TC39 vs "the community"

[Garrett Smith]

On 6/20/14, David Bruant <bruant.d at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm not quite sure what this is all about, so forking in hope for
> clarifications.
> I'm sorry to send a message that will probably be read as noise by a lot
> of people, but I'm also tired of some of these pointless and
> unconstructive, if not destructive, fights among people (in here, on
> Twitter or elsewhere).
> I hope to have a conversation to start the end of the alleged
> unharmonious relationship between TC39 and JS developers.
>
> Domenic, your email suggests a fairly strong dichotomy between "TC39"
> and "the community". As far as I'm concerned, to begin with, I don't see
> anything that is called "the community" in JavaScript.

Words tend to get coopted and their meanings stretched to suit agendas.

<aside>
If you're easily offended, or if you wish not to read opinionated
information, stop reading now. Also, I add nothing whatsoever to the
technical matter of this discussion.
</aside>

Developer relations is public relations for developers, and public
relations is propaganda. This is because Edward Bernays used a
propaganda technique to rename propaganda to "Public Relations".It
stuck.


The renaming of term "propaganda" was necessary because it had lost
any acceptibile legitimacy that it had maintained prior its use in
WWII, when Joseph Goebbels' used Edward Bernays' propaganda.

Similarly, popular opinion for the bellamy salute, changed around this
time, which is why schools now use the hand-on-heart techqnique to
instill the values. But that is getting off topic on an already off
topic thread.

The terms, "community", "developer relations", and "technical
evangelism", are all used to describe roles for corporate propaganda.

"The community," where propaganda is disseminated, exists more
recently as corporate-sponsored technical events and, starting a few
years back, on w3c mailing lists. Large numbers of individuals are
organized (By Google, Microsoft, etc) to accept what is fed to them
through these corporate vehicles, and willingly do so for three
reasons (1) the great potential for career advancement via social
climbing, (2) the large amount of money in corporate community, and
(3) a shortage of corporate-free spaces.

The term "community" has long been coopted outside the world of tech,
generally to leverage herd mentality, so as to control, categorize,
marginalize, and otherwise take advantage of subsets the public.

And so now too in software, where companies hire representatives to
promote agendas, "the community" represents something of value to
them: influence.

Developer relations and community managers are generally presentable,
attractive, and serve their company's agenda. Programming skill is not
so important. Appearance and presentation are.

Developer relations is generally very well-compensated for very light
work hours (e.g. $150k+ 4d/wk, 6h/d). Don't get me wrong, I'm all for
working fewer hours! -- my point is that "community," and those who
manage to shape it, play a significant role in the corporate agenda to
the expense of anything resembling consensus-based voluntaryist
community.
-- 
Garrett
@xkit
ChordCycles.com
garretts.github.io