Social issues for techies

I'll admit it. I was a teenage activist. Then I outgrew my teens and became an adult activist, focusing my attention on issues that matter to me and on which I can make a difference. In my particular circle of vegan, hippy town activism, I learned a lot about gender, orientation and all the manifold things springing from those simple words.

A particular thing that often comes up is the conflation of gender and sex. Lots of people think that the two words mean the same thing. So I've come up with a handy metaphor. That's what makes this post about social issues for programmers. It's a tech metaphor. And it's occurred to me that many social issues can be well explained using techy metaphors.

Try this explanation on for size. Gender has to do with software and sex is about hardware. Your sex is effectively the hardware that everything runs on and your gender can be likened to software, specifically, your operating system. So, for example, someone who feels that they're running the right software for their hardware would be called cisgendered. Someone with a conflict between software and hardware would be transgendered. But it all comes down to whether or not your software and hardware match up.

I'm wondering what other thorny social issues (the ones that are so often misunderstood) there are that could be explained with simple, techy metaphors. Or, in fact, whether it's worth using metaphors that only tech-oriented folk will understand.