On Meritocracy

I’m easily convinced that in today’s technical world, the word meritocracy has outlived its usefulness at best, and describes something rather sinister at worst. But as an old-school free software hacker who has been doing this stuff for nearly 15 years now, this leaves me with some mixed feelings.

As a method of governance, meritocracy is roughly equivalent to tribalism, and has all the strengths and weaknesses you might expect from that sort of thing. In a tribal society, the most successful elk hunters and berry gatherers might enjoy an elevated level of respect within their community, much in the same way that we revere our best bug hunters and patch gatherers in the programming world. Merit is defined simply as what the existing community finds valuable — nothing more and nothing less.

To show appreciation for exceptional performance is not in itself a sin, but there is usually a shadowy flip-side that arises from this sort of cultural mindset. Once you start ignoring, pushing away ,or even punishing those who do not perform as well as others, you end up with systemic imbalances that will actively destroy a community’s diversity and fairness. It does not matter if this happens intentionally, or accidentally through a lack of social awareness — the end result is the same.

Many others have written on the ugliness that meritocracy-as-governance can bring to the modern, open world of technology. If you’re not familiar with the critiques, you might want to check out Inside the Mirrortocracy and The Open Source Identity Crisis for some thoughtful critiques on the matter. I’ve read both of them, and I agree with the ideas they express. So why then would I have mixed feelings about all of this? I am not 100% certain, but I’m using this article to try to figure that out.

Picture a 14 year old boy who is generally pretty nerdy, often teased by classmates for having interests that aren’t perfectly aligned with what “the cool kids” are into, who only has the fallout from his parents’ failed marriage to look forward to when he gets home from school. To this teenager, a computer is a powerful escape from that oppressive world, limited only by what can be learned and what can be imagined.

Discovering the free software movement and its rich philosophical orthodoxy, the notion of a community that is not based on who is popular but instead on what kind of useful work a person can do is very attractive. Without a deeper understanding of the existing social structures that govern the free software world, a beginner conceptualizes meritocracy as a cultural ideal rather than a form of governance.

For me personally, here it what it meant to act in a meritocratic way when I first got into open source coding:

Set aside personal differences and cultural biases when considering arguments or suggestions from others, and focus instead on the “merit” of their ideas. This is to say that the contributions of others should be judged by the value they produce, not by the way they are presented or by who they are presented by.
When expressing your own ideas, don’t rely on political status, authority, or the ability to speak in a persuasive way to make your arguments: demonstrate value instead, ideally in an objective and technical way.
Do what is best for a project, even if it’s not a popular choice.
Give power and trust to people who show that they are capable and responsible, so that they can continue to do good work.
If you’re given power, understand that you can expect to lose it if you stop producing good work. All benevolent dictators should respect and fear the right to fork.

On the surface, these ideals are hopefully at least a little less sinister than the modern notion of meritocratic governance that says “let’s separate the world into newbies, normals, and rockstars”. As a very coarse-grained set of ideals, they even encourage an ethically responsible way of working. However, each of these guiding principles has a weakness to it:

We cannot escape our cultural biases and personal differences, even if we actively try to mitigate them. Privilege means that people from different socioeconomic classes are living the game of life at different difficulty settings, so there’s no direct means of comparing one individual’s contribution to another on any project.
We cannot escape our own socioeconomic status. Our brains are hard-wired with many different biases that help make sure that those in a position of power or authority are seen as somehow more capable outside of the area of their expertise than others, and the effect is even worse when someone is playing on their home court.
We can’t easily separate the notion of what’s best for a project from what is best for us personally. We also can’t easily evaluate whether something is unpopular because it’s poorly understood, or whether it’s truly a bad idea. Even after the fact, we’re limited to evaluate our choices based on solely on feedback we receive, which only gives us a blurry view of the picture. In other words, there’s no clear way of determining “what’s best for the project”, and believing you are capable of doing so is a dangerous form of tunnel vision.
Technical capabilities and social skills are orthogonal in nature, and sometimes are even at odds with one another. Historically open source projects have been lead by the most technically capable coders, because we’ve underemphasized the importance of “soft skills”. Giving lots of power to the brilliantly productive but incredibly rude hacker has not lead to good social outcomes, but we still do this often.
In practice, the right to fork is about as threatening to open source maintainers as the right to emigrate is to first world nation-states. Breaking a popular project up into two communities is a nuclear option, and rarely works out well in practice. So unless a maintainer is extremely abusive and irresponsible to the point of being pathologically insane, they’re at little risk of losing control of their community.

And with these points, we set fire to the idealistic image of meritocracy-as-a-cultural-ideal hat once lived (and perhaps is still lingering on) in the hearts of geeky teenagers everywhere. After 15 years, it’s hard for me to let go of these ideals, but it’s clear that is what is needed.

The problem, I fear, is that we are now in a bit of an ethical vacuum. There are certainly more conversations now about software ethics and community conduct than ever before, and that is good. But much of what is said is about how much everything sucks. When I was growing up, the idea of meritocracy, flawed though it was, inspired me to hold myself to a higher social and ethical standard. Now that we see it is no longer suitable as a guiding principle, what might we replace it with?