March 2, 2023

Hype Cycles Aren't "Gaslighting" You

I promised an update on the logic book today but I haven't done a spite write in a while and oh boy a new one is just raring to go. Update is queued up to be sent out Monday.

Anyway, the candidate for today is The Great Gaslighting of the JS Age. The author Jared White looks at the current spike in React Discourse and claims that the pro-React arguments are identical to last decade's pro-Angular arguments. This means that pro-React people are gaslighting everyone else.

I’m angry because for the past decade of web development, I and so many others like me feel like we’ve been repeatedly gaslit, and that so many of the “merchants of complexity” refuse to acknowledge the harm that’s been done.

There has been a small but mighty ecosystem of “influencers” peddling a sort of “pop culture developer abstractions” ethos on the web whether it’s about React, or CSS-in-JS, or Tailwind CSS, or “serverless”, or “microservices”, or (fill in the blank really)—and they’re continuing to gaslight and obfuscate the actual debates that matter.

I don't have a dog in this fight. I learned formal methods to avoid writing CSS. I don't give a single shit about React versus Vue versus Vanilla JS. But I do care about honest writing, and I especially care about mental health, and I want to say that calling this gaslighting is complete bullshit.

Let's pull the definition of "gaslight" from the American Psychological Association:

To manipulate another person into doubting his or her perceptions, experiences, or understanding of events. The term once referred to manipulation so extreme as to induce mental illness or to justify commitment of the gaslighted person to a psychiatric institution but is now used more generally.

To be gaslighting, it's not enough to lie, or lie about what you said. You have to push someone into doubting their own experiences. So this is not gaslighting:

• Me: Use React! It's Great!
• You: You said that about Angular 10 years ago.
• Me: I know, but I decided React is better because XYZ.

Neither is this:

• You: You said that about Angular 10 years ago.
• Me: I did not!
• You: Here's your blog post about it.
• Me: I forgot about that.

This would be gaslighting:

• You: Here's your blog post about it.
• Me: [Deletes posts] I did not.
• You: Here's the archive.org snapshot.
• Me: [Sends takedown request] I did not.

See the difference?

Now you could say that I'm being a prescriptivist and gaslighting is descriptively used for "lying". But it's important for us to push back against that excuse. We shouldn't rush to call stuff gaslighting because gaslighting is evil. Not just bad, but evil. If I call someone a gaslighter, I'm saying they are morally repugnant.

There are evil people out there, but a lot more neutral people we just don't like, and it's so easy to conflate the two we should be extremely careful about calling people evil.

Lying about "Liars"

This doesn't actually refute the blog's substance. Even if it's not gaslighting, it's still bad to pivot from pushing Angular to pushing React with nary an acknowledgement. That's something we should condemn. If people were actually pivoting. Jared never presents evidence that's true.

Jared uses Laurie Voss as a standin for the industry, who wrote The case for frameworks defending the use of React.

Which is why I’m so perturbed at the line of argumentation which goes something like this (and these are all direct quotes from Laurie Voss’ article): [quotes] Here's the deal: I've heard all of this before…ALL OF IT.

And you know where I heard it?

The hotshots who were peddling AngularJS 10 years ago! 🤪

In Jared's defense, he doesn't out and out say that Laurie Voss pivoted from Angular to React. But he implies it strongly enough that I had to carefully read the article several times to realize he never explicitly says it. Maybe I'm a rube and nobody else was fooled like me.

In the event that you were fooled like me, let me tell you that Jared is wrong: Voss never pushed Angular. "Angular" appears exactly once in his 22-year-old website. He never pushed it on Twitter, either (most of the tweets are about survey results). He can't pivot from Angular if he never talked about Angular!

So are there any pivoters? It could be that the people who once pushed Angular and the people who now push React are different people. Figuring out the historical size of programming communities is incredibly hard, but I wouldn't be surprised if number of React users now is over 10x the number of Angular users in 2013.¹ A lot of people who are pushing React now might not even have been programming during Angular's heyday. Jared doesn't give a single confirmed example of a person who shilled Angular and then shilled React. He could very well be right, but I'm not going to do the research for him. If he wants to convince us we're all hypocrites, he should be expected to show his work.

There is no Conspiracy

Instead of showing his work, Jared gestures at a giant conspiracy to ruin the lives of web developers.

When you say “there is no secret cabal of charismatic influencers”, I really have to wonder who you talk to on a regular basis because many of the people I talk to on a regular basis among a wide variety of projects and clients think that’s exactly what’s going on.

I'm sorry, but has he ever met an influencer? We're a bunch of petulant little children warring over tiny mindshare fiefdoms. Whenever something takes the developer world by storm, it's never because we banded together to puppeteer your brains. It's rarely even because of influencers pivoted from Old Thing to New Hotness. 99% of the time all the current influencers are still trying to sell Old Thing, and the hype comes from fans of New Hotness becoming influencers. There are still people pushing Ruby on Rails.

Like, for example, Jared White! All through the piece he talks about how React is temporary while Rails is timeless. Does he not realize that Rails went through the same hype cycle? Everybody was saying that Rails was the future of webdev and you better get on board or be left behind. To pretend otherwise is either total cluenessless or deceit.

But not gaslighting. He may be arrogant, angry, and wrong, but he's not evil.

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In conclusion, stop calling everything "gaslighting", do your research, and don't read a shadowy cabal into every zig and zag of the tech industry. Okay bye

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