Try it and see what happens?

I am a social scientist and have somehow avoided learning anything about coding for my entire life (with the exception of a brief foray into HTML when that was first a thing). The logic and literal nature of coding appeals to me, and I am passionate about language in general, at least when it comes to English and Spanish. But coding language hasn’t hooked me the same way for some reason.

What I do know is that every stroke, every character, every space, every punctuation mark means something and makes a difference. That used to be the case in search, back in the olden times when as a young consultant I did queries and research using Lexi’s/Nexus. You had to be very precise with search terms, order, phrasing…everything, if you wanted to get an accurate and useful result. Searching today requires none of that since applications and input portals are so much smarter.

But my impression is that the code behind such things still has the same rigidity of logic and demand for precision. I’m in the process of proving that to myself as I have been trying to program a script in FileMaker Pro to do some matching in a database. I used ChatGPT to give me the basics, but I’m having to go through what it gave me line by line, character by character, end do endless trial and error to make sure it’s doing what I want it to do.

We now live in the Upside Down because we have learned over the last couple of days that some young software engineers (with apparently loathsome beliefs) have gained access to the coding behind the payment systems that the US Treasury uses to distribute something like $6 Trillion to nearly every person and organization to whom Congress has directed funding. Let’s leave aside the illegality of the access these same chodes have to our personal information and all kinds of protected data for now. That’s a terrible, very bad thing, but the coding of the systems has the potential to do a couple of things.

Perhaps the best case scenario is that things continue to work, but Musk and his sycophants now have the ability to stop or redirect payments being made to legally funded programs because they don’t like them. Or their titles, or any of the dozens of words to which they object. Words like “woman” and “female” and “gender”. That has massive and rippling repercussions, ranging from lifesaving programs stopped to salaries and rents not paid to lives generally wrecked economically. Not for any rational reason or even appearance of “efficiency”, but just because Musk or Trump or the next 23 year old with a bad haircut decide they don’t like them.

That’s bad for a variety of reasons, not to mention unconstitutional and legal, but they seem to be following Musk’s Twitter approach of just ripping things out, taking things away, waiting to see if the thing still works, then trying to add back in whatever you need to in order to make sure it functions again once you broke it. That’s an idiotic way to approach any problem, and the results were operationally catastrophic for Twitter for the reasons I mentioned above. You can’t just delete things to see what happens without infinite, mostly bad, unintended consequences.

The worst case scenario is that the whole thing stops working. I don’t know much about the coding or systems, but it seems like they have been built over many years and are probably using languages and hardware that are dated. Changing over systems of the scale that run government payments is a very long, arduous, and risky process (ask anyone who has gone through something similar but comparatively minor in scope at a university like mine). It inevitably involves a lot of iterating, failing, troubleshooting, and friction before the thing works the way you want.

I can’t even wrap my mind around how perilous it is to tinker with millions and millions of lines of code, in a language these young men have probably never seen, with no offline trials and no plan for gradual integration. There are infinite minefields and consequences that have real impact on real people at the micro and macro level. At the far end, if Treasure doesn’t meet our national obligations on time and in a predictable way, people can get nervous and call in our debt, lower our credit rating, pull out of trade agreements, lose faith in our currency, jack up interest rates to loan us money, and so on and so on and so on.

Try it and see what happens? Fine, if you own a private social media platform and don’t really care if it breaks, loses money, or massive amounts of shareholder value. That’s on you.

Try it and see what happens with the faith and credit of the United States on the line, in a way where the outcomes will impact all 320+ million people in the US and potentially billions of people around the globe? That’s the height of insanity so far, and it doesn’t seem like the President or Republican leadership care or believe they can do anything about it.

In the right side up world, grown ups think about the consequences of their actions. Moral people consider how their words and deeds impact others, especially less fortunate folks. Humans who follow any of the major religions ascribe to the teachings of leaders who almost universally advocate for doing good for others, as we would like to have done for us. To completely ignore all of that and dabble in world wrecking behavior for spite, vengeance, and generally childish impulses, is horribly Upside Down.