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Mars Review of Books Podcast · Mars Review of Books

"Computer Programmer" is a Fake Email Job that Should Be Eliminated

·55 min·3 clips
“AI is going to kill programming jobs” is welcomed as “good” because the industry is “an enormous monument to waste.”
The AirPods stay in. That tiny setup does more than sit there. Louder music, faster playback, and a joking zoomer pose turn into a whole attitude toward work. Speed is the gateway drug. YouTube at 1.25x, Netflix controls, jungle, and drum and bass get treated like tools for thinking, not personality accessories. Then bitcoin walks onstage. One speaker frames it as a way to settle the rare cases where reality itself is up for grabs, without handing the decision to a central authority. The other speaker asks for examples, which is where the argument gets bigger and stranger. Maybe computing can pick up bitcoin-like properties. Maybe it can loosen the naming power held by centralized systems. The phrase gets lofty fast: ontological gatekeeping. In plain terms, systems name things before anyone gets to argue. Money is the clean example. A top-down authority can say what money is, how much exists, and how much of it belongs to you. Bitcoin messes with that setup. From there, the dream spills into education and maybe other parts of the world. Heraclitus gets dragged in too, with fire becoming part of a loose story about exchange, pricing, and universal value. The gold standard lingers nearby. This is not a tidy crypto pitch. It is a jagged argument about categories, power, and bad inherited names. By the end, naming starts to sound like an accusation: if the names are already false, how is anyone supposed to work?

As heard by us

A loud, restless debate about speed, money, names, and who gets to define reality.

The opening hits hard: loud jungle, faster pace, and a conversation that quickly turns into how speed and attention shape the way things get done.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a loud argument that starts with AirPods and ends with truth.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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