Faust: Well now, who are you, then?

Mephisto: One of the party that ever wishes evil, yet ever yeilds good.

Goethe, Faust

This week at Portland Code School we found ourselves enmired in the primal struggle of Good against Evil.

It began on Monday, during our pitch session for our team projects, Neilson proposed a Cards Against Humanity app where people could vote on plays they thought funniest. Just like the game, but on the web. Our interest was to see what combinations would prove to be the most popular and we may yet find this out, but not before learning of some unsettling possibilities.

We ended up with other team projects, but the CAH app was popular and on Tuesday, we discussed using it as a class learning project, considering how we might create and combine cards in a purely Object Oriented way using Ruby. On Wednesday morning we considered how we might store and retrieve cards in a relational database like MySQL.

On Wednesday, for her lightning talk, Faye brought to our attention the epic fail of Solid Gold Bomb, a company which used an algorithm to randomly generate slogans for T-shirts and generated several T-shirts with highly charged sayings. Many people were outraged by the shirts, the company’s response aggravated those who were offended by the shirts and Amazon.com, their primary outlet, began pulling the items. The company quickly fell into a downward spiral after that.

On Thursday one of the lightning talks I heard part of was on virtue. It featured a lot of Rumi quotes, and I can’t remember the details, but something the presenter set in motion a cascade of thought that carried through to the next day, when the first talk was on Punk Rock ethos and the Open Source movement.

I doubt I can articulate all the mental/emotional/ethical connections I made about all this: about civil discourse and common courtesy, about censorship (including self-censorship) and free expression, about responsible behavior and “safe spaces,” about power and oppression, about input and output, about transgressive humor and what it means to be a decent human being. But here’s one thing I think worth considering potentially harmful:

  
def get_word(dictionary)
  dictionary.sample
end

Machines are amoral, asocial extensions of ourselves. Even words are just sounds or figures until they are comprehended by a mind which then associates them with whatever memories and feelings happen to give the word meaning for that person. If we ever find ourselves having to apologize for something the get_word function returns, we can’t blame the sample method. We have to take responsibility for the dictionary provided. The possibilities which make it useful, emerge from realities which may be in the experience of those who use it. Among the many hazards, We may find ourselves and our software speaking ignorantly on a subject about which others have painful expertise.