, and the screen came alive with words, thoughts, pictures, and sometimes elaborate worlds built out of air—those computer programs which could make any man (or woman) a god.” (In the era described by Levy’s book, the term hacker didn’t have the transgressive, lawbreaking connotations it acquired later.)

The God impulse is at the root of many creative professions: Artists conjure up color-flecked landscapes, novelists build whole societies on paper. But it’s always clear that these are creations: A painting doesn’t talk back. A program can, and the illusion that it’s “real” is powerful. Eliza, one of the first rudimentary AI programs, was programmed with a battery of therapistlike questions and some basic contextual cues. But students spent hours talking to it about their deepest problems: “I’m having some troubles with my family,” a student might write, and Eliza would immediately respond, “Tell me more about your family.”

Especially for people who’ve been socially ostracized due to quirks or brains or both, there are at least two strong draws to the world-building impulse. When social life is miserable or oppressive, escapism is a reasonable response—it’s probably not coincidental that role-playing games, sci-fi and fantasy literature, and programming often go together.

The infinitely expandable universe of code provides a second benefit: complete power over your domain. “We all fantasize about living without rules,” says Siva Vaidyanathan. “We imagine the Adam Sandler movie where you can move around and take people’s clothes off. If you don’t think of reciprocity as one of the beautiful and rewarding things about being a human being, you wish for a place or a way of acting without consequence.” When the rules of high school social life seem arbitrary and oppressive, the allure of making your own rules is pretty powerful.

This approach works pretty well as long as you’re the sole denizen of your creation. But like the God of Genesis, coders quickly get lonely. They build portals into their homespun worlds, allowing others to enter. And that’s where things get complicated: On the one hand, the more inhabitants in the world you’ve built, the more power you have. But on the other hand, the citizens can get uppity. “The programmer wants to set up some rules, to either a game or a system, and then let it run without interference from anything,” says Douglas Rushkoff, an early cyberbooster-turned-cyberpragmatist. “If you have a program that needs a minder to come in and help it run, then it’s not a very good program, is it? It’s supposed to just run.”

Coders sometimes harbor God impulses; they sometimes even have aspirations to revolutionize society. But they almost never aspire to be politicians. “While programming is considered a transparent, neutral, highly controllable realm… where production results in immediate gratification and something useful,” writes NYU anthropologist Gabriella Coleman, “politics tends to be seen by programmers as buggy, mediated, tainted action clouded by ideology that is not productive of much of anything.” There’s some merit to that view, of course. But for programmers to shun politics completely is a problem—because increasingly, given the disputes that inevitably arise when people come together, the most powerful ones will be required to adjudicate and to govern.

Before we get to how this blind spot affects our lives, though, it’s worth looking at how engineers think.

The Empire of Clever

Imagine that you’re a smart high school student on the low end of the social totem pole. You’re alienated from adult authority, but unlike many teenagers, you’re also alienated from the power structures of your peers—an existence that can feel lonely and peripheral. Systems and equations are intuitive, but people aren’t—social signals are confusing and messy, difficult to interpret.

Then you discover code. You may be powerless at the lunch table, but code gives you power over an infinitely malleable world and opens the door to a symbolic system that’s perfectly clear and ordered. The jostling for position and status fades away. The nagging parental voices disappear. There’s just a clean, white page for you to fill, an opportunity to build a better place, a home, from the ground up.

No wonder you’re a geek.

This isn’t to say that geeks and software engineers are friendless or even socially inept. But there’s an implicit promise in becoming a coder: Apprentice yourself to symbolic systems, learn to carefully understand the rules that govern them, and you’ll gain power to manipulate them. The more powerless you feel, the more appealing this promise becomes. “Hacking,” Steven Levy writes, “gave you not only an understanding of the system but an addictive control as well, along with the illusion that total control was just a few features away.”

As anthropologist Coleman points out, beyond the Jocks-and-Nerds stereotypes, there are actually many different geek cultures. There are open-software advocates, most famously embodied by Linux founder Linus Torvalds, who spend untold hours collaboratively building free software tools for the masses, and there are Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneurs. There are antispam zealots, who organize online posses to seek out and shut down Viagra purveyors. And then there’s the more antagonistic wing: spammers; “trolls,” who spend their time looking for fun ways to leverage technology at others’ expense; “phreaks,” who are animated by the challenge to break open telecommunications systems; and hackers who break into government systems to prove it can be done.

Generalizations that span these different niches and communities run the risk of stereotyping and tend to fall short. But at the heart of these subcultures is a shared method for looking at and asserting power in the world, which influences how and why online software is made.

The through-line is a focus on systematization. Nearly all geek cultures are structured as an empire of clever wherein ingenuity, not charisma, is king. The intrinsic efficiency of a creation is more important than how it looks. Geek cultures are data driven and reality based, valuing substance over style. Humor plays a prominent role—as Coleman points out, jokes demonstrate an ability to manipulate language in the same way that an elegant