Dennis Ritchie passed away on October 12, 2011. In a sane universe, people who knew who he was would have paid their respects, the news would have been relayed by the specialized press, and people who didn't particularly care about computing or its history would have never heard of it. After a week or two, everyone would have moved on with their lives.

Which is exactly what happened.

But at the time, the rest of the world was in mourning for another guy who had died about a week earlier. Celebrations went on and on for the god like figure whose gift had blessed us all with amazing technology that was nothing short of magical.

That other guy was Steve Jobs. And the whole situation pissed me off.

I'd never been a fan of apple or Jobs, but this isn't my point here. No matter what merits the man might have had, I couldn't stand the way he was constantly praised as a genius inventor¹, when it was obvious his real accomplishements had much more to do with marketting than engineering.

And then the man who designed the C language in order to build Unix, two staples of computing that are still widely used 50-ish years later and / or shaped digital history as a whole, died and what little recognition he got was lost next to the ongoing canonization of someone who'd figured out how to turn pixels into luxury goods.

Kill your idols

A classic take among techies is that Steve Wozniak should be the famous one, as he did all the real work. Praise the nerds rather than the suits. I don't agree with this.

The point I'm trying to make here is that both should get public recognition for what they actually did, and no more. Giving credit to work we find useful doesn't mean we have to turn its authors into rock stars.

I wasn't pissed because I thought the roles should have been reversed. I'm not arguing that Wozniak and Ritchie should have been the ones under the spotlight (I'm sure they are/were perfectly happy with their relative lack of public exposure).

I just wish the media would stop indulging the ones who do seek the attention.

This isn't a new problem. The focus on individuals is as old, if not older than mass media and has been discussed and criticized for longer than I've been alive. This happen in just about every domain. Art is full of this crap, too. And it's always more infuriating when it comes to something you think you know someting about.

Ritchie was a researcher who simply did his job. No more, no less. He built on what came before, and neither C nor Unix were magical masterpieces than no one else could have conceived of. They just happened to solve the right problems at the right time, and went on to leave a truly profund mark on the global evolution of technology.

Their creators then simply went on with their work. Those who care about that stuff recognized that work, and that was enough. No need to hype them up for the masses.

The rule of marketting

But marketting doens't work that way. Marketting only cares about selling an image, and thrives on the figure of the brillant entrepreneur.

And that would be fine, if marketting kept to its place. But sadly, its reach extends much beyond designing dumb ads to sell us dumb crap. In more and more fields, advertisers get to decide what gets made and how, and their word weighs more than the advice of those who actually know what they're doing. This is why Hollywood can't seem to produce anything beyond focus-group-approved, rehashed franchises designed for mass-appeal, and this is what allows the tech industry to sell us bullshit upon bullshit. Even politicians end up caring more about their brands than policies.

To the point that collectively chanting the current buzzword passes for innovation.

Apply that logic to misunderstood (and barely taught) topics like technology, and you get the current nonsense around AI. I'm not talking about whether the tools can be useful for certain things here, but about the way business owners, ie people that tend to at least worry about their investments, happily bet everything they own on what the current flock of self proclaimed experts sold them as The Future™.

We live in a sausage

None of this is surprising in a system that values short-term profit over everything else. Not much of a scoop, I know.

It still depresses me to think that Zuckerberg's metaverse delusions got more attention than anything Tim Berners-Lee might have to say about the state of the web. This makes about as much sense as putting Elon Musk in charge of a country's budget.

Trying to reason about complex things ain't easy, and it can be pretty hard to figure out who we should trust, especially when the media doesn't understand or care about the truth any more than the average CEO. My rule of thumb is to stay away from any corporate actor, and to be extra-vigilant about anything that gets hyped. It ain't perfect, but it's a start.

Asking yourself where whoever's speaking comes from helps, too. Most of the real, meaningfull progress in computing was publicly funded², most notably the internet and the web. The private sector mostly figured out how to make a buck out of it before convincing everyone else that they were the ones responsible for the whole thing and should therefore shape all future evolutions.

We need to stop believing in that lie. And one small part of that comes from learning to differentiate the actual pioneers from the frauds³, and to stop worshipping individuals. Valuable work that truly matters comes from regular people simply doing their job, not from gifted geniuses. Give credit where credit is due and move on.

And let's hope Ken Thompson doesn't kick the bucket on the same day as Bill Gates.