I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s – here’s what I discovered | Technology | The Guardian

One day in 2017 I had a realisation that seems obvious now but had the power to shock back then: almost everything I did was being mediated by computer code. And as the trickle of code into my world became a flood, that world seemed to be getting not better but worse in approximate proportion. I began to wonder why.

Two possibilities sprang immediately to mind. One was the people who wrote the code - coders - long depicted in pop culture as a clan of vaguely comic, Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another was the uber-capitalist system within which many worked, exemplified by the profoundly weird Silicon Valley. Were one or both using code to recast the human environment as something more amenable to them?

There was also a third possibility, one I barely dared contemplate because the prospect of it was so appalling. What if there was something about the way we compute that was at odds with the way humans are? I'd never heard anyone suggest such a possibility, but in theory, at least, it was there. Slowly, it became clear that the only way to find out would be to climb inside the machine by learning to code myself.