The Sea of Code…

If  I were a a sci-fi writer or a Norwellian social critic I  would call the 21st century  the “Rise of the Techie” and, indeed, it is. But I don’t think the societal structures currently in place have any idea what that will mean to the “normal” day to day life of Jane and John Doe. From my point of view in advertising and now ad-tech, these trends are much easier to see coming than for an average “techie”. “Techies”, whatever that term ACTUALLY means, are seen as the most unaware people in the world, focusing on “apps”, and “product cycles” and “agile configurations” . Nomenclature common in today’s trendy world of millennials starting up a brand new “hi-tech” start-up every day. The cultural language of our time is full of terms like “social network”,  “gaming”,  “netflix binging”. We hear it every day, but somehow its still something ethereal, mystical and beyond the realm of “normal” people.

“It’s a digitial world and I am just a digitial girl…!” -revised Cyndi Lauper

As an added consequence anyone over 35 is immediately ejected from the “in-crowd”, since unless they’re the ones financing those brand new “hi-tech” startups.. they just don’t “get it”. Which is ridiculous but accepted in the “Ender’s Game” culture we live in. But there are exceptions. In the recent movie “The Intern”, Robert Dinero does his usual credible job of portraying someone we all want to be (and, of course, aren’t) guiding the trendy, beautiful “founder” of an ecomm company, through the perils of both corporate and “real” life. My personal feelings aside, the reason I mention this in this article is, although she was the CEO of a “digital” company, should could do everything from customer service to showing warehouse workers how to fold clothes for shipping…but there was one thing she DIDN’T do…code! That was left to the nerdy oddballs straight out of the Big Bang Theory. Grown up men who dress and act like boys, finally learning from a paternal DeNiro, the dignity and manly grace behind wearing a tie or carrying a handkerchief. Well, whatever… I may never understand why all these stereotypes are so wildly popular but that aside, there is some reality behind all dreams.

In my previous post The Great “Talent” Show I expressed my dismay at how techies, developers, in particular, are somehow always the forgotten man in technology’s Broadway show. Sort of like putting a lot of hype into Wolfgang Puck’s brand new 4 star restaurant without hiring anyone to cook the food. American culture seems to be one of downplaying whats truly importan for whats shiny, bright and new. A Peter Pan culture that likes when nice things happen but don’t always want to be responsible for making them happen. Its like having a century of fossil fuel based economic growth, without anyone ever once mentioning, “What happens when the fuel runs out?”. We’re currently in the business of creating a global technology economy, an economy based on code, trillions of lines of code. But who’s going to write all this code?

What fossil fuels were in the 20th century, code will be in the 21st century…the fuel that runs the economies of every country in the world, 1st, 2nd or 3rd world, it will not make any difference. The demand increases every day, will the supply keep up? In the end, all those bits and bytes are put there by people. Perhaps some day, there will be programs to write programs. Who knows? Time will tell. But the good news is, as if by divine decree, more and more tools to create all this digital nirvhana are being created every day. And with the power of the internet anybody who has access to the internet can use them.

Just the last 5 years alone, I personally have seen, not just technology leaps like faster chips, or cooler iphones but “software tools” that make all that hardware more useful, more relevant and more valuable. Yes, all the Dockers, NodeJs’s, Githubs and the like are creating a modern renaissance in software development…a “Golden Age” we are just now embarking on. In the 20th century, it was C, C#, Java, perl and php that were cryptic, mysterious and hidden, but provided the fuel that created the economic miracles of their day, Apple, Microsoft and the ever amazing Sony Playstation. The difference? Not just semantics or even code. If you look deeply under the hood of the “new” stuff we find ourselves still surrounded by C code and “Bash” shells, just like 1990! But in 1990, to even know what this stuff even meant, much less be able to use it, you could tinker in your garage with parts from Radio Shack, but unless your Jobs and Wozniak, that was “unprofessional”. Generally you had to have a clear and distinct interest, major in “Comp Sci” in college just to get behind the screen of a “mainframe” or “mini-computer”. Then you had to get that first job in “IT” as an analyst, technical support engineer or even, yes even then, a programmer. The typical interview question then, “You know C? When can you start?”

Now any 12 year old can start his school science project on Github, pull in a Node module and create a mobile app to the keep the scoring average of his favorite NBA players on a day to day basis. I don’t know whether anybody out there is doing or will be doing such a thing but I do know that they CAN do it! Anywhere in the world at any time! And that is where all of our futures lie. In the hands of not just “developers”, “techies” and “propeller heads”, but little johnny and jane who program as naturally as they drink milk and outgrow their clothes…openly, without stigma, ridicule and prejudice. In a world full of consumers SOMEBODY has to be the producers. And I’m betting it won’t just be the Stanford scholars and drop outs in Silicon Valley. I’m betting it will be the kids in Sao Paulo, Nairobi and Manila.

Think about it…