I’m an computer engineer by trade. I design circuit boards, and work with radio signals. Lots of datasheets, computer simulations, math. Very objective things. And yet, social matters like “inclusivity” are beating on my door, and I am reluctant to answer.
The banner image for this article is a simple circuit I designed in university. It takes two numbers between 0-15, and adds or subtracts them. Each red bar represents a CMOS transistor pair, destined to be etched into silicon. This circuit could be the building block of a very small computer—once you add things like memory and a processor.
One of the tragedies of this course was that my designs only ever existed as a computer simulation. To actually manufacture the above circuit into real silicon is a multi-million dollar process. I could only dream of ever having the chance to see my design become real.
Yesterday, I read an advertisement for an open source silicon initiative. You can submit your silicon designs to be produced for free—the opportunity of a lifetime. In effect, this is like NASA making an open call to send your robotics project to the moon. Just publish it on the internet, and NASA will build it for you, launch it on a rocket, and send you a radio to control your robot from the comfort of your home. All for free, for the sake of furthering science and humanity.
Of course, with significant opportunity comes significant stipulations. All your designs and documentation must be made public, so that anyone can inspect, recreate, and make further iterations on your design. You also must license your work with a permissive “open source” license, prohibiting you from charging others to reproduce your work. But remember, you’re going to the moon! These asks are small in comparison!
Oh… and one additional thing! Your documentation must use inclusive terminology.
What is “Inclusive” language?
So very glad you asked. Here is a simple scenario.
You are invited to speak at a rather informal event: a business dinner, where the company culture is very laid back. (The CEO wears a hoodie.) How do you start your speech? “Well guys, it’s been quite a year”?
Though informal, addressing the company as “guys” may make the women feel left out. After all, this particular industry is rather dominated by men. But everyone who works here is extremely technically competent, and we shouldn’t make someone who worked so hard to make it in this challenging field feel excluded.
To use inclusive language would mean that it is poor taste to use gendered language like “guys”, and instead you should start your speech with “everyone”. This concept can be extended to an entire class of common language that should be phased out. As another example, policeman should be replaced with “police officer”—because women are also police officers.
But there are so many instances of “gendered language” that have unconsciously slipped into common parlance, that many of us don’t even realize we’re using it. Helpfully, Google has constructed a style guide in attempts to reduce gendered language, abelist language, and other outdated expressions.
Adhering to Google’s inclusive style guide is required for your project to be accepted in the program. Some of the recommendations are fairly mundane. Others are a little puzzling, and a bit of a stretch. Authors should not use “tribal knowledge” to refer to information that is passed around a small group instead of written down. And don’t refer to the primary and backup database as “master and slave”, refer to them as “main and replicant”.
One suggestion drew an outright laugh from me: STONITH is considered unnecessarily violent language.
What does STONITH it stand for? I had to look it up, because the style guide wouldn’t explain what it meant.
It stands for “Shoot The Other Node in the Head”.
STONITH. Ah yes, how often I used to write that in documentation…
So what’s the issue?
There are three arguments to make, and I will make the weakest ones first.
First, Google recommends that documentation should reflect a global userbase. Authors should refrain from excessively referring to American names, holidays, and sports teams in documentation, and should sprinkle other cultures into their code examples. Already, I can feel the email from HR—my sample spreadsheet for domain names included “brayleigh.me and l’shäwnda.org”—and I offended someone.
Yes, I intentionally chose ridiculous names to make a silly and ridiculous point. People do have names you consider silly. They have silly characters, silly spellings, and silly lengths—and for a decent time, domain names only supported A-Z and 0-9.
Could I have chosen more bland names, that don’t seem to poke at a sensitive cultural issue surrounding absurd and unique variations on birth certificates? Perhaps. But there is no limit to what people will find offensive. I’ve dealt with enough people who will search for offense, that I’m tired of preemptively looking through everything I write to make sure that I don’t offend someone.
“I identify as an attack helicopter” used to be a transgender slur—but plural beings whose pronouns are “we/our” and identify as “an expansive ornate building” are real. (No, I’m not making this up.) And Elon Musk named his child “X Æ A-Xii”, so. Perhaps my examples will actually be virtuous in about four to eight months when the rest of society catches on.
Secondly, much of “inclusive language” is simply a futile walk on the euphemism treadmill.
In days long past, “moron” meant mentally disabled—but it quickly became a pejorative insult, and was replaced with “mentally retarded”. Which was replaced with “special needs”, which was most recently replaced with “neurodivergent”, and will soon be replaced with something else.
Steven Pinker explains this human behavior well, and coins a term for it: the euphemism treadmill.
People invent new "polite" words to refer to emotionally laden or distasteful things, but the euphemism becomes tainted by association and the new one that must be found acquires its own negative connotations.1
Writing clear technical documentation is already difficult enough. I have no time to allocate to futile exercises, nitpicking phrases that will be rendered culturally insensitive in three months. I have no intent to offend people with my documentation, or to make anyone feel excluded—but I simply cannot take responsibility for someone what someone else feels.
But these arguments are weak. Someone can simply raise a charge that I’m being insincere. “Master/slave” vs “primary/replica” is the smallest token to ask. There’s no reason to refuse this request, unless you wish to exclude and insult people. What possible objection could you have to being more inclusive?
Here is the linchpin. (Is that insensitive to say?)
Inclusivity: Fathers Excluded
A father recently responded to one of my comments.
As a parent my role has shifted to be more involved with my kindergarten aged kid. The parents like to organize events and socialize. However, the language used is often "mom" instead of "parent". My understanding is that they aren't intending to exclude "dad", as they are using "mom" as shorthand for "most active parent". My involvement in the group has been lower as a result, it's tough to feel like you may not be included.
From my previous writings, you should know that fathers are a near and dear topic to my heart. I attribute many of the social problems the world faces today to a lack of paternal involvement. It may be off topic, but Samuel Sey, over at Slow to Write, wrote an excellent article on the epidemic of fatherlessness, and I must quote it here:
63% of teenagers who commit suicide are fatherless. 72% of adolescent murderers are fatherless. 75% of adolescents in rehab centres for drug abuse are fatherless. 60% of rapists are fatherless. 85% of teenagers in prison are fatherless.
And especially, 75% of the most-cited school shooters in America are fatherless—just like the teenager who walked into Robb Elementary School to murder 21 people.
I have absolutely heard tales of society stepping on the toes of fathers, inferring that they must have gotten “stuck” with the kids for the day, or are playing “Mr. Mom”. While I don’t think that anyone is trying to be sinister, it’s a sad fact that our language in society reflects on the absenteeism of fathers.
It seems then, that I’ve lost the argument. If I want to see fathers be more represented in society, then inclusive language is an important tool!
…and there lies the problem.
Inclusive language doesn’t suggest using “mother or father” equally, in the way that documentation would say “he or she”. It suggests using “parent or guardian”, so as to include children who are raised by their grandparents, living in foster care, with divorced parents, or in a homosexual union. Fatherhood is not brought back into the picture by inclusive language, it is excluded.
And to use technical language, I’m lead to believe this isn’t a bug, but a feature.
Exclusion: A Feature, not a Bug
Be warned. This section is going to sound absolutely insane.
In July of 2020, amidst the racially charged turmoil surrounding George Floyd’s death, The Smithsonian helpfully published this infographic explaining “whiteness” and “white privilege”. (It was subsequently retracted for being a horrendous PR disaster.)
On the chart were some fascinating things. Apparently, the scientific method is an aspect of “whiteness”. So is a respect for authority, a hard work ethic, private property, planning for the future, and… the nuclear family.
Never mind that this sounds like what you’d expect to hear at a KKK rally: that colored people (oops, I mean, people of color) had no respect for authority, had a poor work ethic, spent all their money as soon as they got it, would never make it in scientific fields, and would always have broken homes stemming from infidelity and immorality. But history has come full circle, and now it is virtuous to reframe things as “whiteness” and “anti-racism”.
Any notion that “rational thinking” is a good principle that can be enjoyed and aspired to by any culture is actually “internalized whiteness”. White people have simply made these ideas so popular, they’ve effectively colonized thought, causing marginalized people to accept these principles without questioning them, and forcing minorities to live within this system of whiteness—in effect, oppressing them.
In order to liberate minorities from “whiteness”, the country needs to be decolonized to be more inclusive of diverse ideas. Many cultures raise children in communal settings, and the idea that a child needs both a mother and a father is merely colonial thought. One of the systems that must be decolonized is language itself—in order to tear down the systemic racism of the nuclear family, one must refer to “parent or guardian” instead of “mother or father”.
Does this sound crazy?
It is.
And it’s currently mainstream thought, called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”. Or Contemporary Critical Theory. Or whatever term we’re supposed to use in the intellectually dishonest shell game of “that’s not it, it’s just a theoretical college level theory that definitely isn’t being implemented in society!”
DEI: Ask Not for Whom the Bell Tolls
While writing the above paragraph, it felt like I’m taking crazy pills. The Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) crowd will laugh me off as some crackpot that doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. Stirring up some moral panic about fringe academic theories that definitely aren’t being taught in public schools. Crying wolf. The slippery slope fallacy. It isn’t happening.
It’s real, and it’s coming for you. There’s no avoiding it.
Around 2015-2018, I watched the softer side of computer science get steamrolled by woke ideology — or at the time, what we called political correctness. Web developers, game designers, and the Javascript crowd had silly wars over trivial issues. A video game called “Cuphead” was problematic and ableist for being too difficult to win. Yes. Seriously.
From my position far away in the land of engineering, I laughed. The arts and humanities double majors had infected the CompSci world, and were eating it alive. But they were arts and humanities majors! They’d never make it in any fields harder than HTML/CSS.
In 2016, GitHub adopted a Code of Conduct that explicitly stated it would not pursue claims of racism for privileged people.
In 2017, Redis was forced to remove “master/slave” terminology. James Damore was fired from his job at Google for his views that there may be explanations for a gender imbalance in software development other than sexism. Node.js briefly forked after refusing to punish a user for… apologizing. (Meanwhile, a prominent Node.js user received no punishment for tweeting “kill all men”.)
In 2018, Linus Torvalds, famous for his blistering code reviews, adopted a Code of Conduct for the Linux Kernel.
In 2019, Stack Overflow enacted a policy requiring use of preferred gender pronouns. Consciously avoiding pronouns and using the singular they was a violation of the policy, in spite insistence that users also use non-gendered language. The community raised serious questions, and the official FAQ thread was so unpopular, it was deleted. (Archived version here.)
And in 2022, if you want to hop on the shuttle and tape out silicon, you must adhere to the inclusivity style guide.
DEI has come to the “last bastion” of the hardware world, and the battle is lost. Their strategy is impeccable: slip in under the trojan horse of being welcoming and inclusive. Guilt trip people to voluntarily render themselves subject to your authority. (It’s just terms like police officer, it’s a small ask!) and begin implementing social reforms via newspeak. Disagree with using the term “birthing person” at the peril of your current (and future) employment.
But the end result is not more inclusivity. Groups like fathers, who should ACTUALLY be included, are excluded so as not to offend families without fathers. All the meanwhile, the dictators of language spew the most vile and hateful rhetoric, while erasing the very people they claim to care about.
Given that it’s soon to be Pride Month, I’ll end with one final illustration.
The rainbow is literally inclusive of the entire visible spectrum of light, it was chosen for the pride flag to be inclusive of every gender and sexual orientation. But the rainbow wasn’t inclusive enough. It had to include transgender people, and so the white, pink, and blue chevron was added on the left. Still, it was not inclusive enough, and a brown and black stripe were added for… minority skin colors?
I suspect that the chevron will continue to grow with the LGBTQ+ acronym. Since it’s not limited to gender and sexuality anymore, I’m sure it will start to include other progressive causes like the Ukrainian flag, Monkeypox/COVID, and gun control. Meanwhile, the rainbow flag slowly gets covered up further and further. Erased.
Ladies and gentlemen, the paradox of inclusivity.
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” - Orwell
The game of the name—Steven Pinker (1994)