What Is Programming For?
The calls for programming as a form of literacy came long before the personal computer revolution made them seem feasible, and now they are accelerating. What these calls claim programming is good for has shifted as computer technology has rapidly advanced and as code has increasingly embedded itself into our work, homes, and governance. Initially, programming campaigns focused on benefits to citizenship and child development, but now many of them emphasize employability. The role of programming for national defense strategies and its purported cognitive benefits and personal empowerment have consistently featured in the rhetoric of mass programming since the 1960s. Given the history and ideological impetus of literacy campaigns that we explored earlier, we’ll now look at the campaigns for mass programming. As we saw, religious, political, and economic ideologies form the rhetorical glue that connects reading and writing to a concept of literacy. Literacy campaigns are driven by ideologies; these ideologies reflect particular worldviews and serve as justifications in order to encourage donors, institutions, and individuals to participate or sponsor them. Just as arguments supporting reading and writing literacy campaigns tell us something about the changing perceptions of literacy, so, too, do the arguments supporting programming literacy campaigns.
Mass Programming Campaigns Since the 1960s
In 1959, George E. Forsythe of the Stanford University Mathematics Department argued that all students should be exposed to coding an automatic computer. While ostensibly making an argument for math majors to use computers, Forsythe ultimately favors a computing course for all undergraduates so that they might “learn that [computers] are no substitute for creative thought, and yet that they can do a good deal of what passes for thought in this world.”108 He writes
we think every undergraduate mathematics student should know how to code some machine fairly well. (I would also include all undergraduate students, for I feel that the computer revolution will have such a great impact on all our lives that every college graduate should understand it intimately. Possibly it will eventually be taught in the ninth grade for the same reason.) Since coding presupposes no mathematics beyond arithmetic, it can be taught to freshmen. I recommend a two-hour-per-week semester course in coding, to be taken as early as possible.109
This was, as far as I know, the first public argument for what we might consider coding literacy.
Alan Perlis, who directed the computation center at Carnegie Tech, was another early and influential advocate for what he called a Freshman Computer Appreciation Course. At a 1960 conference on “The Use of Computers in Engineering Classroom Instruction” at the University of Michigan, he argued that computers were tools of formal reasoning and should be available to freshmen upon entering the university. Richard W. Hamming from Bell Laboratories elaborated that this course would not rely on engineering knowledge and could teach students about computer music, languages, and symbol manipulation rather than arithmetic. Hamming argued, “This is a liberal arts course that ought to be basic to everyone in order that the student can better understand the civilization into which he will emerge.”110
Perlis reiterated this vision at a 1961 conference at MIT called “Computers and the World of the Future,” the conference attendee list for which reads like a who’s-who in the history of computing: Vannevar Bush, John Kemeny, J. C. R. Licklider, Norbert Weiner, and more. In front of this audience, Perlis proposed a computing course that resembles the first-year undergraduate composition courses still standard at American universities:111
The first student contact with the computer should be at the earliest time possible: in the student’s freshman year. This contact should be analytical and not purely descriptive, and each student during this first course should program and run or have run for him a large number of problems on the computer. … This course should share with mathematics and English the responsibility of developing an operational literacy. … In a liberal arts program the course could be delayed until the sophomore year, but certainly deserves inclusion in such a program because of the universal relevance of the computer to our times.112
Perlis’s vision to teach programming to all undergraduates, including those in the liberal arts, is particularly striking given the state of computers at the time. In 1961, only a few college campuses had mainframe computers (MIT, the conference host, was one). But computers were increasingly important to large-scale business and government, including defense. The broad emphasis on programming in undergraduate education suggested that future leaders of America should know something about these “universally relevant” machines.
Perlis’s proposal was at least partially realized with the BASIC programming language and Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, designed at Dartmouth College in the early 1960s by John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz. Kemeny may have been inspired by hearing Perlis’s speech at the 1961 MIT conference. However, Kemeny writes that the possibility of widespread access to computing first occurred to him in 1953, when he saw an early version of FORTRAN (now Fortran) while working as a consultant at Remington Rand and thought “all of a sudden access to computers by thousands of users became not only possible but reasonable.”113 Through its relatively straightforward mathematical syntax, Fortran was a programming language that made the computer’s processing power more readily available to scientists and mathematicians—in other words, people who weren’t engineers or computer specialists.114 Kemeny wanted to make the computer even more accessible to nonspecialists by designing a language that had more intuitive syntax and a system that allowed the mainframe hardware to serve multiple users at once. Like Perlis, Kemeny and Kurtz saw the computer as universally relevant and designed BASIC to be accessible to all undergraduates—not just those in engineering or physics.
The syntax of BASIC was designed to be “simple enough to allow the complete novice to program and run problems after only several hours of lessons.”115 Paired with the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System (DTSS), BASIC opened up programming to a huge percentage of Dartmouth undergrads and faculty in the 1960s. It was taught to Dartmouth freshmen in a popular introductory math course beginning in the 1964 fall term, and by 1968, 80% of Dartmouth students plus several hundred faculty had learned to write computer programs.116 Telephone terminals hooked faculty and students up to the mainframe, and DTSS managed requests so that computing resources could be effectively used and shared in what appeared to users as “real time” rather than the slow feedback loop of batch processing. Kemeny and Kurtz’s generous licensing terms allowed DTSS and BASIC to spread to New York University and many other universities in the 1960s. It is impossible to overestimate the impact of the BASIC programming language in the movement for programming literacy, and it becomes particularly important again in the 1980s, when it came installed on many home computers.
Efforts to teach programming broadly were focused on undergraduates in the 1960s, in part because computers could be found only in government offices, large corporate centers, and some campuses. But as the technology and culture of computing spread, the movement branched out from college campuses in the 1970s. In his book Hackers, Steven Levy traces the epicenter of programming innovation from the East Coast to the West Coast around this time,117 and at least some of the impetus to promote programming to the masses seems to have followed the same trajectory. West Coast programming initiatives were imbued with post-1960s San Francisco–area politics: hobbyists and hackers thrived, typified by the San Francisco area’s The Homebrew Computer Club and People’s Computer Company. In this context, mass programming took on a vibe of liberation and individual empowerment.
The People’s Computer Company (PCC) was founded in Menlo Park, California, and launched with a 1972 publication that proclaimed: “Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people, used to control people instead of to free them. Time to change all that. We need a PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY” (figure 1.1). Like Kemeny and Kurtz, PCC founders Bob Albrecht and George Firedrake wanted code to be freely shareable and adaptable. They aligned themselves with 1960s counterculture in opposition to corporate computing, as symbolized by “Big Blue”—IBM. Ted Nelson, who influentially described a file structure he named “hypertext” in 1965, was part of this computer counterculture movement. His 1974 self-published Computer Lib/Dream Machines envisioned a world where “technoids” would no longer hold a monopoly on computers and computation, and people would be liberated from the “cybercrud” of giants like IBM, which he dubbed a “concentration camp for information” (figure 1.2).
Figure 1.1 The cover of the first People’s Computer Company Newsletter in 1972 declared computers to be for the people. “The People’s Computer Company Newsletter.” Source ID: M1141_B9_1:1. Collection: People’s Computer Company. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
Figure 1.2 The People’s Computer Company supported BASIC as an accessible programming language. “The People’s Computer Company Newsletter.” Source ID: M1141_B9_1:1. Collection: People’s Computer Company. Courtesy of Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries.
His bombastic rhetoric and jargon are typified in this introductory statement to the book: “THIS BOOK IS FOR PERSONAL FREEDOM, AND AGAINST RESTRICTION AND COERCION … COMPUTER POWER TO THE PEOPLE. DOWN WITH CYBERCRUD!”118 People should rise up and demand that the computers and computer people don’t control them, Nelson insisted. Computers should belong to everybody. BASIC figures into this era of computing, too. The PCC founders wanted to promote computers for everyday users, and BASIC was their flagship language (figure 1.3). Their version of Kemeny and Kurtz’s language, TinyBASIC, was provided with instructions within PCC publications,119 and also in a popular book that humanized computers, My Computer Likes Me When I Speak BASIC. BASIC was also part of an experimental high school math curriculum from Columbia University Teachers College that was taught in the New York metropolitan area in the late 1960s and expanded to more than 25,000 enrolled students across the country in 1974.120
Figure 1.3 Ted Nelson’s 1974 Computer Lib/Dream Machines insisted that people take power back from the technoids. Reprinted with permission from Ted Nelson (author and copyright holder) and Alison Langmead (book owner). Scanned image courtesy of University of Pittsburgh Libraries.
The first barrier to mass programming outside the context of the college campus was the inaccessibility of hardware. Kemeny and Kurtz had solved this problem through time-sharing on a mainframe; however, in the 1970s there was a push for personal computers. In 1971, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab focused on children as computer users and claimed, “If every child were to be given access to a computer, computers would be cheap enough for every child to be given access to a computer.” They wrote about “twenty things to do with a computer” using the Logo programming language, including drawing men, bird turds, and playing Spacewar.121 In 1972, Alan Kay imagined a “Dynabook” personal computer for “children of all ages” that would be portable and connect them with libraries, schools, and stores. He, too, addressed the issue of cost and dismissed it optimistically.122 Both of these visionary memos about computers for children assumed that programming was part of the package. In the mid-1970s, we start to see computers emerge at prices that made them affordable to middle-class Americans, at which point the entanglement between software and hardware accessibility becomes especially apparent. The January 1975 Popular Electronics issue famously declared “THE HOME COMPUTER IS HERE” when introducing the MITS Altair 8800.123 A version of BASIC later circulated with the Altair 8800, written by Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who bucked the tradition of giving BASIC away for free and launched Microsoft in the process. The Altair 8800 was the first popular hobbyist computer and represents that side of the popular programming movement in the 1970s. It was difficult to run and program, and it didn’t do much, but it was the first affordable computer for individual enthusiasts. In 1976, Popular Science claimed that “the home computer is here because the price of a central processing unit … has gone down by 99%,” noting that thousands of Americans had bought hobbyist kits such as the Altair, and computer clubs (such as the Southern California Computer Society founded by Ted Nelson) had exploded in membership over the past year.124 The September 1977 issue of Scientific American contained articles about personal computers and the changes in computer science based on miniaturization of components, as well as ads for a dozen different kinds of computers aimed at businessmen, families, and hobbyists—including an ad introducing the Apple II.125
From educational experiments and the liberation rhetoric and hobbyist movement in the 1970s, the mass programming movement went mainstream in the 1980s as the hardware hurdle lowered. Computers became easier to use. The Commodore 64, Apple II, and other commercially available machines didn’t require assembly language programming like cheaper hobbyist computer systems. Many adults saw their workplaces restructured to accommodate computers, computer science enjoyed its height as an undergraduate major, and movies like War Games and Tron showcased the strategic and entertainment possibilities of the computer.126 By the early 1980s, personal computers had become common in middle-class households. In 1982, Time magazine named the computer “Machine of the Year.” Because machines at this time often required some knowledge of BASIC to use them, simple computer programming was a relatively accessible and sometimes necessary hobby. Built-in programming was marketed as a feature in ads for home computers,127 and BASIC became the “lingua franca of home computing.”128 Lines between computer usage and computer programming were blurry in these early years of home computing. When home computers went mainstream, they shed much of the hobbyist vibe, and the rhetoric of political empowerment gave way to educational opportunity, commercial competition, and workplace efficiency.
Cheap computers brought programming into homes and classrooms in the 1980s, but they also brought commodity software (see also chapter 3 for how computers made their way into American homes in the 1980s). Prior to the 1980s, software was generally free and bundled with hardware. Hardware was expensive and specialized, and software was not considered sellable. But as the computer market expanded and as several important legal decisions were made in the 1980s about the copyrightability of software, software became a commodity separate from hardware.129 In defiance of this commodification and its accompanying restrictions on the sharing of code, Richard Stallman at MIT launched the Free Software Movement in 1985.130 Free and open-source software—which was the rule rather than exception before the 1980s—has contributed significantly to the material infrastructure that mass programming initiatives draw upon. Open-source software, programming languages, and libraries gained popularity with distribution on the Web, but in the 1980s they were decidedly counterculture.
Affordable and easy-to-use home computers in the 1980s meant that, for the first time, computers became accessible to kids. K–12 education was the focus of mass programming initiatives at this time. Ads for home computers often focused on their educational value. The idea of computers as tools for kids owes much to pioneering educational research done in the 1970s, especially by Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, and Alan Kay. With Wallace Feurzeig at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in 1967, Papert developed the Logo programming language, a sophisticated LISP (now Lisp) language variant. Papert began piloting it in classrooms with Cynthia Solomon and others in the late 1960s.131 At Xerox PARC in California in the 1970s, Alan Kay and Adele Goldberg led a team of researchers to prototype the Dynabook laptop as well as the programming language Smalltalk, both of which were designed to make computing and programming more accessible to children.132 Increasingly affordable classroom computers, available through grants from Apple and from Cold War funding for math, science, and technology initiatives, could—at least theoretically—scale up these early efforts by Papert and others. The association of programming education with the term literacy becomes more common at this point, perhaps because literacy is often thought of as a primary goal of elementary education and, since the nineteenth century mass education movement, children have often been the site where literacy is measured. Literacy and technology initiatives in the 1980s (as well as the 1986 Grammy won by Whitney Houston) indicated that children were our future.
By the 1980s, some colleges had implemented Perlis, Kemeny, and Kurtz’s vision of computer literacy at the undergraduate level. Echoing Perlis’s argument from the 1960s, John Kemeny draws an analogy to freshman writing in 1983:
Many colleges now offer an elementary introduction to computers. A question frequently asked is whether such an elementary introduction suffices, and if not, how room for further computer courses in an already overcrowded curriculum can be made. We can answer this question by comparing the achievement of computer literacy to that of writing skills. Although freshman English is very important, it cannot carry the total responsibility for the teaching of writing. Unless there are courses throughout the curriculum that assign a substantial amount of writing—and in which professors are willing to hold students responsible for doing it well—the majority of graduates will write poorly. Similarly, if computer assignments are routinely given in a wide variety of courses—and faculty members expect students to write good programs—then computer literacy will be achieved without having a disproportionate number of computer science courses in the curriculum.133
What Kemeny describes here is now commonly referred to as “computing across the curriculum” (CAC). Begun in the 1980s, CAC is informed by what is called “writing across the curriculum” (WAC), which is a popular educational strategy to spread the responsibility of teaching writing across multiple disciplines.134 Contrary to the “kids today can’t write” argument that assumes a singular concept of “writing,” WAC approaches writing as situated within disciplines. If the practices and forms of writing or computing look different across multiple disciplines, it follows that each one should teach its own kind of writing or computing. Kemeny’s argument implies that programming education would need to be decoupled from computer science in the same way that WAC decouples writing from departments of English or other languages.135 Although Kemeny made this case in 1983, CAC is still relatively uncommon.
In the 1990s, the mass programming movement’s focus moved to the new World Wide Web, which widened access to programming. The architect of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, insisted on technical and organizational protocols that would make it accessible to and programmable by everyone.136 For their introduction to programming, many young people today credit HTML, the simple markup language on which the Web is built. HTML does not have the technical capabilities of Logo or BASIC; it doesn’t enact procedures like those and other Turing-complete languages. However, HTML was inspired by BASIC, and it shares BASIC’s accessibility and ubiquity. As the authors of 10 PRINT, a collaborative book based on a BASIC maze program widely circulated in the 1980s, write:
Though HTML is a markup language used for formatting, not a programming language used for data processing and flow control, it copied BASIC’s template of simplicity, similarity to natural language, device independence, and transparency to become many users’ first introduction to manipulating code.137
The easy-entry possibilities of HTML, plus the fact that it can lead users to other more extensive languages like Javascript, Perl, and PHP, enacts that gentle novice-to-expert climb that Kemeny and Kurtz sought for BASIC. However, even with most Web browsers’ capability to show the source code for any webpage, people aren’t automatically exposed to code now in the same way that they were on their Commodore 64 in the 1980s. Coding literacy advocates have pointed to this as a problem.138
Software consumerism took the spotlight from mass programming campaigns in 1990s, although coding in HTML and the Web took off. Java, a language that emphasized good software engineering, became dominant in computer science classrooms, in part because of its integration with the burgeoning Web. In contrast to BASIC, Java was a proprietary language and controlled by Sun Microsystems.139 The numbers of computer science majors sagged in the mid-1990s.140 Low reading skills were a greater national concern, as we saw earlier with the National Literacy Act. Public attention about technology in the 1990s was focused on the digital divide of access to the hardware of computers rather than programming them. Adam Banks signals this moment in his book Race, Rhetoric, and Technology when he breaks down the concept of access at work in the 1990s, particularly for poor and minority groups. In reports such as the U.S. government’s “Falling through the Net” series, access was imagined as strictly material and focused on the use of computers rather than any transformative activities such as programming. After the initial enthusiasm that accompanied Logo in elementary schools in the early 1980s, we see a shift from the rich concept of literacy from Kemeny, Papert, and Kay to a surface notion of computer literacy, which focused on computer user tasks such as saving files and searching for resources on the Web.141
After the decline in programming sponsorship at universities and through the government in the 1990s, the early 2000s saw a rise again in computer science majors—a delayed response to the late 1990s dot.com boom, which dropped again after the bust.142 In the 2000s, resources for informally learning programming had never been greater, and many people also sought out diverse online communities with little connection to formal computer science and institutions. The growth of the Web allowed for ready circulation of open-source programming languages that offer more features and computational possibilities than HTML, such as Javascript, Python, Perl, PHP, and Ruby. Today, all of these languages have robust libraries, frameworks, and Web communities supporting and promoting them. People can learn programming by downloading copies of language compilers and development environments, asking questions on forums, contributing to open-source projects and getting feedback, taking free massively open online courses (MOOCs) made available by universities and education companies, and watching help videos and reading blog posts by thousands of individuals throughout the globe.
Along with this decentralized culture of how-to videos and forums online, we see countless large- and small-scale commercial and nonprofit initiatives supporting programming education. One initiative focusing on developing countries is the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC is part of the mass programming tradition, as it emphasizes production as well as consumption of computational technology through open-source software and language tools. The OLPC project includes the Python programming language, among several others, and its open-source operating system (Sugar, a version of Linux) makes it possible for users to install many others.143 Organizations that promote mass programming in more developed countries, such as Code.org, Khan Academy, and Codecademy.org, offer free educational resources online. They feature video lessons, e-books, interactive online code-checking, and a wealth of other resources helpful to anyone wanting to learn programming. These groups are typically funded by overflow Silicon Valley capital, and they echo interest in mass online education, typified by Lynda.com, free lectures from MIT and UC Berkeley, TED Talks, plus MOOCs. Together, these privately funded online education initiatives often signify an increasing emphasis on large-scale, technology-based educational structures to replace traditional publicly funded classroom education. (Notably, Code.org has been working extensively with K–12 teachers and school districts and seeks to get computer science in schools rather than supplant classroom education.) Vocational training outfits in the United States promise a kind of “boot camp” for programming (e.g., devbootcamp, CodeFellows, Code School).144 Noncommercial meetup groups also provide space to support people learning to program (e.g., Code & Supply, FreeCodeCamp, GirlDevelopIt). Others are aimed specifically at young people (CoderDojo, Assemble in Pittsburgh). The philosophies of these various groups, as reflected in mission statements and promotional videos, consolidate many different motivational strands of the mass programming movement since the 1960s, including the focus on empowerment, social justice, and citizenship, but many also put greater emphasis on the market for programming and programmers. Knowing how to program means empowerment and liberation in addition to—and often in tension with—access to employment.
Throughout the decades’ waxing and waning of popular attention to teaching coding to all, there have been core groups of educators consistently focused on the effort, including (at different times) John Kemeny, Thomas Kurtz, Alan Kay, Seymour Papert, Cynthia Solomon, Idit Harel Caperton, Yasmin Kafai, Randy Pausch, Jane Margolis, Maria Klawe, Mitchel Resnick, and Mark Guzdial. While their arguments supporting programming vary, they tend to advocate for the intellectual challenge of the activity.
What Drives Mass Programming Movements?
As with literacy campaigns, there are inevitably motivations and ideologies behind mass coding campaigns. Several specific ideologies carry over from the movement for mass literacy into mass programming campaigns. Just as these ideologies provided the reason and resources for mass literacy campaigns, they can fuel coding literacy campaigns. Rhetorically, they manifest as arguments, implied or explicit, in the promotional materials for why everyone should learn to code. They reflect inherent beliefs about what programming does, who does it and why, and how a broader computational or coding literacy might benefit individuals, groups, or nations.
There are, as I see it, four dominant arguments at work in calls for mass programming,145 and any one call may draw on several of them at once:
- Individual empowerment
- Learning new ways to think
- Citizenship and collective progress
- Employability and economic concerns
In February 2013, Code.org launched a high-profile campaign promoting widespread computer programming education that consolidated these motivational strands. Code.org was founded by identical twin brothers—Hadi and Ali Partovi—who grew up in Iran, majored in computer science at Harvard, and sold their start-ups for millions each to Microsoft. The brothers recruited Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, NBA star Chris Bosh, and many others to appear in a promotional video that got 5 million views in just two days.146 In December 2013, Code.org launched the “Hour of Code” campaign to encourage people to spend just one hour learning code. This campaign included videos by President Barack Obama and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. On December 9, 2013, Google’s homepage displayed a “doodle” to celebrate Grace Hopper’s 107th birthday, and underneath was a tagline and link that read “Be a maker, a creator, an innovator. Get started now with an Hour of Code.” Code.org declared the September 2015 Hour of Code the “largest learning event in the world,” with almost 200,000 registered events and 50 million students participating in just one week.147 As of July 2016, more than 260 million people had participated in the Hour of Code.148
Code.org has expanded greatly since launching the Hour of Code campaign in 2013 and now offers self-paced learning resources in more than 30 languages, professional development courses for K–12 teachers both online and in person, and has partnerships with more than 70 school districts and many leading figures in computer science education, such as Mark Guzdial and Barbara Ericson.149 Although many of its resources are directed at teaching programming, its mission focuses on promoting computer science as an offering in American public schools. (See the introduction for a discussion of how this mission changed from promoting computer programming to promoting computer science.) With its international reach, its influence on American curriculum, and its long list of educational advisors and corporate sponsors, Code.org is undoubtedly the highest profile contemporary campaign for programming in the world right now. Because of Code.org’s high profile and influence on other campaigns, and also because its widely viewed February 2013 video “What Most Schools Don’t Teach” serves as a rhetorical clearinghouse for the arguments I outline above, I use this video in the four subsections that follow to discuss each strand of argument in turn.150 I also include contemporary and historical examples of other calls for coding literacy.
Individual Empowerment
Perhaps the most dominant current motivation for coding literacy is that of individual empowerment. Programming is, indeed, a powerful technology for personal expression and information generation. And as computers become ubiquitous, the ability to program them gives a person access to more avenues of control and creativity. This strand generally appears in the mass programming calls made after computers and computation became common, although a few visionaries who sought to make computers more accessible, such as Ted Nelson, the People’s Computer Company, and Alan Kay, referred to individual empowerment early on.
Discussing what he calls “Universal Programming Literacy,” computer scientist Ken Perlin invokes a popular trope for this motivational strand, that of the computer as “servant”: “Those of us who program know that our skill provides us with an enormous increase in our ability to take advantage of the power of computers—the computer becomes a fantastically powerful and extremely protean servant.”151 Code.org’s promotional video echoes this rhetoric of empowerment:
Hadi Partovi (Code.org cofounder):
Whether you’re trying to make a lot of money or whether you want to just change the world, computer programming is an incredibly empowering skill to learn.
Drew Houston (Dropbox founder):
To be able to come up with an idea, and then see it in your hands, and then be able to press a button and be in millions of people’s hands … I mean, I think we’re the first generation in the world that’s been able to have that kind of experience.
Gabe Newell (Valve Software cofounder):
The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know, you’re going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.
Many of the themes in this video recur in other arguments about programming and empowerment, especially the fact that programming allows ideas to reach a massive scale quickly and the association of programming with wizardry. Code.org’s 2015 Hour of Code video features HoloLens Engineer Dona Sakar telling an audience, “By learning to code today, you guys are already getting a head start on taking over the world.”152 As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, the pop technology theorist Douglas Rushkoff invokes individual empowerment from a defensive perspective, arguing, provocatively, “Program or be programmed. Choose the former and you gain access to the control panel of civilization. Choose the latter and it could be the last real choice you get to make.”153
For literacy ideologies, the rhetoric of individual empowerment is a relatively recent addition. It emerged in the twentieth century along with socialist movements, the educational philosophy of Paolo Freire, and global literacy campaigns. It was especially connected to larger social justice movements in the 1960s. Edward Stevens quotes the executive director of the U.S. Adult Education Association arguing that helping someone achieve literacy helps that person to exercise his constitutional right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”154 Literacy initiatives for women and other globally disadvantaged groups often focus on the idea of individual empowerment, and, indeed, there is significant evidence that literacy classes help women achieve greater financial, social, and familial autonomy.155 Given Code.org’s goal of attracting more women and minorities to programming, the focus on empowerment is unsurprising. Ali Partovi writes, “Computer programming gives girls a sense of confidence and empowerment unlike any other study I can think of. Moms and dads who want their daughters to grow up feeling empowered to play an active role in the world around them ought to get them exposed to coding young.”156
More directly focused on attracting and empowering underrepresented groups to programming are initiatives such as Black Girls Code. Several literacy-based arguments are wrapped up in its promotion of programming, including empowerment:
Black Girls Code has set out to prove to the world that girls of every color have the skills to become the programmers of tomorrow. By promoting classes and programs we hope to grow the number of women of color working in technology and give underprivileged girls a chance to become the masters of their technological worlds. … By teaching the girls programming and game design, we hope to have started the lifelong process of developing in them a true love for technology and the self-confidence that comes from understanding the greatest tools of the 21st century.157
Programming gives these girls self-confidence, tools for lifelong learning, and access to employment. Most distinctively in this call, young women in Black Girls Code can “become masters of their technological worlds.” Black Girls Code redirects the masculine and racialized resonances of “wizards” and “masters” toward young black women. As with #YesWeCode, which is geared toward both men and women in groups underrepresented in the tech industry, there’s a sense of flipping a dominant script about coding. Van Jones founded #YesWeCode after a conversation with pop star Prince, who pointed out after the tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2012 that the stereotype of white men in hoodies was Mark Zuckerbergs, but the stereotype of black men in hoodies was thugs. “More black Mark Zuckerbergs” to combat that stereotype is one goal of the group.158 Through programming, participants in Black Girls Code and #YesWeCan can seize power that has historically been wielded against them.
Learning New Ways to Think
Forsythe argued in 1959 that the way the automatic computer taught precise thinking was a reason to introduce it to all undergraduates.159 In their 1968 article “The Computer as Communication Device,” J. C. R. Licklider and Robert Taylor, both early computer visionaries, argued that the computer was “intelligence amplification” and should therefore be widely accessible to people.160 The designer of Logo, Seymour Papert, called computers “objects to think with”161 and encouraged children to engage with programming to learn math. His 1980 Mindstorms is still one of the most important books on programming and learning.162 Along with BASIC, Logo was the language learned by schoolchildren in the 1980s in the United States, an essential part of the Cold War educational strategy. Papert’s focus was never on defense or nationalism, however, and Logo got traction in K–12 education because of its graphics and accessible syntax. As a student of Jean Piaget, Papert was far more interested in cognitive development, and his theory of “constructionism,” which proposed that learning was best achieved through tangible examples and building, prefigures the “maker movement” aspects of computer programming.163 Papert’s legacy is everywhere in mass programming promotion, especially for young children. Alan Kay cites him as a strong influence in his design of the Dynabook, for instance.164
John Kemeny was also interested in how computer programming could revolutionize thinking. In 1971 he said, “We can expect that in the next generation college graduates will have routinely learned how to make use of a high-speed computer. This is likely to have a revolutionary effect on the way human beings attack intellectual tasks.”165 In 1983, in his “case for computer literacy,” he again described programming as a tool for changing how people think:
We have a unique opportunity to improve human thinking. If we recognize the areas of human knowledge where ordinary languages are inappropriate, and if computer literacy is routinely achieved in our schools, we can aspire to human thought of a clarity and precision rare today. This development would be of immense value for science, for the organization and retrieval of information, and for all forms of decision-making. Forcing humans to develop such thought processes may be the major fringe benefit of the coming of computers.166
Reflecting on his visionary work on laptops and programming languages in the 1970s at Xerox PARC, Alan Kay wrote, “If the personal computer is truly a new medium then the very use of it would actually change thought patterns of an entire civilization.”167 Code.org begins its video by invoking Steve Jobs in a statement that echoes this motivation: “Everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer … because it teaches you how to think.”168
For literacy, the evidence that it is connected to the development of new ways of thinking has been hard to come by. In an exhaustive study, Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole demonstrated that much of what we attribute to literacy is actually attributable to schooling: categorization, higher-order thinking skills, and so forth.169 The difficulty of extricating the influence of schooling from literacy and vice versa means that we don’t know much about whether literacy actually expands cognitive capability. However, the claim that literacy shapes intelligence is a tacit force and sometimes explicitly stated in many promotions of universal literacy.
Perhaps because it is less fashionable now in education to claim broad cognitive benefits for learning or because it is impossible to measure such benefits, this motivational strand is less prominent in contemporary calls for mass programming than it was in the 1960s and 1970s. Stephen Ramsay, a digital humanist at the University of Nebraska who promotes coding literacy, writes, “Learn to code because it’s fun and because it will change the way you look at the world. Then notice that we could substitute any other subject for ‘learn to code’ in that sentence.”170 In this clever turn, Ramsay captures the unease many advocates now feel with making broad claims about coding literacy’s specific benefits for intellectual development.
Today, we can see a milder version of the idea that coding teaches you to think in the rhetoric surrounding Scratch, developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten team at MIT. Mitchel Resnick et al. write, “Since programming involves the creation of external representations of your problem solving processes, programming provides you with opportunities to reflect on your own thinking, even to think about thinking itself.”171 Inspired by Logo and the tinkering possibilities of Lego blocks, Scratch inherits the enthusiasm of Papert and Kay as well as their focus on fostering children’s imagination and development. The Scratch team aims not to produce programmers or future employees but rather wants kids to learn programming in order to express themselves and understand computational principles.172 In their discussion of “connected code” and “computational participation” with Scratch, Yasmin Kafai and Quinn Burke extend an emphasis on individual cognition into the social realm. In this way, they reflect more recent developments in literacy research as well: literacy is not simply an isolated cognitive skill but instead gains its meaning and power in social interactions.173
Citizenship and Collective Progress
The rhetoric of citizenship figured prominently in drives for mass education and literacy, particularly in the nineteenth century. A democracy—at least ideally—demands an informed citizenry, and when information circulates in text, being informed means being able to read. However, this idealistic democratic rhetoric came at some cost: pluralistic, unschooled literacies from the eighteenth century, especially those that supported workers’ rights in Britain, were homogenized into a more standardized and hierarchized schooled literacy.174 Stevens argues that as the voting qualifications of property, race, and sex were eventually abolished in the United States, education came to bear more weight in the definition of rational citizenship.175 Literacy thus became a qualification for voting as states implemented tests to exclude illiterates—an exclusion that, not coincidentally, fell disproportionately on people who were poor, African American, or foreign-born.176 Thus, literacy became tied up with idealistic notions of collective citizenship and exclusionary concepts of nationhood.
The rhetoric of citizenship is central to mass programming campaigns, too, although the exclusionary rhetoric has dropped away in mainstream discourse. The analogy to reading and writing literacy is often explicit when groups seek funding from government sources, as programming promoters point out that our communication and information is now structured in code in addition to text. Promoters argue that just as the mass education movement deemed it essential for citizens to manipulate and understand text, they now need to do the same with code.
John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz make this case strongly to describe the motivation for their National Science Foundation–funded project at Dartmouth in the 1960s: “We felt exposure to computing and its practice, its powers and limitations must also be extended to nonscience students, many of whom will later be in decision-making roles in business, industry and government.”177 Reflecting on the success of the Dartmouth initiative in 1971, Kemeny said,
Until we can bring up a new generation of human beings who are thoroughly acquainted with the power and limitations of computers, who know what questions have to be asked and answered, and who are not intimidated by computer experts in a debate, we cannot hope for fundamental change. I see great promise in the reactions of recent Dartmouth students. Now that most of them have first-hand experience with computers, they approach computer applications without fear or superstition and with considerable understanding of how computers can serve mankind.178
Still making the case for computer literacy in 1983, Kemeny referenced the powerful printing press as one of the ways society has progressed and asked, “What capabilities will mankind develop once it fully masters the use of computers and intelligent machines?”179
In the 1970s, Ted Nelson referenced democracy and power in his Computer Lib/Dream Machines manifesto: “If you are interested in democracy and its future, you'd better understand computers. And if you are concerned about power and the way it is used, and aren’t we all now, the same thing goes.”180 We can also recall Guido van Rossum’s argument for collective progress through coding literacy: “We compare mass ability to read and write software with mass literacy, and predict equally pervasive changes to society.”
The investment of local and national governments in coding initiatives means that this line of argument is more than just window dressing. The nonprofit Code for America program and its affiliated grassroots Code Brigades connect the democratic process to programming by facilitating collaboration between programmers and participating city governments. The New York Times reported in 2014 that the governments of Estonia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom have invested in bringing programming to K–12 education in the form of computer science.181 The implementation in Estonia is due, in part, to initiatives related to Kemeny and Kurtz’s early drive. In New Jersey in 1968, Toomas Hendrik Ilves learned to program with BASIC in the experimental Columbia Teachers College math curriculum I mentioned earlier. He later became President of Estonia, and led Estonia’s Internet connectivity initiative in the late 1990s; he credits this math program for inspiring him to launch a curriculum to teach programming beginning in the first grade.182
In Code.org’s “What Most Schools Don’t Teach” video, the citizenship idea is invoked by pop musician Will.i.am, who here and elsewhere has been a vocal advocate for mass programming:
Will.i.am:
Here we are, 2013. We all depend on technology to communicate. To bank. Information. And none of us know how to read and write code! … It’s important for these kids. It should be mandatory to be a citizen on this planet to read and write code.
Will.i.am’s idea of global citizenship elevates the rhetoric above the national level, underscoring programming’s universal applications to daily life and activity. Hadi Partovi connects Code.org’s mission to the American dream, which invokes the rights an American citizen has to education: “It is a fundamental American ideal—and an ideal people worldwide aspire to—that access to education and opportunity should be equal for all. It seems un-American to accept that computer science classes are only available to the privileged few, in only 10 percent of schools. That is the problem we’re trying to solve.”183
The argument about coding literacy for citizenship often merges with concerns about social justice, as a small segment of the population is designing the software on which America and other nations now run. #YesWeCode’s founder Van Jones says that coding literacy campaigns must focus on underrepresentation of minorities and women in coding because
First, coding is the new literacy. It’s the key to the future. Second, and I think even more important, the future is not being written in laws in Washington, DC—it is being written in code in Silicon Valley. That’s where change is happening and that’s what’s driving humanity forward. It is very dangerous to have a tiny, tiny demographic control all the technology to build the future. Democratizing the tools to create the future is a civil rights issue, a human rights issue, and a commonsense issue.184
Here, Jones echoes Lawrence Lessig’s characterization of East Coast Code (laws on the books) versus West Coast Code (law in code).185 He also ties it to demographics and civil rights, tapping into notions of citizenship and empowerment.
The argument for mass programming for democracy and social justice is perhaps the most idealistic ideologically, as it suggests that mass programming literacy will transform society in wholly positive ways by leveling out access to government and jobs and helping us to govern better.
Employability and Economic Concerns
Software production was in crisis in the 1960s. At that time, software was becoming necessary for large-scale commercial enterprise, defense, and banking, and there weren’t enough programmers to write and manage the code needed to run these systems.186 The software crisis is alive and well today in the United States: major software corporations like Electronic Arts and Google partner with universities to train potential future employees, H1B visas are used to import trained software workers, and there is constant media coverage about the employment possibilities for programmers.
Although the software crisis was a U.S. national concern in the 1960s, the energy it generated went toward professional training rather than toward broad coding literacy initiatives. The situation today is different in two significant ways. First, recruitment strategies are not focused, as they were in the 1960s, exclusively on the types of people traditionally thought to be good programmers. Companies are looking for a more diverse workforce, and they claim to be interested in hiring women and people of color. This claim has not been well supported by evidence, however, at least in Silicon Valley, where the vast majority of employees at big tech companies are male and white or Asian.187 Broad programming initiatives can deepen the potential pool of workers. This is an explicit goal of #YesWeCode: in addition to its citizenship goals above, founder Van Jones notes that computer programmers are in demand and proposes “high-end vocational training” in programming to “target African Americans, Latinos, single moms, Native Americans, women of all colors” to help them get these jobs.188 Made with Code, which is funded by Google, has a similar goal: it is focused on getting women into the pipeline of hirable programming talent.189
The second major difference from the 1960s software crisis is our more globalized economy, which means that the employment and economic concerns for individuals, companies, and nations intersect in more complex ways. Educated citizens can collectively increase the economic stability of a nation, but they can also emigrate. Companies can also rely on “virtual migration” by employing people in India to work in real-time in the United States.190 U.S. tech companies in particular are focused on attracting skilled workers from all over the world. Having more American workers makes the employment situation of powerful American tech companies more stable, but having more international workers can help companies keep salary costs down.
This employment/economic strand is perhaps the dominant one in Code.org’s 2013 promotional video, as it showcases the modern-day software crisis at the same time it features employability as a benefit of learning programming. Here’s an example of both:
Drew Houston (Dropbox founder):
There is a much greater need in the world for engineers and people who can write code than there will ever be supply. And so, we all live these very charmed lives. [video of young men skateboarding through a bright, spacious office] To get the very best people, we try to make the office as awesome as possible.
Because the primary audience for Code.org’s video is individuals who might potentially learn programming, especially young people, it emphasizes some of the perks of employment as a programmer. Infographics, videos, and statistics on Code.org’s website also underscore the imminent employability of people who can program. Code.org’s February 2013 video “Code Stars” notes that there will be 1.4 million jobs in computer science and a shortage of 1 million people to fill these jobs.191 An infographic featured on the site claims, “Computer science is a top paying college degree and computer programming jobs are growing at 2X the national average” (figure 1.4).192 This infographic shows intertwining national and individual interest in boosting programming education. While the statement at the bottom of the figure seems directed at individuals who might want a good job after college, the graph speaks to national interests: the “$500 billion opportunity.” Individuals can get a piece of that $500 billion opportunity, but the United States has an interest in meeting that demand for economic growth and stability.
Figure 1.4 Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Code.org emphasizes that computer programming skills are highly employable. “Code.org Stats: What’s Wrong with This Picture?” Code.org, n.d., accessed June 23, 2015, https://code.org/stats/. Source data are from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and linked from the infographic. Reprinted with permission from Code.org.
A March 2014 report in the New York Times on widespread programming education efforts encapsulates this complex relationship between individual workers, the technology industry, and national economic stability:
From Singapore to Tallinn, governments, educators and advocates from the tech industry argue that it has become crucial to hold at least a basic understanding of how the devices that play such a large role in modern life actually work. Such knowledge, the advocates say, is important not only to individual students’ future career prospects, but also for their countries’ economic competitiveness and the technology industry’s ability to find qualified workers.193
Here we see the benefits of adding coding to the curriculum in three ways: individual employment, national economies, and the (global) tech industry’s human resources concerns. Ali Partovi, a cofounder of Code.org, puts an interesting twist on this amalgamation of interests: “We felt that coding is the new ‘American Dream’ and should be available to everybody, not just the lucky few.” In this short statement, he ties together a trope of American national identity, individual success, and the idealistic democratizing strand of programming promotion. This trope is also echoed in the “Computer Science for All” initiative for New York City schools, announced in September 2015. Positing New York City schoolkids as future workers for the city, Mayor de Blasio stated, “We’re calling this program Computer Science for All: Fundamentals for Our Future because it speaks to the reality of the world we live in now. From Silicon Alley to Wall Street to the fashion runways, industries all across our city are increasingly relying on new technologies—and are in need of workers with the experience to help them achieve success.”194 Similarly, President Obama’s Computer Science for All initiative, announced in his final State of the Union Address in January, 2016, aims to “empower all American students from kindergarten through high school to learn computer science and be equipped with the computational thinking skills they need to be creators in the digital economy, not just consumers, and to be active citizens in our technology-driven world.”195 He uses the word empower, but this empowerment is primarily directed toward a collective “digital economy.” Supporting this national “CS for all” initiative are arguments for greater diversity in technology careers and firms as well as statistics about unfilled jobs in comp1uter science-related fields. The White House blog describing the initiative showcases footage from President Obama’s participation in Code.org’s Hour of Code initiative in 2014, demonstrating a connection between these initiatives.196
Like the current campaigns for mass programming, earlier literacy campaigns often presented literacy as important to individual employment and national economies. Literacy does appear to boost national productivity, but its symbolic value outstrips this economic value. National literacy campaigns, if successful, can heighten the international status of a developing country, thus attracting more aid and investment.197 Estonia’s mass programming campaign, ProgeTiiger, seems to echo this motivation, at least as reflected in English-language media.198 Individual programming skills can contribute to national progress—although no survey of programming skills in the general population has yet been conducted in any nation, to my knowledge. (The closest we get are estimates of end-user programmers.199) Thus, we see in mass programming campaigns a similar tension as between individual versus collective uses of literacy observed by Arnove and Graff in national literacy campaigns.200 This tension, I argue, is connected to global economic trends.
Programming Campaigns and Larger Trends in Education and Work
While current programming campaigns such as Code.org’s emphasize empowerment, the ideologies expressed in their videos, charts, and arguments for mass programming suggests a more confining role for computational literacy than earlier campaigns such as Kemeny and Kurtz’s and Kay’s. This shift has been noted disappointingly by computer science educators such as Mitch Resnick, Mark Guzdial, Matti Tedre, and Peter Denning.201 In addition to empowering individuals, mass coding campaigns want to help steer a more diverse workforce into American software corporations, some of which also sponsor these campaigns. Of course, the goal to create workers for the information giants such as Facebook and Google is not necessarily incompatible with the goal to educate people to wield this powerful communication technology for their own ends, and the homogeneity of the software industry is a widely recognized problem. But the tension between these goals is at the heart of what makes contemporary programming campaigns different from those in the past. As Kevin Brooks and Chris Lindgren observe, “The coding crisis narrative over-emphasizes global economic competitiveness at the expense of computational literacy’s ability to empower users’ expressive, aesthetic, and rhetorical abilities.” Brooks and Lindgren also admit to finding this “crisis narrative” seductive, as they used it to secure Google Rise funding for their own coding initiative.202
In his 1985 “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital,” Richard Ohmann offered a critique of “computer literacy.” Paralleling it to textual literacy campaigns, he recognized it as “literacy from above,” which tends to reify existing structures of monopoly capital.203 He admits that computer literacy has the potential to be more liberatory, but he could not see it in its configuration at the time, which was, incidentally, the turn of the Papert constructionism approach into a more instrumental and user-focused approach to computer literacy. While there is considerable demand from people to learn programming to boost their résumés and challenge themselves intellectually, the campaigns themselves echo this hierarchical arrangement. They might empower people, but several of them also align with the concerns of capital. In this way, the campaigns share a tension with mass education more generally, which provides “literacy from above”—along with opportunities for students.
This tension in coding literacy campaigns is exacerbated by the fact that there is a lot of money in software. Software engineering presents a unique opportunity for capital: the software labor force is non-unionized and doesn’t require credentials from conservative institutions such as universities; it is globalized both in its workers and the distribution of its products; and it can provide profits at scales impossible in manufacturing, where physical materials must be purchased, processed, and shipped. Aneesh Aneesh goes so far as to note “both money and code are ‘global’ in that they both provide liquidity to labor and merchandise through symbolization.”204 Code’s ability to traverse networks allows for its globalized flow along with global capital, or practically, it allows workers in India to write software with and for Americans. This capital component of code doesn’t mean that the software companies that sponsor code initiatives or their education advisors obviously subscribe to a global market–focused worldview. But these economic realities provide the backdrop when these initiatives purport to be training youth to be future software workers—many of whom may, indeed, want to get a piece of that pie.
A September 2013 op-ed arguing for teaching programming in the Pittsburgh public schools reflects some of this rhetoric directly: the writer seeks to match a New York City teacher’s boast that “his students graduated ‘Google ready’—with skills enough to join a software firm.” To pay for the program, Pittsburgh can look to “local businesses and universities[, which] have a real interest in well-trained students.”205 The New York City teacher the writer refers to, Michael Zamansky, is sensitive to the ways that training students for software jobs might conflict with instilling higher-order thinking skills through programming. A director for New York City’s program, which was inspired by Zamansky but diverged from his vision of it, explains: “We’re interested in giving students marketable skills so that when they’re done, they can take industry certifications and get jobs.” This instrumental focus upsets Zamansky, who argues, “But what’s important is what you’re doing with the language. I’m trying to teach deeper concepts of thinking.”206 While Zamansky and the city’s Academy for Software Engineering teach many of the same programming languages and concepts, they differ in what they think programming education is for: training for employment or intellectual development. Zamansky seems to be attuned to the argument I am making here with the history of literacy—that the ideas driving the promotion of literacy matter. His approach shares the rhetoric of the Logo and Scratch lineage. In this lineage, Kafai and Burke write, “The point of teaching young people to use introductory programming languages is not to help them become computer scientists or secure a spot at Google or Apple but rather to help them become more effective creators and discerning consumers of digital media.”207
Many contemporary campaigns and educational curricula for programming rely on public-private partnerships such as the one the Pittsburgh editorialist suggested. Half of the funding for an $81 million project announced by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015 will come from private and corporate foundations. A representative for AT&T, one of the corporate sponsors, stated, “For companies like AT&T, the skills gap is real and likely to grow as our core technologies become more sophisticated. … We see this as a smart investment in our company’s future.”208 These partnerships can heighten the contradictions in the ideologies they associate with programming. They should also give educators pause: who or what is determining the purpose of education? As public funding for education is cut, educational institutions seeking ways to support learning at low costs are turning to “free” services that come with political costs. Apple’s iTunes U distributes lectures and Google handles official university e-mail communication at no direct cost to universities. Through his $170 million push for Common Core standards,209 Bill Gates has more influence on public education in the United States than perhaps any other individual. Local knowledge, security, and educational design are often sacrificed for these cost-sharing measures that outsource education to corporations.
This outsourcing of education is happening with programming as well. The United Kingdom will be using Codecademy’s lessons in its new national curriculum, which includes programming. This arrangement benefits the UK because Codecademy can help UK teachers learn programming prior to teaching it, and the ready-made lessons mean they can implement curriculum without the delay of designing it from scratch. The benefits to Codecademy for providing this “free” service is summed up in this explanation from its CEO: “CEO Zach Sims hopes that countries across the globe will follow Britain’s lead, and that just might happen. Codecademy’s lessons are completely free. ‘The more people who are learning,’ he says, ‘the better it is for the company.’”210 Codecademy appears to be working closely with UK educators. But as Sims reveals in this statement, UK schoolchildren are also a test market for Codecademy’s products. Such an arrangement reflects the shift from thinking of education as a process to thinking of it as a product, a shift that is common in public-private educational partnerships—perhaps leading to, Elizabeth Losh argues, a “war on learning” itself.211 Indeed, these programming initiatives often invest more in technology than in human resources, with the idea that technology can support learning at scale. Automated, online lessons can carry the bulk of the weight of teaching, with support from local advisors and key partners in education. Whether or not market logics are overtaking educational motivations in the contemporary push for mass programming, the money for these initiatives is now coming from software corporations rather than government grants.
Contemporary programming initiatives reflect our current trends toward flexible work environments where individuals are expected to integrate multiple skills and domains but learn how to do this on their own time. They can achieve this with sponsorship from Silicon Valley, the new leaders in economic productivity and a major source of America’s global prestige. But the market for these workers is not only local or national. Just as online resources are by default globally distributed, we see here a blurring of national boundaries and national pride as U.S. companies recruit the best tech workers from all over the world and employ them either in the United States or abroad. The simultaneous emphasis on homegrown tech workers can undermine worker autonomy and drive salaries down. As we saw earlier, literacy initiatives of the nineteenth century reinforced the strict hierarchies of the military and factory, the dominant economic and productivity arrangement of the nineteenth century. Despite their stated good intentions to make coding available to all, as part of the “American Dream,” these contemporary programming initiatives at times appear to be reinforcing the dominant global-market economic system in the same way that nineteenth century literacy initiatives did. If programming is being subsumed into market logics along with other educational projects, as Losh argues, what powerful aspects of programming might be lost? What happens if coding literacy campaigns shift their rhetoric from individual empowerment to programming as a practice that can build one’s marketability? I am not arguing that Code.org or any other campaign has a “secret agenda” or that the people who are learning to code are misguided if they’re doing it to enhance their employability. My hope is that by uncovering the ideologies and motivations behind these coding literacy campaigns, we can at least begin to consider these difficult questions.