I feel like this isn't super new. You haven't been able to do things like talk academically about network security or cryptography without being incredibly critical of government for decades.
My professors sure were. I felt really bad for them, honestly. They were the driving force to make philosophy and ethics courses mandatory at my university in order to recieve a comp sci degree.
"If you work in these areas long enough, at a high enough level, you WILL be asked to compromise something for the benefit of a state actor, and you might not even realize it's happening. The person asking you to do it might not even realize what is really happening." Was what our prof told a packed lecture hall.
Wasn't even the wildest. Before compsci I was doing mechanical engineering.
We had an assignment to design a railcar layout for transporting livestock. It gave the minimal parameters for the animals, established client driven acceptable losses for the livestock, etc...
We all cracked away at it. After we handed them all in, the profs were like "nowhere in the spec was the actual animals named, was no one curious?"
Silence.
They had given us a literal Nazi RFP discovered post WWII. It was for moving people to fucking concentration camps.
"You're smart people. People are going to ask you to do bad things. They're going to try and hide thier intentions. Don't collaborate with Nazis. Don't ever use what I teach you to hurt people."
I'm sure these topics become relevant at some point, but I'm doubtful that it's absolutely necessary to address them in an intro course. how does leftist ideology help kids understand what a while loop does
like, literacy can do all of these things too, that doesn't mean you have to introduce those concepts at the same time as the abc's
I genuinely used to believe this too, but the CCC opened my eyes to anarchism, and then HN opened my eyes to plutarchism.
I iterate now between several modes of: "GPLv3 is the best license humanity can use to better itself, decentralised projects are mandatory to keep authoritarian regimes at bay, but damn do I love using MIT projects in my hobby code projects, and hmm it would be nice to make some side income with said hobby project...."
Each of these contradictions of the other, which bothered me in my late 20s, but now I think it's relatively normal to inhabit several conflicting ideals at once
I don't think OP is implying while loops require ideological understandings, but rather more foundationally as to understand how computer commodities are made and traded, the concept of centralization simply arises. Thus, the discussion of control, IP, etc, and now AI and labor.
It's an introduction class, just start with history of computers and shift to programming from there.
You know, the history of computers, the Alan Turing, and the first assembly language, and the first software engineer, and "the entire pre-1992 internet."
"...because when we go online, we free ourselves from consumerism, racism, and get to express ourselves however we want without it getting back to our school or employer."
Honest Trailers may have gone downhill from thier peak, but Hackers (and the OG Dune) videos gave great lines worth sharing
I wouldn't want to be a CS teacher at this decade, more than half the code will be AI generated. Would just suck the life force out of you seeing how little students care about actually learning the stuff.
It's not even that "hardcore" of ideology honestly. It depends a lot on the lens you view it through your society. If it's far right, then saying "water is a human right!" is going to seem extreme leftism.
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