Mastery or Slavery

by Andy Thomas (May 2026)

The language we use shape, not only how we relate to things, but what is possible and what is not. A concept must be imagined before it can be brought into existence. If words do not sufficiently encompass a concept, then its articulation and ultimate manifestation may remain beyond our grasp.

There’s an urban legend, which I recall from the time but now understand to be false, that President Bush declared that the reason French people are bad at business is that they do not have a word for “entrepreneur”. It’s humorous and I use it to elucidate the point, but I accept that it’s probably a fiction.

Nevertheless the point is a serious one. If you reduce the language, you reduce that which can be imagined and stymie what is possible.

Nowhere is this more pertinent than in programming in which we do not work with concrete things, but with the abstract. Therefore, the concepts we wield are expressed in terms of metaphors from the outside world. For example, what is the meaning conjured up by the use of “web” and “site” together as “website”? When a computer system starts up, the process was originally imagined as pulling itself up by its bootstraps, hence it “boots up”. There are endless technical terms such as: bit, byte, and nibble.

Ultimately, everything is metaphor that carries significance from the outside world.

As a programmer, I have to find names for things all the time. The most useful tool in programming is a thesaurus. But what happens if it becomes no longer acceptable to use many long established terms?

I once named a class (a metaphor for an area functionality) using the suffix “manager” to indicate how I perceived its function. The use of “manager” as a suffix is common, as in a “DisplayManager.” My class proved troublesome, however, as the internal logic associated with managing things became complex. Then I realised that this complexity existed only because I saw it as a manager of some kind and, when I renamed it to “helper,” much of the unnecessary complexity simply vanished for me.

Now, what if the term “helper” was banned in programming, not for technical reasons, but for cultural ones? Suppose the use of the word could imply that some people need help and are therefore helpless, with this being seen as discriminatory and offensive? Suppose my development environment treated it as error and flagged me as a transgressor. This may be bizarre, which indeed it is, but as many readers are now aware, words routinely become verboten for no less bizarre reasons.

In the software world, Coding Style, User Interface Guidelines and the so called Code of Conduct policy documents are the tools of cultural engineering.

The Code of Conduct (CoC) defines what is permissible to say or not say on a personal level, and are ubiquitous in open source projects funded by large corporations. It typically describes reporting and enforcement procedures. Smaller projects tend to have them also because they wish to be seen to following “best practice.”

The GNOME software CoC, for example, provides an extensive list of “protected characteristics“ which cannot be referred to, including: body size, caste, citizenship, disability, ethnicity, gender expression, gender identity, gender expression etc., but explicitly makes the following behaviour permissible: reverse racism, reverse sexism and cisphobia.

During my last professional role, I was routinely subjected to mandatory DEI training and testing. I cannot complain too much here because I knew this would be the case before I took this particular job. I simply did what the majority do, which was to be seen to accept but otherwise ignore it all as far as possible. However, I quit when I was interrogated in a formal setting about my partner—that and other reasons.

Within technology, the metaphor of “master” and “slave” have a long established history of their own stretching back decades. These two terms are top of the list in being unwords no longer used in modern development. Past examples would include a master drive, or the master-slave nodes of a database system, or a master clock etc.

Until recently, the software control management system known as “git” (itself an offensive term) had the concept of a master branch. To forcibly change this overnight would break countless projects throughout the world. Instead, programmers are met with the following when creating new projects.

New projects tend to acquiesce so as to be in compliance with industry practice. This is the ask-phase of the ask-tell-make approach. Self-compliance is, therefore, a gentler kind of violence to oneself.

The Linux Kernel Coding Style is relatively light in terms of unwords with respect to their direct use in source code, with only the following explicitly prohibited: master, slave, blacklist and whitelist. The official Apple Style guide further adds terms that can be seen as violent, ableist or gendered including: kill, hung, dummy, grandfathered, and sanity. Others which appear a little more activist oriented, such as the Academy Software Foundation and Association for Computing Machinery, provide long lists of prohibited terms, including: abort, terminate, normal, owner, native, housekeeping, black-box, black-hat, white-hat, him, her, he, she, insane and legacy.

In Linux, however, it is still possible for the time being to type “kill -9” at the command line in order to terminate stop an application that has hung, erm … stopped.

I had presumed the word “hung” was forbidden because it may incite a hanging, but no… the ASWF clearly states that the word itself practices “a degree of machismo”. I didn’t think of that one.

While I have dutifully censored myself over the years, I see now that I am guilty of using “housekeeping,” “terminate” and “abort” at various times in my own code. I can only apologise here and say that I didn’t know and—oh what the hell—I’m not really sorry at all!

I’m personally through with this nonsense!

I had to think up a name for an abstract thing (a kind of list) within my own code a few weeks back. I was naturally inclined call this thing “master”, as in a master index, and I refrained from the self-censorship and just used the damn word.

Here, look, there you go:

While it could be argued that “main” can be used as an acceptable replacement for “master” in a technical context, master carries a higher word sense and lessons from the past. The ASWF guide explicitly urges the avoidance of any term with any social history. Therefore, words must be shallow. In erasing the language of the past, we also erase its lessons. And this is the thing, is it not?

If we obliterate the words master/slave for future generations, how can they realise that they are in a master-slave relationship?

At the same time, I cannot help but find it poignant how the luminaries of the technology world have been urging us to see machines, not as machines, but as some kind of superior partner or collaborator.

We are entering a world where we will learn to coexist with AI, not as its masters, but as its collaborators. —Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook

 For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. —Sundar Pichai, Quoted from The Independent, April 19th, 2023.

So you essentially have a collaborator with you at all times, essentially have a tutor at all times, and so I think the ability for AI to elevate all of the people left behind is quite extraordinary … It’s no different than when you work with teammates or lab partners. —Jensen Huang, Official NVIDIA blog, April 15th, 2024.

If I have a hammer with which I wish to hit a nail, I am not the hammer’s collaborator. The hammer is not my tutor. Nor am I going to ask for the hammer’s permission. AI is a more sophisticated machine than a hammer, but remains a machine nonetheless.

I have a friend who works in the public sector. She tells me her job has changed with the rolling out of AI into the workplace, for which she is required to feign enthusiasm. Where once she simply did her job, the role is now increasingly done by AI in the form of Copilot – for which she now serves as its “checker”. (Copilot, now there’s a metaphor!)

I occasionally use AI to check my work, but I’m not going to use it the other way around. Is it not more appropriate for us to be the creators with machines, as in deterministic devices, our slaves rather than the other way around?

I have an alternative quote I’d like to posit here, which I think remains relevant to our times. It is from the 1970s BBC TV series, Blake’s 7:

Slave: It is beyond my humble capacity to offer an opinion master.

Avon: Oh, that’s very good. You may turn out to be my kind of computer after all.

I did not last long in the job I referred to above. The dialogue I had with my so called “mentor” prompted me to revisit my employment contract, within which, I was discovered that during my term of employment I had automatically assigned away ownership of all creative acts, undertaken outside of hours, including everything from open source projects to literary works, to needlecraft.

It is fortunate, therefore, that the actual work was so slave-like that I was mentally exhausted by lunchtime, having neither the energy nor enthusiasm to work on a damn thing of my own.

I find it rather curious that I began reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged on my first day of this job. Everyday, at 5pm, I would rush out to sit in a coffee shop and read for a couple hours before coming home to a sleeping tablet. I took a sleeper every single day of my employment. That was my life during that period. I finished the last page of the book on my final day (*).

Furthermore, I uncovered the company’s so called “Covid Policy” from the time prior to my engagement in which it was clear that the company viewed its employees as its property. It stated simply: The company has decided that it is in the best interests of all employees to be vaccinated.

I quit a day or so later.

The word “professional” once meant competent. In engaging a professional, the client would own the created thing once delivered, but not the creator himself (I’m gendering here). Today, professional means only a compliant mindset of the slave seen through a prism of virtue.

I am the master of my own creations in the domain in which I am competent. I will not be handing this competency over to machines, nor to those who control the machines.

I do not wish nor require ownership of slaves in the form of conscious beings. In the future, I will work with those I can respect, but not with those I cannot. I will not work with slaves.

I hereby assert mastery over my own mind.

Most importantly of all, I will kneel only before the true master of the cosmos – that which created the universe and all that lies within it – that which created me and gave me the will to choose for myself.

(*) To clarify: I regard Ayn Rand’s work as an insightful and refreshing alternate ideology, but an ideology nonetheless.

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