https://www.mediamatters.org/erick-erickson/how-myth-about-journalists-telling-miners-learn-code-helped-people-justify
https://twitter.com/swordsjew/status/1088590587731808256
''btw, if any other journos targeted by layoffs are getting masses of “learn to code” harassment, it was coordinated on 4chan (of course)''
7:13 PM · Jan 24, 2019 ·Twitter for iPhone
''How a myth about journalists telling miners to “learn to code” helped people justify harassment''
mediamatters.org/erick-erickson/how-myth-about-journalists-telling-miners-learn-code-helped-people-justify
Hundreds of journalists lost their jobs, and the darkest corners of the internet were ready to pounce.
Written by Parker Molloy
Published 01/31/19 10:57 AM EST
Journalism took a hit last week when BuzzFeed and HuffPost both announced a steep reduction in staff, cutting hundreds of jobs over the course of just a few days. For many journalists, the layoffs meant the end of a job they’ve had for years and, in the case of many BuzzFeed staffers, the separation from a company they had effectively helped build. Jobs in media, especially digital media, are tough to come by and even tougher to keep. And the people who lost their jobs know that they will be joining an already oversaturated talent pool of unemployed industry vets.
Needless to say, it was a rough few days for those involved. Thanks to a 4chan campaign, it got even worse.
If you were to scroll through the Twitter mentions of some of the laid-off journalists, there’s one phrase you probably saw more than a handful of times: “Learn to code.” On its own, “learn to code” is a perfectly innocuous suggestion, and few would deny that coding is a strong skill to have in the modern economy. The reason this phrase was being tweeted in such large volumes, however, was not out of a genuine concern for the newly unemployed but as a way to taunt them.
The “learn to code” narrative sprung out of an impression among some on the right that journalists, whom conservatives have long tried to paint as elitists, had been flippant about layoffs that hit working-class Americans, particularly coal miners, over the last few years. By tweeting “learn to code” a reference to government and tech initiatives aimed at promoting STEM education at these journalists, Twitter users were trying to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Talia Lavin, who had a steady freelance gig writing for HuffPost’s now-shuttered opinion section, was one of the first to pinpoint the origin of the “learn to code” campaign: 4chan.
“Oh the sweet, sweet taste of victory and justice. These vile, soulless pieces of shit are going to have to find actual work now,” wrote one anonymous user on the message board, referring to news of the layoffs.
“They should learn to code,” wrote another. Others said they were going to create so-called sockpuppet accounts (fake, deceptive, or throwaway accounts) for the specific purpose of tweeting at laid-off reporters.
“Making them an hero is the goal,” wrote one person, referencing 4chan slang for committing suicide.
The following day, NBC’s Ben Collins published a story about some of the tweets laid-off journalists received, which included a meme about the “Day of the Rope” (a reference to the day of mass execution in The Turner Diaries, a novel with heavy neo-Nazi themes) and a photo of an ISIS member about to execute journalist James Foley with the text “Shut the fuck up journalist.” These messages were mixed in as part of the larger “learn to code” campaign.
Then a mangled message from Twitter set off a firestorm among conservative Twitter commentators.
On Monday morning, The Wrap’s Jon Levine reported that a source inside Twitter told him that “tweeting ‘learn to code’ at any recently laid off journalist will be treated as ‘abusive behavior,’ and is a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service.”
Just over two hours later, the company issued a public statement contradicting this report, saying that “just Tweeting ‘learn to code’ is not a violation,” but tweeting the phrase “at an account coupled with targeted harassment, violent threats, intimidation, and/or as part of a coordinated campaign is considered a violation of our abusive behaviour policy.” Given that at least one person on 4chan explicitly stated that the goal of their tweets was to encourage journalists to commit suicide, it made sense that Twitter would view tweets resulting from that thread with at least a little caution. Essentially, Twitter’s official statement clarified that people tweeting “learn to code” weren’t somehow exempt from its rules.
Levine also tweeted an update to his original post. In a direct message to me, he wrote, “Twitter told me something on background and then backed away from it publicly after they began to take heat. The whole affair suggests that even their own staff are unsure of how to enforce the nuts and bolts of their [terms of service].”
In fairness, Twitter has what can only be described as an abysmal track record when it comes to enforcing its rules. Moderators routinely ignore posts that clearly violate the site’s terms of service, while marking harmless posts as violations all the time. Conservative media outlets and politicians often argue these inconsistencies are proof of anti-conservative bias at tech companies, but there’s little evidence to back up this claim. Twitter has wrongly taken down tweets from both right-wing and left-wing users, and it has ignored harassment campaigns against people on both sides of the political divide.
Unfortunately, the confusion arising from Levine’s initial report and then Twitter’s official statement provided a misleading narrative for conservatives in the media to latch onto, even after it had been corrected, making journalists on the receiving end of this brigade look fragile and thin-skinned.
Twitter last week was full of accounts doxxing and threatening the Covington students. No crackdown.
Today they're cracking down on people who tell laid off bloggers to “learn to code”
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 28, 2019
Thinking of changing my twitter bio to “learn to code.” I am amazed that advice given in the media to laid off blue collar workers is suddenly hate speech when given to the laid off reporters who first suggested it.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) January 28, 2019
There’s scant evidence that journalists told laid-off miners to “learn to code.” This has led the campaign’s defenders to engage in a bit of revisionist history.
The Resurgent’s Erick Erickson wrote that in 2016, “millennial reporters at various online outlets suggested that blue collar coal miners ‘learn to code’ as the Obama Administration hatched plans to close coal mines. More than one outlet suggested as much with the New York Times even going so far as to profile one group that taught unemployed rust belt workers to code.”
“Well, what’s good for the goose … isn’t working so well for the gander,” he continued. “The internet trolls at 4Chan have encouraged people to tweet out ‘learn to code’ to some of the very same millennial reporters who were suggesting blue collar workers do that.”
Erickson doesn’t give any example of a single laid-off journalist mocking the plight of coal miners, and there’s a good reason to believe it didn’t happen.
The 2016 New York Times profile Erickson mentioned wasn’t published as some sort of smug suggestion that miners just suck it up and “learn to code,” but as an empathetic look at the struggles faced by families in Appalachian coal country suddenly finding themselves without a source of income as once-reliable mining jobs vanished for good.
In September 2018, the Times published an op-ed titled “The Coders of Kentucky,” highlighting bipartisan efforts to revitalize some of the more economically challenged segments of the country. It was, much like the 2016 piece, extraordinarily empathetic to the plight of workers who saw these once-steady careers evaporate.
Neither article was authored by a millennial. The 2016 piece was written by a baby boomer, born in the 1960s, and the 2018 article was authored by a member of the silent generation, born in 1940. The closest thing to a smug “learn to code” response to miners losing jobs came from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who actually dismissed out-of-work miners as being unable or unwilling to code. Bloomberg, born in 1942, is definitely not a millennial.
This isn’t to say that there haven’t been articles urging various groups to learn how to code. A 2013 post published on Forbes’ community page suggested that women should learn the skill. People have made a case for including coding classes in K-12 public education, for businesspeople to give it a shot, and for designers to get in on the action. A 2014 interactive BuzzFeed piece by Katie Notopoulos listed various articles handing out this bit of advice broadly. Interestingly enough, none of them were in the oh, you just got laid off – deal with it and learn to code vein.
Erickson’s “what’s good for the goose” statement doesn’t apply here. Instead, it simply functions as a release valve for people who might feel a tinge of guilt over targeting those who were laid off or who felt a sense of glee at the news.
The “learn to code” portion of this campaign is something of a red herring. NBC’s Ben Collins walked me through it.
According to Ben Collins, the author of NBC’s report on the harassment campaign, smugly suggesting coal miners “learn to code” wasn’t the approach newspapers took when covering those who lost their jobs. He noted that reports on news about coding programs and statements from politicians aren’t anywhere near the type of arrogant sneer conservatives are making them out to be.
And Collins has a theory about why some conservatives build on these sorts of myths. “It … feeds into this larger narrative that ‘the news’ is one homogeneous organism that is all writing the same thing, that we're all one sentient blob,” he wrote in a Twitter direct message.
The goal of these types of campaigns is to launder actual hate and threats across social media to convince outsiders that the people being harassed are just weak, overdramatic, or perhaps even deserving of whatever they receive. Collins elaborates:
The learn to code stuff is not the point for [people on 4chan’s “politically incorrect” message board] /pol/. They understand when they brigade specific tweets/journalists telling them to do something benign, in this case tweet “learn to code,” people on /pol/ will obviously take it too far and send a picture of ISIS executing a journalist instead. Subversion, and the subversion of that subversion, is the very point of /pol/.
…
That's why [the recent campaign] was a perfect storm. Center-right blogs could claim plausible deniability, while writing journalists are soft for not being able to take thousands of “learn to code” messages on the day they were fired. But they understand what /pol/ is. They understand trolling culture and harassment campaigns. They are willfully ignoring the admittedly smaller subset of (but real) threats that are baked into the cake when a campaign like this gets started on the most notorious part of the internet that was built on hate.
On Twitter, Talia Lavin shared examples of the hateful messages she received mixed in with those telling her to “learn to code.”
In response to Ben Shapiro’s dismissal of the campaign, she tweeted, “A lot of the people telling me learn to code were also telling me to jump in an oven, talking about gassing all the kikes and celebrating race war. No matter how much cover you run for fascists, they still hate you, Ben.”
The generally incredulous response to these recent claims of harassment illustrates just how unwilling and out-of-touch social platforms and a sizable chunk of the media world is when it comes to understanding the way information and harassment travels on the internet.
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-code/
''Can You Teach a Coal Miner to Code?''
wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-code
Lauren SmileyNovember 18, 2015
Rusty Justice doesn’t think about Michael Bloomberg very often. But when he does
— even if it’s just for a moment
— it’s like remembering the gloating rich kid who stole his lunch.
The distaste started when the New York City billionaire donated $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign back in 2011 and continued when he poured in another $30 million this year. Rusty, you see, runs a land-moving company in Eastern Kentucky, and the anti-coal movement is playing a big role in systematically closing down the industry he’s worked around all his life.
Say what you will about the long-term environmental effects (Justice, for one, is very pro-coal) but the impact on the area’s one-source economy has been brutal. Some 8,000 miners have been laid off in the last four years
— that’s more people than the entire population of Justice’s hometown, Pikeville. On the road to a cleaner energy future, the surrounding neck of Appalachia is looking like roadkill.
But Rusty’s unease with Bloomberg turned into a gut-deep animus last year when the confessed hillbilly—if you’re from this part of the world that’s a self-identifier, not an insult
—sat down for his weekly, three-hour, Saturday morning news-reading session. That’s when he came across Bloomberg’s latest jab.
“You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code.”
There he was, this business mogul, preaching “compassion” for the miners watching their world collapse
— while simultaneously saying they couldn’t be retrained to work in America’s hottest industry.
“Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great,” said Bloomberg. “I don’t know how to break it to you …. but no.”
It wasn’t just about coal politics this time
— on that stuff, at least, Justice can agree to disagree. This? This was just patronizing.
“It touched every button of every stereotype you can put on us, that we’re not smart and can’t do things and are pitiful and all that,” Justice told me. “It was like waving a red flag in front of a bull’s face.”
1/
Rusty Justice thought he might know miners a little better than some fancy tycoon in New York did. That’s why, at dawn one October morning last year, he trotted down his driveway towards a silver F-150 truck idling in the street and drove some 150 miles along the Mountain Parkway to Lexington.
It was time to go and prove Bloomberg wrong.
They called them company towns for a reason. Coal is to Eastern Kentucky what tech is to Silicon Valley — the most copious, best-paid work that pushes every other lever in the economy. Each coal job supports three-and-a-half others, which means if you pull the plug on them, the economy goes out. There go the machinery vendors and mechanics. There go the train operators. The mine security guards. The bartenders. The cashiers at the family-run grocery store. There go 70 percent of Justice’s construction jobs. In Pike County, the only major non-coal factory churns out Pop-Tarts for Kellogg’s.
Justice never imagined the crash would be this sudden nor this bad, but things just keep piling on. EPA clean air regulations have power plants changing over to natural gas, there’s greater regulation of strip mining, and a series of cities, universities, and state pension plans are divesting themselves from coal.
Justice compares the disruption to the way Uber’s turning the cab industry inside out. With some coal company stocks crashing 95 percent in value over the last five years, I would say it’s way, way worse.
On Wall Street, it’s a big enough problem that the New York Stock Exchange threatened former industrial titans with delisting. In mining country, though, it looks like this: conveyer belts stretching up like fossilized dinosaur necks, with conical stacks of black coal sitting below, waiting for a phantom market.
For decades, miners have been middle-class breadwinners making $60–80,000 a year, with a mortgage and a fishing boat and a truck, and kids in new Nikes at basketball practice. Now they’re hitting the unemployment office in the thousands, signing up for help.
—they’ve run Jigsaw Enterprises together for five years
—have long accepted it: coal is over. The federal government has pumped nearly $23 million into the region in the last two years to diversify the post-coal economy and retrain miners into jobs like installing broadband fiber. But until there’s some serious new high-paying option, most ex-mine workers are getting by on unemployment, taking lower-paying jobs, moving away, or, as one put it to me, “going into panic mode.”
Whatever happens, the same-old isn’t going to work.
2/
Rusty and Lynn got the idea when they visited Awesome Inc, a Lexington tech incubator. They’d driven up from Pikeville, turning onto the Mountain Parkway, cutting down through the shale mountains, and chatting like always. “Windshield time,” Justice calls it.
Inside, Awesome had all the visual shorthand of Silicon Valley: ping pong table, programmer books, entrepreneurs typing at rented desks. Rusty and Lynn soaked it all in. They filed into a glass-walled conference room along with a gang of other Kentucky entrepreneurs, to speak with the space’s 29-year-old co-founder Nick Such.
Coding is the most in-demand job in today’s economy, Such told them. Lexington tech companies couldn’t find enough.
“Don’t they need a computer science degree?” asked Justice.
“No,” said Such. “It’s like welding. It’s a trade. It’s a skill.”
He said, they were running classes all the time, teaching teens and college grads how to program. And how much could they earn? Well, a junior developer in Kentucky could make $60-$80,000 a year.
Justice’s ears perked up: mining wages.
Intrigued, Justice and Parrish piled back into the F-150. As the bluegrass horse pastures of central Kentucky faded into the red-tinged oak trees covering the Appalachians, they started chatting. The two had looked for a solution in several potential industries over the last two years: wind farms, fish farms, farm farms.
Could coding be it?
It was certainly a long shot. Other than being handy with an iPhone, and tracking their truck fleet on iPads, neither of them knew a thing about software. And although tech scenes have cropped up in cities in the middle of the country
— Boulder, Austin, Indianapolis
— things still lag in truly rural areas. Kentucky is the only rural area included in the White House’s TechHire program to train people for digital jobs. Kentucky has been spending federal funds to train customer service work-from-homers, place out-of-work miners into other jobs, and a coding camp for kids. No one had tried to turn adult miners into coders.
But why not? Justice asked.
3/
But why not? Justice asked.
The two kept thinking about what Such said about coding being a trade. “That’s when we said,” Parrish recalls, “we’ve been working with tradespeople all our life.”
Famous historical residents of Appalachia decorate a wall in the main workroom of BitSource.Philip Scott Andrews
Outsiders have never gotten Appalachia — or else, they get the version they want: the one with the meth and Mountain Dew mouth, the incest, the painkillers, the welfare, all captured by journalists parachuting in for their regular dose of poverty porn. They find the toothless guy, the trailers with shotguns racked up on the wall and the yard strewn with diapers and beer cans, and they film some dude saying weird shit in a backcountry accent that needs subtitles to comprehend, they give it an ominous title like “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” and they leave. You bet people here have a chip on their shoulder. It’s not that stuff like that doesn’t exist—but if the world always insisted on zooming in on your warts, you’d be resentful, too.
And then there’s the work. It’s pretty typical to view miners as downtrodden grunts who would have done anything else if they could have (see: Bloomberg). They’re not Stanford grads in hoodies, or dropouts in turtlenecks.
But, Rusty thought a potential miner-to-coder pipeline actually makes a weird kind of sense. After all, coal was the back-end code of 200 years of industrial progress — the fuel that bent the steel for Ford cars and train tracks and skyscrapers, and much of the electricity to light them.
And Silicon Valley has shown that the digital economy doesn’t have to be created in the same place that it’s consumed. It can happen two hours from the nearest airport, in a place where building a new road requires sawing a mountain in half, by people who have different politics, accents and hobbies than the end-users. And miners are already technical workers, machine operators, drafters, engineers.
Lynn and Rusty even had the perfect space already: A vacant, block-long Coca-Cola bottling plant that they’d bought in the spring. It was just two blocks from Justice’s house, but more importantly, right in front of the power poles carrying Pikeville’s fastest broadband internet fiber.
So, as Parrish dropped Rusty off at his house, “We said, huh, what do you think?’
“We pondered on it, prayed over it.”
Then, three days later, Parrish pulled up at his partner’s house.
“We ought to try this,” he said, as Justice opened up the door.
“I will if you will,” Justice said. “We need to do something.”
4/
In the weeks that followed, they lined up the details. First, a name (they picked BitSource, after realizing that a coder’s “bit” could be a play on bituminous coal.) Then, a profit plan (Justice and Parrish didn’t want a do-gooder charity, they wanted to build a real business.)
The job, they determined, would start with a 22-week training program to learn how to code. Trainees would be paid $15 an hour, which came from federal funds pumped through a regional economic development agency. That’s less than miner wages, but it was better than working at the McDonald’s double-lane drive-thru downtown. Then, after those 22 weeks, Justice and Parrish would put up three dollars for everyone from the government and build a coding team that could take on real, paying work. One of Justice’s takeaways from the management book Antifragile was that everyone needs “skin in the game”: Parrish and Justice would be investing in major capital for the miners to learn, and also be on the hook to drum up clients.
The miners would have to learn or they would be fired, and if too many of them failed, so would the business. Conversely, if everything worked, they would all make money, and the miners would have some of the first coding jobs in Appalachia.
When BitSource started advertising the job, Justice was hoping for 50 applications. In the end, they got 900.
On the same day his unemployment ran out in March, Jim Ratliff walked through BitSource’s door. The place looked like a coding shop: a “binary canary” logo looked over the stairs, and old coal sacks and tools decorated the lobby. Dell monitors sat on a dozen desks, and murals of the Appalachians who’d made it big covered the walls.
“I was intimidated,” he says.
You would never guess it by looking at him. Ratliff is a solid 6-foot-2, fourth-generation miner, a 38-year-old with a stoic, worn bearing. His brown beard is edged with gray. Waking up at 3:30 in the morning to go work in the strip mines “wide open, just as hard as you could get it” for 10 to 12 hours a day for the last 14 years will do that to you.
He wasn’t alone. There were 10 newbies, and they did a quick round of introductions. One guy was a college-educated mechanic who’d repaired conveyer belts running out the mines on the third-shift “dead crew.” Another was a brawny former Army corporal who inspected the mines for safety hazards. There was a surface miner. A jolly 50-something man who had sold equipment to the coal companies, and made use of his unemployment to become a Baptist minister. A mine project manager who, after hours, brought his Xbox to Call of Duty marathons at a buddy’s house. Of the coders, the only non-mine-related worker was a former crime reporter for a Virginia newspaper. There was just one woman
—a mining engineer who was originally from Mexico and had been out of work for two years.
Most had heard the program’s radio ad. “Have you been laid off from a job in the mining industry? If you are a logic-based thinker willing to work and learn new things, we have a career opportunity for you. BitSource is bringing the computer coding revolution to Eastern Kentucky.”
Getting down to this final group of candidates had been tough. BitSource whittled the 900 applications down to 60 frontrunners, then gave them a written test that measured three criteria — Were they logical? Were they technical thinkers? And could they sit in a chair for eight hours a day?
5/
Ratliff was one of the lucky ones. The math was easy
—he’d started college on an academic scholarship in the late 90s, but when his wife got pregnant, he dropped out to start working. “The rest is kinda history…. You gotta support your family, either you were at McDonald’s, or you made $60-$70,000 a year.”
Another question on the assessment: Would you rather overhaul an engine or give a presentation? Ratliff knew probably what the employers would want to hear, but “I wanted to be honest.” He answered: overhaul an engine. His backup plan was to follow strip mining work to Wyoming, but the thought of missing his three teens’ last years at home killed him. “I’ve missed a lot of my children growing up. I wanted to make sure I’d exhausted every revenue source.” Still, he got a face-to-face interview.
Then came an email with a BitSource job offer.
“It was like hitting the lottery.”
It’s time for the 9 a.m. standup.
“Last 24: definitely have not looked at C#,” says Michael Harrison. He’s the resident jokester, wearing blue Chuck Taylors and a fierce red mountain beard that hipsters can try to mimic, but would fail.
“You’re a bad liar,” says Justin Hall, the team leader and BitSource president.
“Last 24, I went through the pattern lab demo,” says Garland Couch, the Xbox guy, an ex-mine manager draped in an oversized polo shirt. “I did not create a cool little zombie scene with a first-person character in Unity while I was waiting.”
Jim Ratliff is up.
“Last 24, I fixed the header,” he says. “I finally figured out what was wrong with it.”
Hall gives two thumbs up.
“I dug ground enough, and figured out how to make that work.”
6/
“I dug ground enough, and figured out how to make that work.”
Hall is happy with all the updates, whether they’re serious or not. They must know how to fix headers. They’re all going to need to be fluent in C#. But it’s just as important that they screw around with Unity in their spare time. It’s just as important they know he’s speaking emoji when he says “sad face” in a sentence, and that they crack up at programmer memes. It’s the subtler side of coder culture, the exuberant and unrepentant nerd-dom. And it turns out the assessment was incredibly adept at finding the miners who could be part of the club.
Hall is a distant cousin of Rusty’s on one side. On the other, Hall claims to be a descendent of “Devil Anse” Hatfield
— as in those Hatfields, the ones from the bloody Hatfield-McCoy feud, with the sites where they shot at each other or were buried dotting the surrounding hollers. More than a century later, Hall looks and acts like a calm, khaki-wearing suburban dad, who is seriously stoked when @SiriouslySusan follows BitSource on Twitter. He grew up near Pikeville, but left for a software career in Lexington, where he found himself ironing out the more ornate twists in his Appalachian lilt; it brings stigma even in the central part of the state, not to mention West Coast conferences. “I’m trying to sound smart and sell tech,” he says.
Hall was the one who scrapped together open-sourced curriculum for BitSource. By the end of the first week, all 10 coders had built an HTML page
— be it a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan or University of Kentucky basketball. As the weeks passed they added in more languages: CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, PHP, then Bootstrap and Drupal. Then Less, Unix, and Git. Much of the instruction came from videos at Lynda.com. Every other day, they’d discuss new readings from The Pragmatic Programmer, and the guys started ordering more programming books off Amazon to cram at night.
At first, Ratliff struggled to keep up. One day at standup, he said as much but added that back at the strip mines, he once had to take his lunch break in four feet of sludge up to his chest. “He says, this is uncomfortable, but it’s not that bad,” Hall recalls. “So you don’t have to teach motivation.”
Just as much as the code, Hall says he had to teach an aptitude for screwing up. “Fail fast and iterate” is not the going ethos of mining, where a wrong move means the wrong part of a mountain gets blown off and your ass gets chewed. “I’m not going to lie,” Garland tells me about his first time pushing code live to a website the team was building, “I was sitting there for 15 minutes before I had the nerve to push the button.”
But even if they’re learning new skills, the ex-miners in the room never overtly criticize their old work
—not in front of me, not in front of other ex-miners, not when it’s what paid the bills and kept their region alive for so long and they gave so many years to. But they’re not nostalgic either.
“No, I don’t miss this at all,” Harrison, the former mechanic, told me while showing me a video of his old underground worksite on YouTube. “I didn’t like the work, I liked the people.”
This summer, Ratliff got a call from the same foreman who laid him off. A mine down in Harlan County was hiring. Now that they graduated from training and had started building their first professional web pages, the $18-an-hour BitSource wage for junior coders still didn’t match mining. But at the mines, who knows if the job would last two months or two weeks? Ratliff is not one to walk away from a challenge. “I think we can do this, and I didn’t want to think I left something and it became something really special. I wanted to be a part of it.”
7/
Ratliff dialed the foreman back the next day.
“I’m going to stay where I’m at.”
The foreman said he got it. Then he asked Ratliff if BitSource was hiring. “He said, ‘Keep me in mind. I might need a job.’”
It’s Friday, and that means team lunch. Other than taking chewing tobacco breaks, it’s their one social activity (no happy hours when everyone commutes an hour each way to work, or has kids to get back to). This week it’s El Azul Grande, a sit-down Mexican restaurant named in honor of the University of Kentucky’s rabid sports fans. The group settles around a long table, and bows their heads as Hall says grace, before digging into their enchiladas and Californian burritos.
The conversation splinters out in a dozen directions. Paul, a gregarious former surveyor wearing a camo jacket and camo baseball cap, tells me how when he was a kid in Virginia, his school bus was collateral damage of the jack rocks thrown on the road during a mine strike. Shawn
— the former reporter with a Colonel Sanders-esque beard
— critiques FX’s Justified, which is set in nearby Harlan county. Ratliff brings up his son’s high school football victory the night before. When he was mining, he’d be lucky to get to his games at half-time, if at all. This fall, working at BitSource, he hasn’t missed a game.
When they get back to the office, Rusty Justice blazes in. He does this several times a week, often waxing inspirational or trying to find out what the coders are up to, even if it drives him crazy that he can’t see or understand their progress.
That day, Rusty wanted to get them jazzed about his new idea: A hydroseeding app. Hydroseeding, for the uninitiated, happens after a strip mine is finished getting excavated. They move some of the earth back into place and grow grass to stabilize the fresh soil and make it look mountain-ish again. Estimating how much and what kind of seed to buy can be a money-wasting crapshoot. But if San Francisco’s 20-somethings can create apps to bring them dinner and wash their laundry, then here, the developers can scratch their itches differently.
“I am blue-collar,” Justice tells me later. “They’re blue-collar coders. That’s what they’re gonna be. We have to be what we are.”
8/
The coders listen to what Justice wants, then start to discuss how the app would work. Rusty takes a seat, checks Twitter, and then calls out for everyone’s attention. “I’m just seeing this now,” he says, before reading out the news of more mines closing and hundreds of new layoffs since Alpha, the coal company, filed for bankruptcy.
Homes clustered together are seen out a second story window at BitSource.Philip Scott Andrews
The mood in the room instantly drops.
Garland rubs his brow and shakes his head.
“Wow.”
“Goll-ee,” Michael says, plaintively.
Ratliff stares straight ahead. He was right — the people in this room had won the lotto. But BitSource has to work. They can’t go home again.
Justice segues into motivational mode. “My dad had a mule. He’d go to the end of the row and stop. And someone had to turn him around at the end of every row. Let’s not be like that old mule. Let’s turn around and go back again. We got to fix the holes in our game, and get this baby in the air. I think we’re proficient, but we’re not yet efficient. You go home and your head is tired. It’s gotta be. We just need playing time.”
The Rusty Justice seminar concludes for today. The coders swivel back to their computers, and Michael announces weekend plans to no one in particular: “Looks like I better learn C#.”
Jim Ratliff at work.Philip Scott Andrews
Don’t you go thinking — not for even a second — that BitSource has found the answer. Appalachia’s newest startup founder might be fueled by endless reserves of renewable Rusty Justice energy. But it’s fragile, just 10 people out of thousands, and it has yet to even recover its costs, let alone make a profit. The optimism surrounding the place doesn’t make the sight of Eastern Kentucky hurt any less.
It’s a rainy Saturday morning, and Justice wants to take me around the place. We clamber into his F-150 and he drives me through the hollers. The one where he was born, right there, in that shingled white house. His extended family still live in the homes and trailers along this creek. Jigsaw is right there in that corrugated steel building. We drive out through Pike County, down the side of a mountain on a gravel road, until we reach the 1920’s-era duplex houses of a former company coal camp called Stone. He points out a long-abandoned red-brick company store; the lane where all the managers lived.
In the rain, the old structures are desolate and spooky, ghosts of a mythic industry I’ve never seen up close before. But what’s really haunting to Justice is not these old bodies, but the newly dead: each bend in the road reveals another abandoned mine, their massive conveyer belts gone silent.
Coal piles at the base of a conveyor belt after being cleaned.Philip Scott Andrews
“This is heartbreaking. It makes me feel like a dinosaur, really, wandering around. Cause this was a hub of activity, it had an energy all of its own. When you came here, you were IN something. It’s like being at the stadium, all those people come together and they create this atmosphere? Now this is like going into an empty stadium, that’s crumbling. Where great games were played.”
What they’re building in its place is all so fragile and new. Parrish is worried even about the effect of U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez coming to shake the coders’ hands, or reporters like me coming to do stories. “We just don’t want all the notoriety to give the false illusion that we developed all the skills.”
Rusty is less cautious, and thinks they just need to keep digging, keep plowing, keep seeding. The coders are getting it — they’re building websites, closing contracts. “They believe they can do it. That’s the magic.”
Now the challenge is one that’s very typical to startups: how to scale.
BitSource would like to hire a second class of coders at the beginning of the new year. He, Parrish, and Hall want to fill up their buildings, create an incubator for entrepreneurs, a makerspace for craftsmen, and, someday, if they play their cards incredibly well, a bonafide Pikeville tech scene. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once.
“Once we got the idea of BitSource, it was like, ‘Look here, buddy, you’ll see what we’re going to be,’” Justice says. In fact, they’ve already got a name for this reinvention effort, the concept that ties everything together. And, like any good startup, they kicked it off by making a T-shirt.
Rusty hands me one as I step out of the F-150 in front of my hotel. I flap it open. It reads:
#appalachia
9/9
https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-code/
https://www.mediamatters.org/erick-erickson/how-myth-about-journalists-telling-miners-learn-code-helped-people-justify
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