The years is 19...80? Somewhere in there. A 19 something year that is after WWII. John White Guy is in his garage, working on computers. The white picket fence keeps the riffraff out and the blood of imperialist conquest keeps the Capri Sun flowing in. It's a mystery how he got to the point he did (his parents are well off) and it's a wonder how he produced the tech he did (he got most of it from others and gave no credit). It's from here he starts one of the worlds greatest (most profitable and exploitative) companies. Computer Inc.
Western tech runs on stories like this. The scrappy well off colonizer who came from nothing but the blood of some indigenous people. The western tech world is propped up by giants like this. Impossibly large figures whose tech becomes vital, who speak the language of the computers like it was birthed to them. Sometimes the figure doesn't get the credit they did deserve, sometimes they get credit they don't, but it's all very mysterious.
Well, the people who have pushed for open source have only had so much success, due to the nature of capitalism, so it really is mysterious sometimes. NDAs lock away source code like magic incantations in a vault, making sure the competition doesn't outplay them. Profit is the lifeblood, not common good.
When the boom and bust cycles occur, when the mass layoffs happen, when veteran "wizards" retire or are pushed out, when companies get bought out or go under, the vault can shrink instead of ever opening. Knowledge lost. But how many of these incantations are even a good solution? How many are the best known solution?
Who knows how much duct tape there is holding it together. As long as the interface looks good, it surely can't be that bad on the inside, right? The special white western wizards made it! In a garage of all places. It must be good.
Pay no attention to the languages that people hardly use anymore behind the curtain yet are still relevant in aging tech. You just gotta trust. They would never hurt anyone, right? Code is special! When code is used to make an automated weapons system, that's just the wizards working with their spells again, silly wizards, sometimes they get adventurous. It's not like they're the ones pulling the trigger.
Ah well, it'll hold up. The wizards made a wizard machine to cast spells for them that they call an LLM. The prophecy says that something something more white guys will make AGI and then the end of history I guess. It's all good. Capitalism is innocent, I tell you! Imperialism? Nah, that's an enum of type Politics. Just abstract it away. Who can say they have blood on their hands if they never have to be present with the world they've coded the latest prison walls for?
Author's Note / Disclaimer: This is not a dig at programming or coding as a whole, as I hope is clear enough in the writing. It's pointed at the way in which the tech field behaves in the western imperial context. It's truly amazing what code can produce and I like working with it myself. I'm far from anti-tech. But the way the west acts with it has a whole lot of horseshit going on.