I learned the language of computer programming in my 50s – here’s what I discovered

A writer with no technical background recounts his incredible journey into the realm of coding and the invaluable lesson it taught him about the modern world

One day in 2017 I had a realisation that seems obvious now but had the power to shock back then: almost everything I did was being mediated by computer code. And as the trickle of code into my world became a flood, that world seemed to be getting not better but worse in approximate proportion. I began to wonder why.

Two possibilities sprang immediately to mind. One was the people who wrote the code - coders - long depicted in pop culture as a clan of vaguely comic, Tolkien-worshipping misfits. Another was the uber-capitalist system within which many worked, exemplified by the profoundly weird Silicon Valley. Were one or both using code to recast the human environment as something more amenable to them?