Thompson also makes an interesting analogy between coding and art work. Early on women saw as clearly as men that machines could do a great many thing better than people. In other words, the history of programming has female roots.

In fact he tries to set the record straight about the biased and underestimated role of women in male-dominated coding history but pointing out that, in the MIT labs of the 1960s, most career programmers were women. Women are not exempt from Thomson’s brilliant scrutiny. He found writing code to be easier than writing words, and even therapeutic, but soon also realized that it wastes more of his time than it saves. Ironically Thompson admits that, in the process of writing the book, he became enamored by coding. The only “good guys” in Thompson’s book are paranoid coders who try to tell the world to be afraid of what coders are creating. Without any anarchic ulterior motives, this introverted tribe creates algorithms that can scale from one to billions of digits that are shaping human interactions worldwide. Like a fascinated social anthropologist and superb reporter, Thompson focuses on the explosive coding boom in Silicon Valley, its stereotypes, and what drives its programming denizens. The world’s historically most powerful institutions, including the church, are relentlessly impacted by coding and its consequences. Every moment, vast numbers of computer programmers of every label and description are obsessively solving algorithmic puzzles that channel our thoughts and social behavior and disrupt commercial and civic life. In Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, Clive Thompson calls coders the most powerful tribe in the world. Will the digital world of the future be more humanistic or technologically tyrannical? More than simply another profession, coders are disrupting, indeed transforming, the world as we and our forefathers have known it. The evolving and escalating powers of coders are both scary and promising. As they perform their arcane coding rituals, they are changing how we think and act in our daily lives and even our connections to the universe and realms of the spirit. Coders wield, and are constantly augmenting, a totally new kind of power. Increasingly the world as we know it is being (re)constructed with code. Coding is a culture shared by coders who, intentionally or not, are reshaping the world.

Coders the making of a new tribe