> "Intellectual Property" isn't preventing you from learning programming and earning 6 figures.

I honestly believe you might be missing the bigger picture here.

"Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. [...] These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, in ways similar to industries that were nationalised in the past — and yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control.

This is the dark side of Silicon Valley, the uncomfortable reality that lurks beneath its glitzy exterior. Whatever its emancipatory narrative, Silicon Valley is facilitating a system where wealth concentrates, labour is disciplined, the public sphere is diminished, and global inequities are reinforced."

From earlier in the article:

"The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide." [1]

My comment isn't about me being able to 'learn programming and earn 6 figures', as you put it, it's about the overarching system, laws and culture that surround us all.

This also feels relevant:

""Knowledge is power and so it tends to be hoarded. Experts in any field rarely want people to understand what they do, and generally enjoy putting people down." [ - Ted Nelson]

Computer Lib was published in 1974, and it’s kind of eerie that those words ring so true today. The tech industry that grew out of this knowledge still feels like a priesthood, one dominated by men who are either white or a specific kind of Asian, who define the parameters of what’s considered “real” tech talent according to what they themselves are good at. They hire people with similar academic backgrounds, programming journeys, and knack for solving brainteaser questions in interviews as themselves.

The worst of them outright resent the existence of coding bootcamps and other efforts to get underrepresented groups into tech, seeing them as a threat to their own privileged status, even if they wouldn’t admit it as such. They’re not real programmers, so the reasoning goes, if they didn’t go through the desert of learning how to code in the days before GitHub and StackOverflow and Codecademy, when you asked for help on mailing lists and IRC channels and usually expected no response. Unlike the high priests who discovered tech long before they knew how lucrative it could be, these newcomers are motivated primarily by the money, and that makes their qualifications suspect. For many of them, it’s just a job - the worst possible sin to those who believe you should do what you love, and who perhaps spent some of their most formative years in social isolation in pursuit of that love.

I definitely went through a phase, probably entwined with my Ayn Rand phase, where I wholeheartedly believed this view. It took a while before I saw it for the self-aggrandising gatekeeping it is. It’s similar to what Alex Williams has called “negative solidarity”: a requirement that other people suffer as you have, not because you believe that it will be better for them, but because it makes you feel better about yourself. The most common form of gatekeeping that occurs in tech isn’t driven by a noble desire to build better products by keeping out the less capable; it’s driven by a much more selfish desire to implicitly validate the choices and skills and perspectives of those already doing well in the industry." [2]

[1] https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/01/abolish-silicon-valley

[2] https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50