I’m not in the category you’re pointing at because nobody is in the category you’re pointing at. But I feel called out enough by it that I’m probably one of the people your category is an exaggerated version of. So let me try to explain.

Your best primary source, if you want to get a visceral feel for this thought process, is Dilbert. The plebs work themselves to death making things, and everyone is content to abandon them to eternal Cubicle Hell. The managers do no real work except coming up with ever more ridiculous ideas for “open offices” and “company morale days”, and they get all of the money, upward mobility, and respect.

Generalize, and you get a world where learning real skills and making useful things is for chumps. The real rewards go to people who learn how to plug themselves into networks of power, play political games, and justify their right to control others.

The classic Pointy Haired Boss is a Business Major. But the Pointy Haired Bossness extends further than that. It’s the sort of thing where opinion columnists get paid however-much-they-get-paid to tell people their politics are bad, while you get paid $7 an hour to dig ditches. It’s about how your company brings in a consultant who graduated from Yale with an unrelated degree and pays them twenty times what you make. It’s about how somehow every single person in Congress is a lawyer even though you can never remember voting for any. The term “thinkfluencer” seems increasingly relevant here. Somehow thinkfluencers have taken over the world, deriving their divine right to rule from their skill at criticizing others.

Ask the man on the street what a liberal arts/humanities student does, and you’re likely to get answers like Philosophy, Literature, Journalism, and Art History. Ask a Gruff Cynical Conservative, and they’ll throw in Critical Theory, Ethnic Studies, and Gender Studies, maybe with a sneer. And Literature classes generally don’t teach you to write books; they teach you to criticize. Art History doesn’t teach you to paint; it teaches you to criticize. Philosophy doesn’t tell you the true nature of Good so much as it teaches you to criticize. Even History is less about learning specific facts and more about how to criticize or defend historical narratives. The Ethnic Studies cluster is even more obvious about this. I don’t think this is too controversial a claim; literature professors will happily tell you that their class isn’t just about literature, “it’s really about learning to think critically”.

And again consulting our inner Gruff Cynical Conservative, even the making something isn’t about making something. Everyone should read the story of Ern Malley ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley ) - the fake poet who was completely optimized to have a stirring, trendy biography and manifesto, but whose actual poems were generated randomly from opening pages of a dictionary. Everyone loved him and he became super-famous before the hoax was revealed. Plausibly a lot of rhythmless free verse poetry and weird blue-triangle-on-red-square style art is people who have learned a skill of writing manifestos, winning over tastemakers, and arguing critically for why we should like their art - rather than any skill at art-making.

“STEM majors learn how to make stuff, liberal arts majors learn to think critically and promote themselves” is an unfair simplification, but so is everything. And if you have the Dilbert view of the world, it’s easy to map this to the underpaid unrespected worker vs. overpaid prestigious thinkfluencer dichotomy.

Think about any widely beloved work. Let’s say Lord of the Rings. I have never heard any self-appointed representatives of STEM criticize Lord of the Rings. Nobody says “you shouldn’t read Lord of the Rings, you should just learn to code”. On the other hand, I have heard two million vaguely liberal-arts-adjacent people criticize Lord of the Rings. Either it’s not Serious Literature, or it’s somehow Problematic, or Tolkien has the wrong politics, or it says something about Society, or […] To me, this challenges the simple model where STEM people hate Art, but Humanities people love Art. The alternative model is some kind of dichotomy between makers and criticizers, with some STEM and some humanities people on both sides.

But STEM people feel - I think reasonably - that their fields have a special immunity from thinkfluencerification insofar as they hard to fake. No matter how high-status you are, no matter how good you are at saying the right shibboleths, and ingratiating yourself with the right people, and exerting soft power, and coming up with really convincing arguments for why you deserve more than you have - either your code runs or it doesn’t. It feels real, in the same way that some people like being in the wilderness because Nature feels real-er than whatever their day job is.



So “learn to code” means learn to code - or prove theorems, or build bridges, or cure an ear infection, or deliver a baby, or dig ditches. Or heck, design a UI, write a novel, play an instrument, paint a picture, raise a child - just do anything other than manage / criticize / consult / thinkfluence.

And under this model, the way thinkfluencers deflect any criticism of their position is with “Ah, those STEMlords, clearly their only argument is that Art is terrible and nothing matters except widget production.”

(before you point out that I’m hypocritical, consider that I could just hate myself, which would make me perfectly consistent)

