Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation)

Don't Take the Black Pill (Text Adaptation) This is a blog post version of the talk I delivered at Software Should Work 2026 . Shoutouts to Isaac Van Doren for running such a delightful conference and nailing it first try , and for infecting us all with his charming enthusiasm for Columbia, Missouri. Part 1: The Pill When I gave this talk, I warmed up the crowd by asking the audience who liked the 1999 film The Matrix. Roughly half raised their hands. But the kicker was the followup question, "who has never seen this movie?". 10 brave youngsters raised their hands to audible gasps. In this movie, there's an iconic moment where our hero, Ted "Theodore" Logan , is presented with two choices, the red pill or the blue pill. The question is essentially "Do you want to know an uncomfortable truth?"; the blue pill means "no" and the red pill means "yes". To the audience, the answer is obvious. If the main character chose blue, the credits would roll before anything happened. But the metaphor is so strong and the cinematography kicks so much ass that the scene influenced our culture and language to the point where people who haven't even heard of the film say the phrase "based and red-pilled". Let's talk about the "black pill". It comes from "incel" culture. The word is a portmanteau of "involuntary" and "celibate". Basically, young men who had trouble dating started complaining about it together on the Internet. So far, so good, but an unfortunate feedback cycle emerged. Those who used the space in a productive manner, such as brainstorming, encouragment, mentorship, etc., tended to shape up, mature, work through their problems, and, to put it bluntly, get laid. At that point, they didn't really feel like sticking around and commiserating anymore, so they left. This was a natural filtering process . Thus, when new, impressionable youngsters entered the community, they were greeted only by miserable, hopeless, antisocial losers. Over time the culture became so toxic that the accepted wisdom became, essentially, "Give up. The game is rigged. There is nothing you can do. You might as well lie down and rot. " In short, the "black pill" is nihilism mixed with depression mixed with anger, and in the worst case leads to outcomes like suicide or school shootings. I almost fell into this trap. Speaking from experience, entering the dating scene as a young man can be challenging to the point of despair. I was raised by conservative Christian parents and had so, so much to learn and to unlearn about the world in order to date comfortably and confidently. Perhaps you may be surprised to hear this but what helped me get out of this spiral was listening to pick up artists. Looking back, I think what these guys mainly have to offer is its own form of nihilistic, manipulative toxicity, but one of them said something that I instantly realized was key. He said that you shouldn't focus on the outcome of "the pick up". The actual move, he said, is to work on being attractive, in general, to everybody . Platonic friends included. You should try to make everyone want to be around you, because you genuinely care about them. Listen intently to what they say. Make them laugh. You offer people whom you interact with meaningful experiences that make them remember you and invite you to future events. You put effort in to make everyone have a good time. By doing this, you create more circumstances where there is a chance for romance to spark. It's genius! My takeaway here is that the kids are alright. Even when exposed to a bunch of bad ideas, if good ideas are also in the mix, they'll figure it out. Let's bring this a little closer to home. This is Cory Doctorow. He's the guy who coined the term "Enshittification". He worked for Electronic Frontier Foundation for a while before becoming a fulll-time writer. In 2019 he published a short story called "Radicalized" . The story centers around an online forum of people who commiserate together because they got screwed over by heath insurance companies. Listen to this excerpt and see if it sounds familiar: In a forum for ex-drunks, there’s a big group of elder statespeople who’ve been sober for years and years. They’re a wise, moderating voice, and they are the existence of proof of life after addiction. Whenever someone on the forums went on a bender and was recriminating with themselves, there was a dried-out elder who could tell a story to top theirs, about being put out on the street, losing their kids, losing their limbs, even, and coming back from it. Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face did not have those people. The people who got over their furious grief left [the forum], chased away by its rage culture. The people who stayed were really into their anger, clinging to it like a drunk refusing to let go of a bottle. If your anger took you to a place you couldn’t handle, a place that scared you, the elders of [the forum] would help you all right: they’d explain to you that this was the right reaction, the only reaction, and it was never, ever going to get better. This was your life from here on in. Five years after Doctorow published this fictional short story, the real life CEO of the American health insurance company UnitedHealthcare was shot to death, bullets cased with the words "deny, defend, depose" . Part 2: Software Should Work The main purpose of a conference like this is technical. At its core, it's a "safe space" where the attendees already agree that software should work, and it should be fast, and it should prioritize the user experience, and so all we have to do is share tips, tricks, demos, and research with each other on how to better accomplish these things. But if we neglect the meta examination here, our efforts are in vain. The implication of the phrase "software should work" is that often in the real world, we find that it doesn't work. Right? Why not? What's stopping software from working? Is the problem simply ignorance? Are programmers not programming hard enough? Is the software engineering field too nascent? Have we not discovered how to make robust software yet? I would argue that mankind discovered how to make robust software before I was even born. There's a case to be made that the overall robustness and performance of software has decreased since then, despite hardware being many orders of magnitude more capable. What gives? Have you, dear reader, ever attempted to make software work better at a company you worked for as an employee or contractor, and you were shot down by management, saying that the business had other priorities? You know the kind of relationship I'm talking about. Management is Pointy Haired Boss, and you're Dilbert. Management is Rusty Venture, and you're Brock Sampson. Management is Michael Scott, and you're...any other character from The Office. The reality is that we software engineers already have a strong drive to make software work well, but there is a non-technical opposition. Let's talk about Benevolent Noncompliance : a form of rebellion where the beneficiary is also the authority. Asking for forgiveness rather than permission . When I gave this talk at SSW '26, about 75% of the audience fessed up to having done this (including myself). Secrecy . Normally you want to claim credit for doing good things at work. But sometimes we find ourselves doing the necessary things to make the business run smoothly in full secret, knowing that if management found out they would actually stop it. Inception . You have a meeting with management, and fool them into believing they have come up with an innovative, brilliant solution to the problem you bring to their attention. Of course, this "innovation" just so happens to be exactly what you carefully planted in their head during the meeting. Misdirection . Management wants to argue with you about something so whenever you do important work, you time it to coincide with less important work that you intentionally create more fanfare around. Management takes the bait and gets involved in the trivial distraction work, leaving your important work alone. It's kind of like giving your child a Fisher Price toy oven so they stop fucking around with the hot stove and burning themselves. The "duck" . You intentionally put an obvious problem for management to identify and claim credit for removing, again leaving your important work alone. As the lore goes : The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen’s animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the “actual” animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, “that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck.” Of course, all of these amusing tricks are alternative coping mechanisms to either quitting, confrontation, or acceptance. Consider that all of these, other than accepting your fate to create subpar software, are gambles . If you be tricky, you risk getting caught and reprimanded, possibly fired without severance. If you quit, you endure stress and uncertainty in the job market. If you confront management, you risk silent retaliation and loss of political advantage within the company. Now consider how the job market affects this dilemma. When the supply/demand ratio favors software engineers, we enjoy stronger negotation power. Rather than being afraid of getting fired, our managers are afraid of us quitting. When computers were first invented, we drew incredibly strong negotiation power from the scarity of fellow programmers. But now the free market is catching up with us, and we face the same struggle as workers of other industries. We are learning that software quality was maintained only through the will of software engineers combined with their accidentally strong negotiation position in the job market. Part 3: Agency This is a transistor - the fundamental unit of modern electronics. The key concept here is that it's an automated switch. Even just a teeny weeny smidge of voltage into the base terminal controls whether a relatively large current flows through the other two terminals. We practically worship these things. It's beautiful because it is both literally how computers work at a microscopic scale, and also metaphorically what they do at a macro scale. It is a mechanism by which something weak controls something strong; a device where an arbitrary amount of power is wielded by an effortless indication of intent. But who gets to decide whether "true" or "false" is sent into the base terminal? Whom does the software serve? This is something that I would like to try to help non-tech-savvy people be a little bit more savvy about. For example, when I run a browser on my computer, that's literally called a "user-agent". The browser is acting on my behalf; it serves my interests, not those of websites I visit. That's why I use can use AdBlock even though websites don't want me to, and they can't do a lick about it. DRM is an example of software that is actively hostile to the end user. DRM makes the user's own hardware serve the interests of a third party. You might argue that DRM indirectly is in the interest of consumers because it's the only reason that copyright holders will allow them to view their copyrighted works. I'm not talking about indirect interest, or consumers. I'm talking about end users of software, those who are directly interacting with it . Computers should always serve the person directly interacting with them . I always thought it was interesting that Isaac Asimov encoded this into his laws of robotics: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. In Asimov's sci fi universe, robots are flat out exempt from participating in the hierarchical power structures of humanity, other than those strictly necessary to prevent harm. For instance, if the police got a warrant for a suspect's arrest for a nonviolent crime, and they told a robot, go arrest that person, when the robot arrived at the door, the suspect could just tell the robot to fuck off, and the robot would say "of course, sorry for bothing you." Another expression of the same concept is this meme. It's a goofy formulation but it expresses a fundamental ideal: machines are meant to serve humans. This is a line that must not be crossed on a spiritual level . What we're seeing instead in the modern real world, is computers harnessed for coercion. We take the Holy Device - the transistor - and operate the control terminal as usual. But rather than wield the power of machines, we perform forbidden alchemy to bond our fellow humans to the transistor, indulging our sick, perverted fantasy of manipulating people as if they were soulless robots whose purpose is to do our bidding. Everywhere we look, we can see examples of Coercionware : attempting to treat the human mind as an instruction set architecture. Mechanical Turk . This is right on the nose. It's a business model that directly treats humans as robots, paying them less than minimum wage. Bossware . Trying to control employees to a fine degree all the way down to eye and bowel movements. Intrusive Advertisement . To whatever degree it is effective, it is literal mind control. But even ineffective advertisements interrupt our thought patterns and steal our attention, depriving us of agency. Push Notifications . Unless the user specifically and intentionally enables such a feature, it's an effort to not only programmatically control their behavior, but to reduce the latency of compliance. A/B Testing . It prioritizes outcome over intentionality. How should we design our user experience? Don't worry about it, just maximize clicks and revenue, even if that ends up being a dark pattern. In fact it offers plausible deniability for this case. Maybe the red button causes more clicks because it subconsciously instills fear in the user. Now we don't have a paper trail of doing this with intent. YouTube . Both content creators and viewers are being controlled by "the algorithm". Content creators are forever stuck chasing the ephemeral preferences of the algorithm, often at the expense of the integrity of their content. Have you ever noticed how modern YouTube thumbnails are evolving to look like this? Meanwhile on the viewing side we have absolutely absurd concepts like "Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" . What in the actual fuck kind of Chthulu hell portal have we opened, that this is a thing? AI Agents . Sleight of hand. AI agents purport to serve the user, but in reality the agency they serve is that of the AI company who controls the model and the closed source software surrounding it. If you don't control the source code, you are not in control . Dark Patterns . These are just openly coercive, not much to say here. It is mindblowing to me the degree to which computer users regularly tolerate this outright hostility. Doomscrolling . This is software that maximizes engagement by using content algorithms and infinite scroll. It keeps users glued to the screen and accustomed to consuming content chosen for them. To be clear, most people when they say "doomscrolling" are talking about a bad habit, e.g. they used Facebook too much on one particular day. I'm saying that the user-facing software of Facebook is categorically, fundamentally coercive . It's like an arbitrary code execution exploit running on our brains. Scrolling down is the program counter, and the content that pops up is the instructions. A weird side effect of this is that it means our brains can get hacked, just like computers. Although the content selected by the algorithm is intended to serve the company which is providing the software, it leaves our brains also vulnerable to malicious third parties. This is a quote from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in January 2017, summarizing work of the FBI, the CIA and the NSA : President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for president-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments. No matter what your political leanings are, if you value democracy, this should be alarming. The primary methodology used was a state-sponsored troll farm waging a social media campaign. It's really not far-fetched to say that we were mind-hacked, and that the vulnerability stems from the manipulative software practices of social media, and that the vulnerability has not been patched, and is still being actively exploited . No one is even working on a fix. Certainly not this guy: I think the idea that fake news on Facebook influenced the election in any way, I think is a pretty crazy idea. - Mark Zuckerberg, 2016 Each year that goes by, it gets more difficult to be an empathetic person who loves computers. Seeing the potential for what software could be doing for humanity versus the stark reality developing before our eyes is depressing. It can feel hopeless. Sure, we want things to be different, but is there actually anything we can do? It seems like every day we're being asked to "call our representative" or sign a petition or deal with the next emergency. We're always losing ground, never getting anything back. "I'm tired, boss." Our agency is under attack from all sides, and we're losing even the ability to opt out as more of our society becomes integrated with software. I lost touch with an entire group of friends because they exclusively do their event organization on Discord. The black pill offers relief in the same way that submission offers peace. To take the black pill is to relinquish the magic of computers, and surrender to their oppression . I would like to call attention to some black-pilled takes that I've seen in the wild. I want to be crystal clear here: the point is not blame or shame, but empathy. Even the last one. These are examples of attempts to cope with a very real sense that something is wrong . Let's start with a low stakes one. "Computers were a mistake." Sigh . I find it aggravating when a fellow programmer says this. I hear this occasionally from people who have not only made their entire career out of programming but also made it their primary hobby. I understand that they're just being edgy, it's supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek, it's a self-aware joke. But in my head I'm screaming, you are the one making computers do stuff! It denies all agency. Using AI even though you don't like it , or in a way that you find distasteful, because you think you have to . If you legitimately like to use AI, it's a different story. But I've seen way too many blog posts of people describing the joyless way in which they've begrudgingly started using it at work and how it makes them depressed but this is their new reality now. I have a friend who manages a team of people who told me that they are working 50+ hour weeks, using AI to try to eliminate the jobs of other teams at the same company, out of fear that if they don't do it, it will happen to them. Another one is Anubis . We've all seen this pop up right? It's web scraping deterrence software. I know it's being used by Linux k…