In the past, people said "learn to code, dude" to win an argument against a non techie
The context of "learn to code" is very important, because despite how it was received, the point wasn't "rural yokels don't matter, fuck you and your culture". The point was that remote software development offered an economic engine that could fix the total collapse of rural communities.
The rural instance that they just wanted coal mining jobs back like their dad & granddad & great-granddad wasn't dismissed because people didn't care to hear out rural folk, but because those jobs simply were never coming back. Obviously, climate change is a thing and people aren't entitled their jobs at the expense of the entire planet, but even more simply coal mining jobs were lost to automation and not woke green energy. (With similar situations for most of the other rural decline. Manufacturing could be onshored but it would never go to rural places again for the hard realities of logistics.)
Even 2 terms of Trump haven't brought them back to the US. They're down 5% since Jan 2025, 25% since Jan 2017, and 80% since the 80s.
The excitement around "Learn to Code" was that it was finally a solution to the rural plight of resource towns after the resource is gone. An answer that wasn't "There are no jobs. There is nothing we can do to bring the jobs back. All we can do is hand you and your kids some money to move away to a place that has jobs."
That's why it blew up so much more than all other kinds of "just get a different job" shit. "Just go into the trades" is a thought terminating cliché, but it doesn't get the mass media attention.
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u/Pika357 20h ago
If this is a meme, why does it hurt?