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I Cannot Be Technical

With some regularity, kind-hearted Technical people tell me that I Can Be Technical, Too. This usually happens when I’m asking us to define what we’re calling technical in a software environment. I understand why it happens. I am a psychologist of software environments and that is something of

In this current version of tech we built–which is to say the overwhelming jungle of rituals and group identities and normative behaviors and seemingly abundant but actually restrictive sociotechnological covenants that make up what we pretend will eventually feel like belonging in tech–someone else will always control genius. Lest at this point you are feeling that software is under seige, that this multi-trillion dollar shifting construct of beliefs and imaginaries has taken one too many hits to be fair in an essay from a 5’4” brunette who as a teenager was a goddamn barista not a coder so like how could she even, rest in the reassurance that Psychology has set this trap too. It can be as quiet as having to forget about having a mother-in-law who worked long days outside of Philadelphia holding other people’s babies and devotedly caring for them for years and being paid next to nothing for it, and knowing that no part of the decision apparatus that is happening around you in technology includes this daycare worker as a person when the primary way she interacts with the targeted advertising infrastructure created by tech is getting scammed.

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