Stuart K. Hayashi
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| Protectionist Trump-apologist vlogggers and right-wing internet-trolls use this collage of six articles as their proof that mainstream, left-leaning journalists callously tell laid-off blue-collar workers that they should suck it up and Learn to Code. The problem: the articles do not say what the right-wingers accuse them of saying, as we shall see below. |
This is a shortened version of the blog post “Right-Wing Trolls and Vloggers and Their Delusional ‘Learn to Code’ Narrative.” I thought perhaps many readers would consider my prolonged discussion of “creative-destruction” economics in the longer version to be tedious or distracting. Therefore, for this, the shortest version, I edited out the discussion entirely.
If you still want to read that discussion of economics, but want an abridged version of that, please see the medium-length version of this essay, “On ‘Learn to Code’: Right-Wing Protectionist Trolls vs. Market Economics.” The medium-length version retains some of the explanation of “creative-destruction” economics and the discussion of the history of the media’s general ideological attitude toward “creative destruction.”
In January of this year, Buzzfeed and HuffPost announced hundreds of employee layoffs to cut costs. On cue, politically right-wing trolls scoured Twitter for journalists lamenting the layoffs, and then spitefully tweeted at them that they should just suck it up and “Learn to Code.”
What was meant by that? Since the 1990s, the mainstream media have been running stories about how factories, plants, and mines in the U.S. Rustbelt have been closing, in part due to foreign-born competition, but much more due to the provision of manufactured goods and energy being automated, conducted by computer-programmed robots.
In the blinkered narrative of right-wing trolls, mainstream journalists — most of whom have an admittedly politically left-wing perspective — have for years been gloating about the job losses in the Rustbelt. This is because, proclaim the right-wing trolls, mainstream journalists look down upon members of the white working class, dismissing them as bigoted rubes and cultural villains. The right-wing trolls conclude that because mainstream journalists hold dislocated blue-collar workers in such contempt, these journalists express no sympathy or concern for them, crowing at them that they should “Learn to Code,” analogous to a caricature of a rich man snapping at a beggar, “Go inherit your own money!” Hence, say the right-wing trolls, mainstream journalists themselves getting downsized out of their jobs is an instance of poetic justice. The right-wing trolls admonished the journalists “Learn to code” to show them how it feels.
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| Disappointingly, this tweet is from someone who has a Fellowship at an organization that purports to be a free-market think. I hope the reader will see, by the end of this blog post, how this tweeter’s depiction of journalists is a straw man. |
As the Alt-Right YouTube vlogger “Black Pigeon Speaks” frames it to his 480,000 subscribers,
“Learn to code” was the response by many to tweets and posts made by the newly unemployed journalists talking about having been let go on social media. The meme was, in effect, being thrown back at many of the activist-slash-journalists that had just been fired to pretty much rub their noses in their own sanctimonious and smug suggestions, beginning in the 1980s but really ramping up in the 1990s when working-class Americans who saw their livelihoods and jobs evaporate as manufacturing was outsourced to China and Mexico, and their suggestion to those workers was to go out and Learn to Code. Obviously, people with gender studies- and psychology degrees working at news outlets across the United States came off as totally out-of-touch with people in the Rustbelt. And thus the retort to journalists who themselves are now seeing their own industry dying out as a result of technological change, and telling them to “Learn to Code,” is as genius as it is simple.
The “anti-Social-Justice-Warrior” vlogger “ShortFatOtaku” — who, to my knowledge, is less politically radical than “Black Pigeon Speaks” — similarly phrases it to 56,000 subscribers,
...in the past, when the working class of hinterland America saw layoffs, firings, and factory closings, as the combination of globalist trade policies shipping their jobs overseas and influxes of cheap labor into the market through mass migration completely destroyed America’s mining, manufacturing, and energy sectors, these bourgeois upper-class journalists and bloggers, sitting in their coastal elite offices, would write about how the working class should just “Learn to Code.” [ . . . ] There is[...]a dedicated section of hell for journalists who tell coal miners “Learn to Code”; you’re experiencing it right now.
There are many inaccuracies in those jeremiads. For an explanation of what exposes those jeremiads as economically illiterate, especially concerning the general tone that the media have historically taken when covering mass job losses, please see the medium-length version of this same essay.
“Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” Directly Contradicted By the Six Case Studies in the Collage They Present
No doubt, apologists for President Trump and protectionism maintain that there are indeed myriad examples of the mainstream media being smarmy and lecturing laid-off blue-collar workers that their dislocation from heavy industry is for the best and that it would behoove them to “Learn to Code.” As supposed proof, both “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” present, pictured below, the exact same collage of six online media headlines. “Black Pigeon Speaks” does it at the 3 minute, 55 seconds timestamp and “ShortFatOtaku” at the 1 minute, 35 seconds timestamp.
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| Again, this is the collage they cite. |
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| “Black Pigeon Speaks” citing the collage. |
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| “ShortFatOtaku” citing the collage. |
That same collage was tweeted to journalists who vented online about the lay-offs.
Here is the problem: when you actually look at the articles in total — or even bother to read their headlines — the articles don’t actually do what “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” accuse them of doing.
And it turns out I am not alone in noting this. Days after I uploaded the three different versions of this essay, I learned that the blog Angry White Men pointed out back in January that the articles “are anything but malicious, and none of them are examples of journalists ‘push[ing] coding on the coal miners.’ ”
Not one of the six articles is a prescriptive essay urging laid-off blue-collar employees to learn to code. All of them — even the one in the right-hand corner from the New York Times and labeled “Opinion” — are straight-news articles that are descriptive of the phenomenon of blue-collar employees actually learning to code.
When it comes to the mischaracterization by “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” of what the articles actually say, a red flag should go off immediately from the title of the Bloomberg Business article directly in the middle. It is not “Appalachian Miners Should Learn to Code.” It is “Appalachian Miners Are Learning to Code.” ARE Learning to Code — as in: regardless of what anyone’s opinion is, the reality is that laid-off miners are learning to code. In fact, all of them except for the New York Times piece, are about the same for-profit company, Bit Source, founded by M. Lynn Parrish and Rusty Justice and employing former coal miners as software engineers.
Let’s start by addressing the three news articles that first seem to be the likeliest to be sermons exhorting laid-off workers to stop feeling sorry for themselves and just learn to code already.
The one that at first seems to be such an opinion piece is the one on the bottom from Forbes, by Anne Field, “Turning Miners Into Coders — And Preventing a Brain Drain.” It begins, “Is learning to code the answer to the plight of struggling coal miners? For business partners Rusty Justice and M. Lynn Parrish, it’s at least one solution.”
That sounds like it may be opinionated — the author saying that Justice and Parrish believe learning to code is a possible “solution” sounds like praise for that prospect. But those two sentences are the most opinionated in this and the other five articles from the collage. The rest of the Forbes article is just straight news. Here is a sample:
Three years ago, Justice and Parrish got tired of watching out-of-work coal miners struggling to survive. So the owners of Jigsaw, a Pikeville, KY, excavation and engineering company, decided to start a new business — a software development company that would hire former miners in eastern Kentucky, first teaching them how to code.
This is the conclusion:
The partners plan to ramp up their current employees’ skill level before making any more hires. Still, so far, according to Justice, his newbie coders have been doing just fine. He points to one employee, a former miner who used to run a shuttle car underground and recently attended a lunch in New York City about agile software development. “He fit right in,” says Justice.
Now let’s get to the New York Times story in the upper right-hand corner, titled “The Coders of Kentucky.” It is, after all, labeled “Opinion.” But it is actually not structured as an argument. The only one of these six articles that is not about Bit Source, it consists of straight news contents like these:
Mr. Gopal is at the forefront of a new movement to bring money and jobs from the coastal capitals of high tech to a discouraged, outsource-whipped Middle America. Ro Khanna, the Democratic representative from California whose district includes Apple, Intel, LinkedIn and Yahoo, was among the first politicians to float the idea of Silicon Valley venturing inland. “Why outsource coding jobs to Bangalore when we can insource jobs to eastern Kentucky, poor in jobs but rich in work ethic, and every one I.T. job brings four or five other jobs with it?” he said.
Unlike the videos from “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” on this topic, this New York Times piece isn’t telling you to adopt a particular opinion or value-judgment. It is, like the Forbes piece, bringing attention to the fact that former blue-collars in Kentucky are becoming computer programmers. And in the New York Times piece, the focus is on the company Interapt, indicating that Bit Source is not alone in what it is doing.
Now let’s get to the article with the most ambiguous title: the Wired piece “Can You Teach a Coal Miner to Code?” Again, this is an article about the computer programming firm Bit Source, which employers former coal miners. It does not condescend toward former coal miners, ridiculing them as relics to be cast aside if they cannot adapt to the new IT marketplace, but it does mention that the firm’s cofounder believes that true condescension comes from the assumption that former miners are helpless and unable to adjust to the new global competitive marketplace. Although former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg — similar to “ShortFatOtaku” — seemed to believe he was standing up for dislocated blue-collar workers by protesting that it is unrealistic to think they could learn to code, the article quotes Bit Source cofounder Rusty Justice on how that attitude severely underestimates the capabilities of the working class.
Rusty Justice thought he might know miners a little better than some fancy tycoon in New York did. That’s why, at dawn one October morning last year, he trotted down his driveway towards a silver F-150 truck idling in the street and drove some 150 miles along the Mountain Parkway to Lexington.
It was time to go and prove Bloomberg wrong.
And, judging from the article’s relaying of facts, that is precisely what Rusty Justice did.
The National Public Radio article in the bottom right-hand corner, “From Coal to Code,” is straight news like the others:
...the coal industry is shrinking fast. More than 10,000 coal workers have been laid off since 2008.
Many have had to leave the area to find work, but a few have found employment in other — and sometime unexpected — fields, as businesses are innovating to use former coal workers in new ways.
Rusty Justice’s company is one of these.
This one from the bottom of the collage is the most straightforward about focusing on the same IT firm that most of the other articles do: “BitSource Building a Coal to Code Mentality in Appalachia Kentucky.” It says,
BitSource has gained national attention for its “Coal to Code” mentality that has taken the transferrable skills of coal miners and turned them into world-class computer coders.
A proud East Kentucky partner of Shaping Our Appalachian Region, Inc. (SOAR), BitSource redesigned the SOAR website, and, in 2016, helped create SOAR.network, an innovative platform to allow people and organizations from across the region to share ideas and network with one another.
Finally, the most obvious one, the one in the middle, “Appalachian Miners Are Learning to Code”:
Jim Ratliff worked for 14 years in the mines of eastern Kentucky, drilling holes and blasting dynamite to expose the coal that has powered Appalachian life for more than a century. . . .
He works for Bit Source now, a Pikeville, Kentucky, startup that’s out to prove there’s life after coal for the thousands of industry veterans who’ve lost their jobs in an unprecedented rout that has already forced five major producers into bankruptcy.
To the extent that these articles betray an ideological bias, the bias is in the implicit premise that, everything else being equal, former coal miners working as computer programmers is preferable to them not finding any new work. Imagine a reporter from a local newspaper doing a story on someone in the community receiving an award or undertaking some high-profile project. The reporter doesn’t know the community member well, but has no reason to root against him. The reporter is happy for the community member and wishes him well, and, while the article is just a presentation of straight news, the goodwill is apparent from the article. That’s how far the ideological bias goes.
That’s what we find with these articles. Not turning up any noses at dislocated workers and saying, “Just learn to code; now shoo!”, the only discernible opinion that the journalists let slip is their hope that these dislocated workers succeed in their lives and future endeavors, whatever those might be.
Remember from the beginning that the “Learn to Code” meme came from the mass layoffs of journalists of HuffPost and Buzzfeed, and that when right-wing trolls told these journalists “Learn to Code,” the trolls were simply saying back to the journalists what the journalists had said to laid-off blue-collar workers first. And also recall that the six aforementioned articles were presented by “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” as case studies of left-wing journalists callously dismissing the plight of laid-off blue-collar workers by telling them “Learn to Code.” Not one of the articles presented as “evidence” of the phenomenon in this collage came from HuffPost or Buzzfeed. This casts doubt on any supposition that the right-wing trolls are trying to inflict vengeance on the specific parties who had supposedly wronged blue-collar workers in the manner that the right-wing trolls claim.
The real reason why the six articles of the collage were cited as an excuse to celebrate the misfortune of journalists laid off from HuffPost and Buzzfeed is that the right-wing trolls who mocked them have developed a bigoted grudge against young mainstream journalists in general. The assumption is that writers for HuffPost, Buzzfeed, Forbes, and Bloomberg Business are all so alike that they are interchangeable; they’re all just generic bad guys who deserve to be subjected to vindictive gestures when they are at their lowest points emotionally. But as far as accuracy and precision are concerned, the citation of the six articles in the collage — as case studies in mainstream journalists’ callousness toward the white working class — amounts to whacking at a big straw man. In this case, it is the journalists who have been stigmatized in a sweeping, false, and bigoted generalization.
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| I hope by now the reader will discern how this tweet makes use of a straw man. |
Some right-wing protectionists might protest that regardless of the specifics of what the articles said or who wrote them, such right-wing protectionists still resent the articles for their subtext, the subtext that blue-collar workers learning to code was a change that was welcome and is worthy of further reinforcement. It is still offensive, they may maintain, as they believe that society-at-large, at least to some degree, just owes it to blue-collar workers in the Rustbelt that they retain greater job security. That makes no more sense than saying that, decades after more efficient methods of indoor heating became available and affordable, people should have felt obligated to continue building homes with fireplaces and chimneys, just so chimney sweeps could persist in steady employment and not feel pressured to train in a new set of skills in a new line of work.
Conclusion
When it comes to their false presentation of the aforementioned six articles as evidence of journalists snidely admonishing displaced blue-collar workers that they “Learn to Code,” there are three possible reasons why “Black Pigeon Speaks” and “ShortFatOtaku” might have done this.
- They didn’t actually bother to read the articles in-depth. They just saw in the headlines some optimistic-sounding mentions of former coal miners learning to code, and decided that that was close enough — egregiously imprecise as it is — to the narrative they wanted to foist.
- They didn’t consider that some member of their audience — someone who didn’t have 100% faith in their assertions — might take a closer look at the six articles shown in the collage.
- They did read the articles but, because they are so committed to their narrative and already know what conclusion they want, they re-interpreted the articles and told themselves that the articles were snide lectures to displaced blue-collar workers that they should just learn to code, as opposed to being straight-but-sympathetic news articles about how displaced blue-collar workers are already learning to code.
Contrary to Michael Bloomberg and the right-wing trolls and vloggers, it appears that Rusty Justice is right: former blue-collar workers are more adept at adapting than assumed. If the trend continues into the next decade, some of these former blue-collar workers might end up programming the computers that run the very robots that perform the old jobs these same blue-collar workers once held in heavy industry.
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* Longest version of this essay (including its discussion of economics and the history of the media’s bias concerning this topic).
* Medium-length version of this essay (retaining parts of the discussion of the economics of “creative destruction” and the history of the media’s bias concerning this topic, but removing the discussion of the moral implications of factories closing due either to governmental interference or due to market conditions).
On April 25, 2019, I added the paragraph mentioning that the blog Angry White Men also noted that none of the articles cited expressed callousness toward dislocated blue-collar workers.
