Why I Cannot Be Technical
为什么我不能成为“技术人”

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 an anomaly.^[1] Also at the end of the day I have mischief in my heart and I love to ask Bad Questions. Kind Technical people are attuned to exclusion because they’ve been beaten around enough by it and they’re still kind enough to want to do something about it so they frequently intervene on my bad questions. I recognize that in these moments what Technical friends wish to do is usher me safely inside of the Technical tent. There is a core of such goodness to this, dare I even say sweetness. In many cases packaged inside of this kind of statement is a hand outstretched, seeking to extend protection to me. Mama didn’t raise no fool: I know that on any quest we should accept protection. In your outdoor voice, please continue to tell people I’m Technical. If we meet inside of a meeting or inside of a decision, and being called technical is the dividing line between people who get to stand on the high ground when the water comes in and people who don’t, I don’t care what type of line you throw down to me.
时不时地，好心的技术人员会告诉我，我也可以“懂技术”。这通常发生在我试图定义我们在软件环境中称之为“技术”的时候。我理解为什么会这样。我是一位研究软件环境的心理学家，这本身就有点反常。 ^[1] 此外，归根结底，我内心有点调皮，喜欢问一些“坏问题”。善良的技术人员对排斥很敏感，因为他们自己也饱受其苦，但他们仍然善良到想要为此做点什么，所以他们经常会干预我的“坏问题”。我意识到，在这些时刻，技术朋友们希望做的是安全地把我迎进“技术”的帐篷里。这其中蕴含着善良的内核，我甚至敢说，还有一丝甜蜜。在很多情况下，这种说法中包含着一只伸出的手，试图向我伸出援手，保护我。我妈可没把我养傻：我知道在任何探索中，我们都应该接受保护。 请大声地告诉大家我是“技术人员”。如果我们在会议上或决策中相遇，而被称为“技术人员”是区分那些在洪水来临时能够占据高地的人和不能的人的分界线，那么我不在乎你向我抛出什么样的界限。

However, mama didn’t raise no fool. What I know–because my form of expertise which creates the basis for your extended hand in the first place is expertise for this exactly–is that I cannot be Technical. Not really. This is because Technical is a structural designation that operates outside of any actual problem-solving you and I are doing together. Being Technical is about being legitimate. Or to put it more simply: it’s because you are Technical that I can’t be. We have created the identities this way. A person with a PhD in human things and who deals in human problems and human solutions cannot ever be Technical no matter how dense her statistics are, how many conferences she speaks at, and how comprehensively she has given examples of generating outcomes that are often beyond engineering to generate (change over time; impacts on humans; making legible even an imperfect approximation of just one single emotion). These things can be useful, interesting, valuable, heartrending, inspiring and memorable to tech, but they cannot be legitimate.
然而，我妈可没把我养傻。我所知道的——因为我的专业知识正是你伸出援手的基础——就是我无法成为“技术人员”。 真的不行。这是因为“技术人员”是一个结构性的定义，它独立于你我共同解决的任何实际问题之外。成为“技术人员”关乎合法性。或者更简单地说：正因为你是“技术人员”，我才不能是。我们就是这样创造了身份。一个拥有人文科学博士学位，处理人类问题并提供人类解决方案的人，永远不可能成为“技术人员”，无论她的统计学有多么精深，她在多少会议上发言，以及她多么全面地给出了产生结果的例子，而这些结果往往超出了工程学的范畴（随时间的变化；对人类的影响；即使是不完美地近似地呈现出哪怕是一种单一的情感）。 这些东西对技术人员来说可能是有用的、有趣的、有价值的、令人心碎的、鼓舞人心的和难忘的，但它们不能是合法的。

One of the psychology professors who first inducted me into the field gave me advice about studying things. He was a very dialectical thinker: everything for him had to be understood in pairs, like Noah’s Ark. I was hanging around after class because I was a teacher’s pet kind of college student. But hanging out with authority is a way you can pick up the actual rules as people drop them, the actual game. It’s like if you stay in your seat at a theater while everyone else leaves and wait for the lights to come on so you can see the seams in the backgrounds and the faces of the people cleaning to whom this is just another day at their job. The actual game is also what I am listening for when I’m listening to Technical people explain things to me. At any rate, this faculty member said, “Everything worth studying has an opposite that’s necessary to understand what you thought you were studying.”
一位最先带我进入这个领域的心理学教授曾就学习方法给了我建议。他是个非常辩证的思考者：对他来说，所有事物都必须成对理解，就像诺亚方舟一样。我当时在下课后逗留，因为我属于那种讨老师喜欢的大学生。但与权威人士交往是你能捡起人们无意中透露的实际规则、也就是“游戏”的一种方式。这就像你留在剧院的座位上，直到所有人都离开，然后等待灯光亮起，这样你就能看到背景的接缝，以及那些正在打扫卫生的人的脸，对他们来说，这只是他们工作中的又一天。当我听技术人员向我解释事情时，我听的也是这种“游戏”。总之，这位教员说：“所有值得研究的东西都有一个对立面，而理解这个对立面是理解你认为你正在研究的东西所必需的。”

I have found this to be true. If you want to construct a psychology theory that truly describes marriage and our beliefs about it as stable, romantic, supportive and lasting, you cannot ignore the fact that many human relationships rupture and many relationships are violent. How we think about marriage is shaped as much by divorce as it is by the meet-cute. Your theory has to ask why, so your theory has to include repair. A description of the things happening for technical people and technical work has to include a realization of boundaries and how they are policed. This helps you start to see. Despite how real it feels, despite how carefully we have knit supposedly objective judgments of performance and evaluation and delivery of work into these words, Technical is not an assessment of reality. Labeling someone Technical is a reality-transforming weapon. I am structurally incapable of being Technical because in the world we have built, Technical must always be conditional for people like me, buffeted around by some unearned privileges and some undeserved exclusions as mediated by people’s perceptions and the current social location of my gender, class, race, ideological perspective, the role-related identities that the label put on my work gives me, and all of the other categories our brains are using to slice up this planet in between meteor strikes.
我发现这确实如此。如果你想构建一个真正描述婚姻以及我们对其稳定、浪漫、支持和持久的信念的心理学理论，你不能忽视许多人际关系破裂以及许多关系充满暴力这一事实。我们对婚姻的看法，受到离婚的影响，就像受到一见钟情的影响一样。你的理论必须问为什么，所以你的理论必须包括修复。对技术人员和技术工作发生的事情的描述，必须包括对界限以及它们是如何被维护的认识。这有助于你开始看清。尽管感觉多么真实，尽管我们多么小心地将对工作表现、评估和交付的所谓客观判断编织进这些词语中，但“技术”并不是对现实的评估。给某人贴上“技术”的标签是一种改变现实的武器。 我从结构上就无法成为“技术人员”，因为在我们构建的世界里，“技术”对于像我这样的人来说，永远是有条件的。我受到一些不应得的特权和一些不应得的排斥的影响，这些都受到人们的看法以及我所处的社会地位（性别、阶级、种族、意识形态观点、标签赋予我工作的角色相关身份）的影响，以及我们的大脑用来划分这个星球的、介于陨石撞击之间的所有其他类别。

Very frequently in my reckless excursions into tech social media I say something that is aware of this and that touches a nerve with some Technical Person who experiences contact with my mind like a live wire. In this exchange, Technical seems to see as its only possible recourse the activity of going absolutely ham in my mentions. One of the great joys of being a psychologist, however, is that everything becomes material. I suggest you listen to the tone as not auxiliary to, but as central to the content of these rants (I suggest you do this in general in tech). Like every born-different or made-different kid with poverty origins who lives in the airlock of the Technical I can swiftly recognize the tone of the guy standing on the spaceship side of the door slamming the eject button at me. One of these people recently proposed a future in which I would run out of clean water and electricity, presumably because at that point I would learn to be subservient enough to engineers. The problem for Technical is that I have already run out of water and electricity in my life, so I already know what I would do and who I would do it for. Do you?
在很多次我鲁莽地闯入科技社交媒体的经历中，我都会说一些意识到这一点并触及某些“技术人士”痛点的话，他们与我的思想接触就像触电一样。在这种交流中，“技术人士”似乎认为唯一的选择就是在我的评论区里大肆攻击。然而，作为一名心理学家，最大的乐趣之一就是一切都可以成为研究素材。我建议你把语气当作这些抱怨的核心，而不是辅助（我建议你在科技领域也这样做）。就像每一个出身贫困、与众不同或后天不同的小孩一样，我生活在“技术”的隔离区里，我可以迅速识别出站在飞船那一边、朝我猛按弹射按钮的家伙的语气。其中一个人最近设想了一个未来，在那里我将耗尽干净的水和电力，大概是因为到那时我就会学会足够顺从工程师。 对于“技术”来说，问题在于我的生活中已经断水断电，所以我已经知道我会怎么做，以及我为谁做。你呢？

This is why the caring people around my work instinctively and accurately feel that for my work to succeed, someone will have to fight. However the very fact that you are Technical means that this fight cannot be won by you. I am sorry to be the one to tell you this, but if my belonging in tech is fundamentally unacceptable yours is uncertain. If you as a Technical person seek to stretch the Technical label it will dissolve in your hands like a wet piece of paper because what you are doing is breaking down the fundamental units that create this label in the first place. To preserve its integrity, a Technical system will reject you sooner than it will accept me. This is why you can’t fight it. You are it. The moment you win that argument you get shoved out the airlock to join me out here in the dark.^[2]
这就是为什么我工作周围那些富有同情心的人本能地、准确地感觉到，为了我的工作取得成功，必须有人去战斗。然而，你之所以是“技术人员”，意味着这场战斗你无法获胜。我很抱歉要告诉你这些，但如果我在技术领域的归属从根本上来说是不可接受的，那么你的归属也是不确定的。如果你作为一个技术人员试图扩展“技术”这个标签，它就会像湿纸一样在你手中溶解，因为你所做的事情从根本上破坏了最初创建这个标签的单元。为了保持其完整性，一个技术系统会比接受我更早地拒绝你。这就是你无法与之抗争的原因。你就是它。当你赢得这场争论的那一刻，你就会被推出气闸，和我一起到外面的黑暗中。 ^[2]

I’ve been in tech long enough that some engineers have described me to my face as a bargain, an anomaly, an idiot, a problem, an ethical affront to the profession of psychology.^[3] Others have told me about all of their problems because I continue to give a shit about them and because all of this illegitimate psychology work is doing something that deeply needs doing. More often than you would think the two groups overlap. In my research and writing on how technical identities are both constructed and policed, I gave a round of talks about how I see Contest Cultures in software spaces, naming the routine hierarchical nastiness that we experience under the guise of technical arguments as real and important. In a conference hall, a woman in technical leadership came up to me and held my hand so tightly that it hurt. She struggled to find words, and I understood, because some things are too difficult for words and can only be felt together. I will never forget her. It is because I am not Technical that I can have these moments and I would not trade them for anything. Closely after this I heard from an engineer who told me that my work had named and helped him set a boundary around a years-long experience of pain in his career. These moments also mean everything to me, although there are so many more of the second than the first. As someone who has been known to be a human being myself, sometimes I go home and cry after I deliver a piece of the psychology of software teams. This is hard work. And at the same time to be in this field is to understand that I can provoke this second kind of reaction from a man who never would have offered a job to the me of ten years ago. In the Technical world, men have told me quite openly that who they were twenty years ago would have hated me from the moment I came into their visual range, that they would have believed that they knew everything about my mind without knowing me at all.
我在科技行业待了足够久，一些工程师当面形容我为“便宜货”、“异类”、“白痴”、“问题”、“对心理学专业的伦理冒犯”。 ^[3] 另一些人则向我倾诉他们遇到的所有问题，因为我一直关心他们，也因为所有这些不合法的心理学工作正在做着一件非常需要做的事情。比你想象的更常见的是，这两类人会重叠。在我的研究和写作中，我探讨了技术身份是如何被构建和监管的，我做了一系列关于我如何看待软件空间中的“竞赛文化”的演讲，将我们在技术论点的幌子下所经历的日常等级制度的恶劣行径定义为真实且重要的。在一个会议大厅里，一位技术领导层的女性走到我面前，紧紧地握着我的手，疼得我直皱眉头。她努力寻找词语，我理解她，因为有些事情用语言难以表达，只能一起感受。我永远不会忘记她。 正因为我“不技术”，我才能拥有这些时刻，我不会用任何东西来交换。紧接着，我从一位工程师那里得知，我的工作为他命名并帮助他划定了界限，结束了他职业生涯中长达数年的痛苦经历。这些时刻对我来说也意义重大，尽管第二种情况比第一种情况多得多。作为一个众所周知的人，有时我在交付了关于软件团队心理学的内容后，会回家哭泣。这是艰苦的工作。与此同时，置身于这个领域，也让我明白，我可以激起这种第二种反应，而这个人十年前是绝对不会给我提供一份工作的。在“技术”世界里，男人们曾坦率地告诉我，二十年前的他们，从我进入他们的视野那一刻起就会讨厌我，他们会认为自己对我的想法了如指掌，却根本不了解我。

An engineer once asked me whether I felt physically safe at a specific technology conference because while talking to me about the fact that the basic methodologies of my research had included women he had looked around and realized (for the first time?) that it was a male space. My answer sounds dismissive but it is anything but, it is very serious: I already knew. That’s my secret Cap, I’m always unsafe. I understand I can never take off my spacesuit in these Technical places. Walking across the street during a conference, a car pulled up intentionally fast and close to me and I hopped out of the way, scared. The men with me who did not jump roared with laughter, and this sparked a conversation (monologue) about innate personality differences (rather than, say, height differences). In that moment it was impossible for me to be a PhD who studies how we maintain beliefs about innate characteristics and generates empirical evidence around them and their impacts, even though I am. We are always constructing. In that street, my identity could not be made real against the identity that was offered out of the situation that aligned with a world they preferred, one in which some men could laugh at scared women. Similarly despite the existence of bad measurement that systematically undermeasures the abilities of many people, for Technical as a system, whiteboarding interviews can never be a measurement activity that is failing to correctly create a situation in which technical skills are both elicited and identified. Rather, it is merely people who are capable of failing to perform, as if the technical interview was not designed and implemented by people.
一位工程师曾问我，在一个特定的技术会议上，我是否感到人身安全，因为在和我谈论我的研究的基本方法包括女性时，他环顾四周，意识到（第一次？）这是一个男性的空间。我的回答听起来像是轻描淡写，但事实并非如此，这非常严肃：我早就知道了。这是我的秘密，Cap，我总是感到不安全。我明白我永远不能在这些“技术”场所脱下我的太空服。在会议期间过马路时，一辆车故意快速地驶近我，我吓得跳到了一边。和我一起的那些没有跳起来的男人们哄堂大笑，这引发了一场关于天生性格差异的谈话（独白）（而不是，比如说，身高差异）。在那一刻，我不可能成为一个研究我们如何维持对天生特性的信念并围绕它们及其影响产生经验证据的博士，即使我就是。 我们总是在构建。在那条街上，我的身份无法对抗他们所偏好的世界所提供的身份，一个允许一些男人嘲笑害怕的女人。 同样，尽管存在着系统性地低估许多人能力的糟糕的衡量标准，但对于“技术”作为一个系统来说，白板面试永远不可能是一种未能正确创造一个能够引出和识别技术技能的情境的衡量活动。相反，这仅仅是那些无法胜任的人，就好像技术面试不是由人设计和实施的一样。

I know this essay is a hard read so far and I want you to take a breather if you need it so let’s do it in this paragraph together. A different story: I have a very dear friend–an engineer–who is capable of looking at a picture of my new house and sending me a laundry list of things he considers technically insecure and wrong with it. This is skill, access and knowledge I do not have and I appreciate it. But I know that I trust my friend as much as I trust anyone in the world because I trusted him when I was sick and making choices about equipment that had a causal relationship to my own life. He sent me an entire box of supplies, more safety supplies than a single person could ever need. That generosity that exists inside of technicality as a possibility is a wonder. That idea of mapping a terrible world and solving some of it is beautiful. Creating safety in someone else’s life is perhaps among the greatest of possible human activities. The ability we have to build on each other’s problem-solving is delightful. This too is theory-forming for me when I think about software. By Technical I am not talking about my friend helping me stay safe in a hospital while I had a life-threatening illness, a software developer giving themselves eyestrain fixing an update that helps a grocery store operate because they care about people getting their groceries, the countless teams that write to me because they suffer and they want someone to know they are suffering, a person who made a road safe that I drive on, a person who stood in front of their leader at great personal cost and said no. I am not saying I do not want to be in community with you. It is because I do that we are in this hard essay together. I cannot forget about you even when you never see me.
我知道到目前为止，这篇文章读起来可能有点费劲，如果你需要休息一下，那就休息一下吧，让我们一起在这个段落里慢慢来。换个故事：我有一个非常要好的朋友——一个工程师——他只要看一眼我新房子的照片，就能给我发来一份清单，列出他认为在技术上不安全和错误的地方。这是我没有的技能、渠道和知识，我很欣赏。但我知道我信任我的朋友，就像我信任世界上任何一个人一样，因为我生病的时候信任他，当时我需要为与我生活息息相关的设备做出选择。他给我寄了一整箱物资，比一个人可能需要的安全物资还要多。这种存在于技术性之中的慷慨是一种奇迹。那种描绘一个糟糕的世界并解决其中一部分问题的想法是美好的。为别人的生活创造安全感，也许是人类最伟大的活动之一。 我们彼此协作解决问题的能力令人欣喜。当我想起软件时，这对我来说也是一种理论构建。我所说的“技术”并不是指我的朋友在我身患威胁生命的疾病时帮助我在医院里保持安全，也不是指软件开发者为了修复一个能帮助杂货店运营的更新而让自己眼睛疲劳，因为他们关心人们能买到杂货，也不是指无数的团队给我写信，因为他们正在受苦，他们希望有人知道他们正在受苦，也不是指让我在上面行驶的道路变得安全的人，也不是指不惜个人代价站在领导面前说“不”的人。我不是说我不想和你们在一起。正因为如此，我们才一起写了这篇艰难的文章。即使你们永远看不到我，我也不会忘记你们。

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. There is no earning out of this; there is no mathematical proof that I can generate to change this structure because my ability to be on that stage showing you that proof in the first place was determined entirely by what Technical decided could be real. When software organizations introduce me, they speak to my degrees and the quantitative^[4] impacts that my work has had. But when I think about how I understand tech it is bookended with two realities: in my first tech internship a woman who was acting like an authority on technical hiring^[5] told me not to come out of the closet if I wanted to be afforded the opportunity to do my work as an applied scientist and in this current version of tech right now I have begun to fear whether I can speak plainly and out loud with Technical people about what is happening to the work of my wife in science. No amount of applied science done to serve the humans of software will be enough to exchange at some merit currency counter for the luxury of simply existing in our humanity. How is it possible to be so valued and yet so disposable, to have my hands inside of the machine and yet feel unable to talk to the person next to me? Hamster wheel-ass exclusion. I hate that I need to keep understanding it.
在我们构建的当前科技版本中——也就是说，由仪式、群体认同、规范行为以及看似丰富实则具有限制性的社会技术契约构成的庞大丛林，这些东西构成了我们假装最终会在科技领域找到归属感的东西——总会有人控制着天才。这无法通过努力获得；我也无法通过生成数学证明来改变这种结构，因为我能够站在那个舞台上向你展示那个证明的能力，完全取决于“技术”决定什么可以成为现实。当软件组织介绍我时，他们会谈到我的学位以及我的工作所产生的量化 ^[4] 影响。 但当我思考我如何理解技术时，它被两种现实所包围：在我第一次技术实习时，一位对技术招聘表现得像权威的女性 ^[5] 告诉我，如果我想获得从事应用科学工作的机会，就不要出柜；而在当前的技术环境中，我现在开始担心我是否能坦率而大声地与技术人员谈论我妻子在科学领域的工作正在发生的事情。 无论完成多少服务于软件用户的应用科学，都无法在某种功绩货币兑换柜台上换取仅仅以我们的人性存在的奢侈。 怎么可能如此被重视，却又如此容易被抛弃，我的手伸进机器里，却感觉无法与身边的人交谈？ 仓鼠轮式的排斥。 我讨厌我需要不断地理解它。

Keeping you running in that hamster wheel is the goal of Technical, because that is its lifeblood. This whole place is like that gag where there’s a car and you pop the hood and under the hood is a bunch of hamster wheels and that’s what we’re all running on. Technical wants to live and advance itself on you. I also want to live and not be consumed by it. This is why I can cherish being able to text a Technical friend and ask what stupid new thing I should buy or what stupid software thing I need to worry about^[6] and see the utter humanity in that exchange, yet reject even the kindest offers of my friends to give me Technicality and their protests that my accomplishments are extraordinary enough that I have earned it. Of course I’ve earned it! If we are talking about effort most people around the planet have lived their lives in such a way that we would struggle to even find words to describe how hard they’ve worked. Earning it is actually not unusual. The point is that you were not in control of the fact that you got to be Technical. So you absolutely do not have the power to give it to somebody else.
技术的目标是让你在那个仓鼠轮里不停地跑，因为那是它的命脉。整个地方就像那个笑话，有一辆车，你打开引擎盖，里面却是一堆仓鼠轮，而我们都在上面跑。技术想要依靠你生存和发展。我同样也想活下去，而不是被它吞噬。这就是为什么我能够珍惜给一个技术朋友发短信，问我应该买什么愚蠢的新东西，或者我需要担心什么愚蠢的软件问题 ^[6] ，并看到这种交流中完全的人性，然而却拒绝朋友们最友好的建议，他们想给我“技术性”，并抗议说我的成就已经足够出色，我应该得到它。当然我应该得到它！如果我们谈论努力，世界上大多数人的一生都过得非常艰难，我们甚至很难找到合适的词语来形容他们有多努力。得到它实际上并不罕见。 关键在于，你无法掌控自己成为“技术人员”的事实。因此，你绝对没有权力把这个头衔赋予他人。

If the work for someone like me isn’t finally becoming Technical, what is it? The real work is to remain capable of seeing the full humanity of people who do not see my full humanity in return, and to never forget that I am here only as long as I can remember to think about the people I love who are not loved by this Technical system, and to not lose my heart in the process. It is a really high bar but so was surviving as a minimum-wage server in a dying town with a crappy car and the brain of a fifteen-year-old trained on instability and the casual cruelty that said my sharp edges meant I was stupid instead of a baby genius. Anything less ambitious than this high bar would be false psychology. I am not interested in giving you false psychology. I am not interested in the psychology that only makes you feel good. I am not interested in doing a science for developers that puts developers at the center of the universe at the cost of their full humanity. We can get sold for a while on the promise that being a robot is better than being a human but that coolness expires when what you experience is simple dehumanization. Robots sound pretty desirable unless you describe them as factory workers which is what most of them do.^[7] I recommend thinking about what you do as much as you think about what you think you are. At this point perhaps we’re starting to see being Technical isn’t a solution even for those of you who are allowed into Valhalla.
如果像我这样的人的工作最终没有变成“技术性的”，那它是什么？真正的工作是始终能够看到那些没有回报我全部人性的人的全部人性，并且永远不要忘记，我之所以在这里，是因为我能够记住那些不被这个“技术”系统所爱的人，并且在这个过程中不要失去我的心。这是一个非常高的标准，但作为一个在垂死的小镇上以最低工资为生的服务员，开着破车，拥有一个被不稳定和随意残酷训练的十五岁孩子的头脑，而这种残酷说我的棱角分明意味着我愚蠢而不是天才，这也很难。任何低于这个高标准的目标都是虚假的心理学。我对给你虚假的心理学不感兴趣。我对那种只会让你感觉良好的心理学不感兴趣。我不想为开发者做一门科学，让开发者成为宇宙的中心，而牺牲他们全部的人性。 我们可能会被“成为机器人比成为人类更好”的承诺迷惑一段时间，但当你的体验仅仅是简单的非人化时，这种酷炫感就会失效。机器人听起来很不错，除非你把它们描述成工厂工人，而这正是它们大多数人的工作。 ^[7] 我建议你多思考你所做的事情，就像你思考你认为自己是什么一样。在这一点上，也许我们开始看到，即使对那些被允许进入瓦尔哈拉的人来说，“技术”也并非一个解决方案。

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^[8] not a coder so like how could she even, rest in the reassurance that Psychology has set this trap too. We can rewrite this entire essay to be about my field, Psychology, if you need that. Psychology has been a willing partner in the agenda of dividing Technical people from not-Technical people as evidenced by the fact that most people in software assume that someone like me can only work for HR even after I have worked for academia, startups, government teams, nonprofits, big tech, small tech, doesn’t-know-it’s-tech, and basically everything except HR. Psychology has with a straight face proposed that we measure people’s potential with bigoted tasks and such approaches shafted both our own selection and had undue influence on early selections of supposed programmer aptitude.^[9]
免得你觉得软件行业正遭受围攻，这个价值数万亿美元的、由信念和想象构成的不断变化的结构，在一位身高 5 英尺 4 英寸的黑发女性（青少年时期是该死的咖啡师 ^[8] ，而不是程序员，所以她怎么可能懂）的论文中受到了过多的打击，请放心，心理学也设置了这个陷阱。如果需要，我们可以把整篇文章改写成关于我的领域——心理学。心理学一直积极参与将“技术人员”与“非技术人员”区分开来的议程，事实证明，大多数软件行业的人都认为像我这样的人只能为 HR 工作，即使我曾在学术界、初创公司、政府团队、非营利组织、大型科技公司、小型科技公司、甚至是不知是科技公司的公司工作过，基本上除了 HR 之外，什么都做过。 心理学曾一本正经地提出，我们可以用带有偏见的任务来衡量人们的潜力，而这种方法既损害了我们自身的选拔，又对早期所谓的程序员能力选拔产生了不当影响。 ^[9]

Because psychology doesn’t have trillions of dollars it hovers around tech a bit like a horsefly. If tech engineering wanted me to be a waitress, tech psychology wanted me to be my worst nightmare which is a People Person. One of the specific traps I saw in spending such a career as a Tech People Person doing internal research programs–and this could be HR or UX–that truly horrified me was the secret job requirement of affirming the narrative that engineers are more special than everyone else.^[10] An example of this is every time evidence of efficacy is not able to exert any power versus the votes of engineering disengagement. You could put your diligent little psychologist heart into it and make a good program or policy change and muster up extremely critical evidence for something no one else bothered to measure but you could not demand that all of the engineering managers do it, for instance. The engineering managers always had the power and always would. This is what I mean by Technical being a structural designation that operates outside of problem-solving: not only do the structurally empowered eighty-to-ninety-percent-men of technical organizations (100% in a great deal of the research about software topics) get to choose emotions over efficacy, they get to do so while also maintaining the notion that they never have emotions in the first place. Actually to be fully consistent and safely within the Technical they have to do it.
因为心理学没有数万亿美元，所以它就像牛虻一样围绕着科技。如果科技工程希望我当服务员，科技心理学希望我成为我最糟糕的噩梦，也就是一个“社交达人”。我在从事科技社交达人这样的职业，做内部研究项目（这可能是人力资源或用户体验）时，看到一个真正让我感到恐惧的具体陷阱，那就是秘密的职位要求是肯定工程师比其他所有人更特殊。 ^[10] 举个例子，每当有效性的证据无法发挥任何作用时，就会输给工程师们的不配合投票。你可以把勤奋的小心理学家的心投入进去，制定一个好的项目或政策改变，并为没有人费心去衡量的事情收集极其关键的证据，但你不能要求所有的工程经理都这样做，例如。工程经理们永远拥有权力，而且永远都会拥有。 这就是我所说的“技术”是一种在解决问题之外运作的结构性定义：技术组织中那些拥有结构性权力的八到九成男性（在大量关于软件主题的研究中是 100%）不仅可以选择情绪而非效率，而且他们这样做时，还能保持自己从未有过情绪的观念。事实上，为了完全一致并安全地处于“技术”范畴内，他们必须这样做。

And that is key. That is dehumanization doing its own dehumanization. That is the real renewable energy miracle of tech. We may not talk about it but we sure market the hell out of it. If you are one of the people who needed to ask what the fuck is he talking about, this is that Zuckerbergian masculine energy. It feels incoherent but asks a completely coherent question of us. What can we do if we never have enough? This is one of the paradoxes of software teams: rich people, rich teams, rich environments, described and experienced as utter wastelands by (statistically speaking) men who have (statistically speaking) socked away more than I’ve ever touched and more than generations of my family ever touched, and their entire ownership of not having enough. I am not saying that suffering isn’t real, I’m saying it teaches us what all that richness will never fix. I have been afraid to check the mail and see a bill and afraid to go to the doctor and afraid for the future of our science is what I’m saying, and that is not how Technical feels, and yet I am the one who knows what I have enough to care about it. Without the ability to feel, part of the “enough” that Technical craves is continually novel ways to make people like me afraid.
而这才是关键。这就是去人性化在进行它自己的去人性化。这是科技领域真正的可再生能源奇迹。我们可能不会谈论它，但我们肯定会大力推销它。如果你是那些需要问“他到底在说什么”的人之一，这就是扎克伯格式的男性能量。它感觉语无伦次，但却向我们提出了一个完全连贯的问题。如果我们永远不够，我们能做什么？这是软件团队的悖论之一：富有的人、富有的团队、富有的环境，却被（从统计学上讲）拥有比我接触过的、甚至我几代家人接触过的都多的财富的男性描述和体验为一片荒原，而他们完全拥有着“永远不够”的心态。我不是说痛苦不是真实的，我是说它教会了我们所有这些财富永远无法解决的问题。 我一直害怕查看邮件看到账单，害怕去看医生，也害怕我们科学的未来，这就是我想说的，而这并不是“Technical”的感觉，但我才是那个知道我足够关心它的人。如果没有感知能力，那么“Technical”所渴望的“足够”的一部分，就是不断地用新方法来让我们这样的人感到害怕。

The paradoxes of software engineering haunt me. Tech is intensely hierarchical and demands performance of flat culture. Tech is immensely global in its activity and so fanatically geo-located in its employment that even the most senior and most unquestionably Technical people worry about moving away from 2-3 certain US cities. Tech sets out a vision of changing the world and cannot change the demographics of its own engineering function. Statistically speaking I was supposed to be a waitress, while most of the people who listen to my research and take comfort in my words and thank me for my work were supposed to be engineers. Why did that happen for me but not all the other people who are just like me? That haunts me. But mama didn’t raise a quitter either.
软件工程的悖论困扰着我。技术行业高度等级化，却又要求扁平化的文化表现。技术行业活动具有极强的全球性，但在就业方面却又如此狂热地依赖地理位置，以至于即使是最资深、毫无疑问是“技术”人员的人，也会担心离开美国 2-3 个特定的城市。技术行业描绘了改变世界的愿景，却无法改变其自身工程部门的人口结构。从统计学上讲，我本应成为一名服务员，而大多数听取我的研究、从我的话语中获得慰藉、并感谢我的工作的人本应是工程师。为什么这种情况发生在我身上，而不是发生在所有其他与我一样的人身上？这困扰着我。但妈妈也没有把我培养成一个轻易放弃的人。

I can generate evidence that yields up for organizations millions of dollars and can quantify the value of that work; I have motherfucking made it and that is not good enough. Curing cancer at the most famous university in the world, the literal symbol of the good smart thing, is not good enough and all this anti-science contains a who-is-Technical argument pure and simple if we the airlock folks have ever seen one, don’t act like it doesn't. The whole thing was designed so that people trying to solve my kind of problems with my kind of tools would never be good enough. I will never be good enough for Technical people no matter how good I ever am. I know this because I need to study success in tech intimately, like a scientist, and not let this eat my heart, my soul, or my mind. Standing behind a counter working my low-wage job with a special job permit in a state that allowed children to work instead of go to school, the older women I worked with hugged me and cried when I told them about the very first scholarship that I ever got. It has taken me a long time to realize that I never left them behind and, embarrassingly, longer to be grateful for that. I will always be closer to being those women than I will be to Technical and I am best served by never forgetting it. A good number of the people who decide what work in this industry means look at someone like me and ask if they can get coffee service, or note taking, or fear they can laugh at, before they are interested in anything about my mind.
我可以生成为组织带来数百万美元收益的证据，并量化这项工作的价值；我他妈的做到了，但这还不够好。即使在世界上最著名的大学——“好、聪明”的象征——治愈癌症也不够好，而且所有这些反科学都包含一个纯粹而简单的“谁是技术人员”的论点，如果我们这些“气闸人”曾经见过的话，别装作没看到。整个事情的设计就是为了让那些试图用我的工具解决我这类问题的人永远不够好。无论我有多优秀，我都永远无法达到技术人员的标准。我知道这一点，因为我需要像科学家一样深入研究科技领域的成功，而不是让它吞噬我的心、我的灵魂或我的思想。 站在柜台后面，做着一份低薪工作，拿着特殊的工作许可证，在一个允许儿童工作而不是上学的州，一起工作的老年妇女们拥抱了我，在我告诉她们我获得的第一份奖学金时，她们哭了。我花了很长时间才意识到我从未离开她们，更令人尴尬的是，我花了更长的时间才对此心怀感激。我将永远更接近成为那些妇女，而不是“Technical”，并且永远记住这一点对我来说是最好的。很多决定这个行业工作意义的人，在对我的思想产生任何兴趣之前，会先看看我这样的人，问我是否可以提供咖啡服务，或者做笔记，或者害怕嘲笑我。

If you have lasted this long reading my words the paradoxes must haunt you too. This newsletter isn’t going to fix it. This essay isn’t going to answer your questions. But it may tell you they are real. Let us at least fight to be able to see what is being asked of us so we can have the capacity to choose our own answers. Let us describe our ghosts. The shadow and the other half of the dialectic is still there even when we never talk about it: that which is not Technical, that which counterweights your world, that which is not you. The quiet slicing away of humanity in tech does not have to be as dramatic as a boss screaming that you have no choice (although it can be). 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. It is being asked to forget that you know that woman’s daughter grew up and taught herself to pull magic cures and socioeconomic mobility for other people’s children out of the harsh landscape of science and that the industry you work in wants to kill her work. It is being asked to forget that you were invited to serve psychology at a tech conference in the same city where your sister was working in a grocery store and their managerial chain forbid them from wearing masks because it made the rich people feel bad and your sister’s union fought for their right to do so at the exact same time as an authoritative man in tech told you it was unacceptable to ask them about masks. These women are a nonentity in tech, which is to say entirely nonexistent to the Technical. This is not an imaginary example. This is my family.
如果你读到这里，那些悖论一定也困扰着你。这篇新闻稿无法解决问题。这篇文章也无法回答你的问题。但它可能会告诉你，这些问题是真实存在的。让我们至少努力看清摆在我们面前的是什么，这样我们才能有能力选择自己的答案。让我们描述我们的幽灵。辩证法的阴影和另一半依然存在，即使我们从未谈论过它：非“技术”的，与你的世界抗衡的，不是你的东西。科技界悄无声息地削弱人性的过程，不必像老板怒吼你别无选择那样戏剧化（尽管也可能如此）。 这可以像不得不忘记你的岳母一样，她曾在费城郊外长时间工作，照顾别人的孩子，多年来一直尽心尽力地照顾他们，却几乎没有报酬，而且知道在你周围发生的技术决策机制中，这位日托工人根本不被当成一个人，而她与科技公司创建的目标广告基础设施互动的主要方式就是被骗。这就像被要求忘记你知道那个女人的女儿长大后，从严酷的科学环境中自学如何为别人的孩子带来神奇的疗愈和经济流动性，而你所从事的行业却想扼杀她的工作。 有人要求你忘记你受邀在一个科技大会上为心理学服务，而你的妹妹在同一座城市的杂货店工作，她们的管理层禁止她们戴口罩，因为这会让有钱人感觉不舒服，而你的妹妹的工会正在为她们争取这项权利，与此同时，一个在科技界有权威的男人告诉你，问他们关于口罩的问题是不可接受的。这些女性在科技界是无足轻重的，也就是说，对“技术人员”来说是完全不存在的。这并非虚构的例子。这是我的家人。

The Technical needs to exclude women in daycares, women in cafes, women in grocery stores and now even women in labs in order to continue its own existence. It needs to be separate from all other areas of work in order to get different rules for itself. After all, objects do not suffer. There is a very direct connection between explaining the experiences of the people I care about in tech and explaining to the people in tech about the people I care about. And because of who I am and who I love, I cannot be Technical here and now for the exact same reasons that I could not be smart back when I was fifteen and working instead of going to school no matter how obvious the proof of smartness was. In some systems otherness causes smartness to dissolve because otherness is more useful to the system than the smartness. It is therefore not very difficult for me in this system to understand why software looks at me and gets surprised when I know what code is, and then gets angry when I don’t care about code all that much and instead care about the people so much more. Caring about the code is supposed to be what you do to earn being here and I refuse that. I cannot be Technical because I put my caring, my hope, my love, and the center of my universe somewhere else.
“技术”需要将日托中心的女性、咖啡馆的女性、杂货店的女性，甚至实验室的女性排除在外，才能继续存在。它需要与所有其他工作领域区分开来，以便为自己制定不同的规则。毕竟，物体不会遭受痛苦。解释我在科技领域关心的人的经历，与向科技领域的人解释我关心的人之间，有着非常直接的联系。而因为我是谁，我爱谁，我现在无法成为“技术人员”，原因与我十五岁时无法变得聪明的原因完全相同，当时我不得不工作而不是上学，无论我有多么明显的聪明才智证明。在某些系统中，异质性会导致聪明才智瓦解，因为异质性对系统来说比聪明才智更有用。 因此，在这个体系中，我很容易理解为什么软件看到我时会感到惊讶，因为我知道什么是代码，然后又会生气，因为我并不怎么关心代码，反而更关心人。关心代码应该是你在这里立足的根本，而我拒绝这样做。我无法成为“技术人员”，因为我把我的关怀、希望、爱，以及我宇宙的中心放在了别处。

My project with Fight For the Human is to create a space for tough but healing conversations about rehumanization in tech. A space for hope as a living practice and an activity, specifically the hope that there is a future when we in tech will be something other than all of this. I am not certain where it will lead but I am very certain that I need to try something; we are losing too much right now to not try everything. This space is just something that I want to exist right now and maybe you do too. If you subscribe, I will try to give you more tools to fight with, and you will make this space a little bit more real. Because I’m a researcher I will weave in research, resources, and things I think will be helpful for the people concerned with this fight. But I will also try personal storytelling because I think that it is a big part of how we think, and our kind of tech, I mean the real work that is happening outside of The Technical, has lacked shared thinking and storytelling for too long. We might have to wear spacesuits to clamber around on the outside of the megastructures that have defined our lives. This design was never fully explained to us but I have been reliably informed that you are builders. Builders know that even the biggest structures can be understood and reconstructed. So let’s try.
我与“为人类而战”的项目旨在为科技领域中关于“再人性化”的艰难但具有疗愈作用的对话创造一个空间。这个空间将希望作为一种活生生的实践和活动，特别是希望在未来，我们科技界的人能够摆脱这一切。我不确定它会走向何方，但我非常确定我需要尝试一些事情；我们现在正在失去太多，以至于不能不尝试一切。这个空间正是我现在希望存在的东西，也许你也是。如果你订阅，我将尝试为你提供更多战斗的工具，你将使这个空间变得更真实。因为我是一名研究人员，我将融入研究、资源以及我认为对参与这场斗争的人们有帮助的东西。 但我也会尝试个人叙事，因为我认为这是我们思考方式的重要组成部分，而我们的技术，我的意思是“技术”之外正在发生的真正的工作，长期以来一直缺乏共同的思考和叙事。我们可能不得不穿上太空服，才能在定义我们生活的大型结构外部攀爬。这种设计从未向我们完全解释过，但我被可靠地告知你们是建造者。建造者知道，即使是最大的结构也可以被理解和重建。所以，让我们试试吧。