The Manifesto reflects a position on the power of programming. It essentially puts programmers on a different plane of existence entirely. Although it’s a bit hyperbolic, I stand by its message, which is that more and more those who know about technology gain considerable power in our modern world. Take Facebook for example. It was started by a technologically driven programmer that wanted to explore something new. Now he has great power over what people see daily. One such display of this power was when Facebook carried out an emotion experiment in 2014. They manipulated people New’s Feed to display either mostly positive or mostly negative posts, such that they can explore the effect of social media on people’s emotions. There was a huge backlash because of that manipulation.
The manifesto claims that programmers would be able to defend themselves better against this. The reason this is true is that we are more aware than others that this can be easily done. We also know of ways to avoid tracking and avoid targeted displays of information. This can’t always be possible, but the fact that we know makes us stronger against it.
The portrait we wrote was very general. A statement written was that most CS students are white, which I’m not. I’m also not a big fan of football or catholic. The CS students’ portrait at Notre Dame was based greatly on what’s the general image of the average Notre Dame student. I don’t think we defer too much from other majors. Maybe we have more quirky jokes and we use our computers more, but I think we are all normal people: we party, we have fun, and we have normal interests.
I think stereotypes can be a problem. We tend to generalize and judge people based on stereotypes. This can’t be a good way to judge people. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to avoid the problem. All humans have an almost unconscious disposition to judge people on as little information as we have from them, even if this just includes their appearance or their major. We may often find that our stereotypes are incorrect, but we never stop using them. I personally don’t find any benefit from a portrait. We are all individuals and we should be judged as such.