Carbon Dysphoria (archive)
Author: Iris Meredith
Date published: 2026-02-15
A few things have happened of late to prompt this article. The first thing that's happened is the latest development in my persistent ill-health: having undergone treatment for H. Pylori induced gastritis, while some symptoms have improved, a few others have worsened and, in particular, I now appear to be losing quite a lot of blood somewhere in my digestive system. Happily, New Zealand's healthcare system isn't too broken and I'm getting an ultrasound and a whole battery of other tests and treatment shortly, but I will admit that living life with a diastolic blood pressure of 60 is quite a lot less pleasant than I'd like. The reason this is relevant (beyond, of course, the concern of my readers for my health) is twofold: firstly, it's striking just how in my body I find myself at the moment compared to how I was before my transition. This is all deeply uncomfortable and unpleasant, and it impedes my ability to use my body to do things I enjoy (walks, swimming, eating, other things I'll not mention) in ways that I think I'd have struggled to find anywhere near so annoying before I transitioned: I want to live a life and do things, and I'm now motivated to at least try and recover from this so that I can get back to living my life in a way that pre-transition me would have struggled to put into words or care about. Secondly, it really puts into relief just how few shits the industry that I'm still nominally a part of gives about the bodily existence of the workers that it consumes. I've been working myself to the bone over the last few years to build a career, and it seems, from what I've read, that working to the point of destroying one's health is almost expected as the price of having any tech job while trans or female. In some sense, we're punished, not so much for having bodies and minds that differ from the majority configuration of people in the tech industry, but for the temerity of thinking to have bodies that we care for and don't ignore at all, rather than attempting to do the "being of pure intellect" thing that men in the industry, supported by unpaid domestic labour and Uber Eats, seem to aspire to do on the regular. This got me thinking about how flat weird the tech industry is about bodies: immortality in a computer, eugenics, phrenology, soylent... one gets the strong impression that tech people don't much like having bodies at all and would much prefer to shed them and exist as pure thought. This seems a little sad to me, as it excludes so many possibilities for having fun, such as food, drink, combat sports, Warhammer, kinky sex and music, but it's very much a thing and a phenomenon that bears examination.The second thing that happened was that in a discussion on Bluesky and Fedi, I drew the conclusion that software developers are almost uniquely vulnerable among educated and professional people to being taken in by propaganda. Even closely allied STEM fields such as statistics and engineering tend to have fairly strong opinions and viewpoints that it takes a considerable amount of propaganda effort to sway them from: some are good, some are bad (a significant minority of engineers are climate change denialists, and they seem to have, interestingly, mostly come by the idea organically), but the gestalt viewpoints of the field exist and are pretty hard to sway. Tech people, by contrast, are observably swayed extremely easily by almost any messaging that's presented to them. Whether it's talking about race science and eugenics, the blockchain and NFTs or our current LLM situation, the core voices in the tech community (which is to say the people who have a disproportionate influence on general opinion within tech) are consistently willing to pick it up and go along with it, regardless of how obviously the narrative has been deliberately engineered and almost as though they have no real desires or internal motivation of their own.
To stress this last point, the majority of professional communities and people working in them have desires and motivations of their own which largely motivate their behaviour. A civil engineer working on roading, for example, might want their country to do more roading projects because that leads to them becoming richer and gives them opportunities to lead prestigious projects. This will make them more vulnerable to some forms of propaganda-type messaging (messaging against climate change mitigation and in favour of cars, perhaps) and less vulnerable to others (austerity isn't going to be a popular platform when civil engineering projects are mostly state-funded, for example, and anti-immigration policy won't be popular if it guts the civil engineering workforce). In most cases, propaganda has to work around these kinds of motivational structures, persuading people, rightly or wrongly, that their motivations will be advanced by taking the course of action that propaganda wants us to take. This isn't the case, however, in the tech world.
The pattern in the tech world seems to be a distorted mirror of this, where some entity pushes a propaganda narrative and, like clockwork, the core influencers of general tech opinion shift their desires to match. When blockchain and NFTs are the hot new thing, everyone wants the bored ape, no matter how widely mocked the damned things are by wider society. When LLM coding agents are the new hot thing, everything that the engineering community previously said about engineering standards, testing and robustness suddenly goes out the window, and people who previously claimed that they enjoyed writing code and putting together computer systems themselves suddenly start claiming that they actually always found it boring and hateful and enjoy having the machine generate everything for them. It's as though many people in the tech industry have no real desires at all beyond the desires that they're told to have by their wider social circles.
In my experience, the wider evidence tends to support this. Many tech people have few to no interests outside of tech or computer gaming: one of the strangest experiences I've had was trying to organise a cinema club at my first job (the thought was to maybe meet up once a month, order in pizza and watch some older and more interesting movies) to a complete lack of interest from anyone, even the lukewarm kind that you'd usually get in most circles. An awful lot of tech people don't read, don't listen to music, don't appreciate art or really do much of anything all. The existence of soylent suggests that a significant minority of tech people don't even really like or enjoy food all that much. All in all, though there are plenty of interesting and worthwhile people at the edges, the cultural core of the industry is a strange void of desire and motivation that anybody with an agenda can write whatever they want into.
Elon Musk and the other tech oligarchs are, as always, the prototypical examples of this. For all that they have everything they could possibly want, they seem to have a deeply disordered relationship to desire, and it's unclear whether they actually want things in the same way that we do at all. In the case of Elon, he doesn't seem to enjoy videogames (he wants to be seen to be good at them, but doesn't enjoy the process and thus pays people to get him to high ranks), art, literature, or anything, really. It's unclear to me whether he even derived much pleasure from his association with Epstein, and in general he seems stuck in a loop of consistently doing the things that he should want and becoming deeply miserable for his trouble.
And now the punchline: this depersonalisation, the weird relationship to their bodily existence, inability to enjoy things and an internal void that people constantly try and fill with what they're told they should want... all of these things are very similar to the experience of gender dysphoria.
What is dysphoria?
For those of you lucky enough to not have experienced it, while gender dysphoria is obviously related to not being able to live as or express your gender in hindsight, before you work it out it's often far from obvious that it has anything to do with gender at all. Without knowing that it's gender-related, dysphoria often presents precisely as this kind of directionlessness, not having desires or not knowing what you want. You often wind up kind of sleepwalking through life, trying to pursue the things that you think that you should want or the desires that society tells you are appropriate for someone in your supposed social position. Nothing ever quite works though, and often enough, until you figure out the problem, you kinda just... stop wanting things and stop trying entirely. In that kind of state, it's very easy to fall in with basically anything that tells you how you should live your life, what the path to happiness and feeling OK is or whatever: when you don't much desire or value anything, rejecting propaganda on the basis that it conflicts with your desires or values isn't a thing that really happens.While a lot of dysphoria is about the physical body (how could it not be), much of the ill-feeling in practice is to do with emotions and with desire. When, for example, a young trans woman is growing up unaware that she's a woman, the primary source of distress is that she has desires that the adults in power either prevent her from exploring or simply don't register at all. She prefers to socialise with other girls and young women because they make more sense and she prefers the social dynamics, but neither her peers nor the people above them will accept that. Instead, she's shoved into socialising with boys, whom she tends to find odious and boring and who value or care about things that she fundamentally doesn't. People expect behaviours and emotional responses of her that don't come naturally to her, and when she's open about her actual emotions and desires, they're quickly shut down. Even her bodily presentation and dress are directed for her against her will: school and parent-dictated haircuts and uniforms sit wrong and leave her feeling ugly and she has no say about that whatever (the first gender-affirming thing I did, even before registering that I was trans at all, was growing my hair out). In this kind of situation, you quickly wind up suppressing your actual desires, emotions and motivations, even to yourself, and instead try and act on the basis of what society tells you that you should want, should feel and should be trying to do. Consequently, it becomes very easy for you to simply fall in with whatever everyone else is doing, to neglect yourself and your body and to see yourself and others almost as depersonalised minds without any real physical needs or wants.
Looking at tech culture through this framing, it's hard not to see a lot of the same patterns at play. The depersonalisation, the idea that people can somehow be pure mind rather than being embodied and the lack of desire and motivation of your own and willingness to go along with whatever you're told by society is good are all very much patterns that we see in tech. Interestingly, so is a fair amount of the strange relationship to the body that we see in trans people: while it's obvious why trans people have strange reactions to a body that doesn't fit them, you'd not necessarily expect this reaction from cis techies. For whatever reason, though, the pattern's still there: the soylent is one indication, and beyond that, the culture around dress, physical fitness and bodily presentation in the tech world are strange. On the one hand we see a lot of people expressing a complete disregard for the body and for dress and basic cleanliness: you'll meet a lot of these people at your average Magic: The Gathering tournament. On the other, there are the people in the tech world who take care to look after themselves, but in a weirdly detached, depersonalised way: they go to the gym and dress in certain ways primarily to express their masculinity and do what the general opinion tells them to do rather than out of any real care for their bodies or how they want to look.
Why are so many techies dysphoric?
It must be said that some people in tech are closeted or unaware trans people, and it's probably significantly more of the population than we might think given that a lot of trans people wind up drawn towards tech as a field. In these cases, the dysphoria makes a considerable amount of sense. However, even at the outer limit, that would account for no more than a quarter of tech people, which isn't enough to explain the general prevalence of dysphoria that we observe in the tech community. This means that we need an explanation for why our tech industry is so dead-eyed and void of emotion or motivation that isn't just that they need estrogen. For this, I have two hypotheses.The first hypothesis is that merely being cis doesn't exclude you from having dysphoric experiences, and tech is gendered in some very strange ways. I've written a fair amount about how tech is gendered in the past, but to reiterate: tech and software started out as mostly feminine pursuits: the prestige was in the development of the hardware, and being both massively sexist and stereotypically hidebound, early software development hires tended to be women, who supposedly had the correct kind of neat, organised mind that made for good secretaries and clerical workers (and software was, at the time, considered to mostly be clerical work). This changed as it became clear that software development was going to be an important source of wealth, and in this year of our lord 2026 software and tech remain some of the most gender-segregated and masculine professional fields in the world. Competition is heavily pushed over collaboration, people have shitfights and attack each other viciously disturbingly often, there's constant pressure to be the best, use the newest most cutting-edge technology and earn the most money and much of the power structure in the industry is based around the protection of individual egos.
The issue here is that, despite the way in which the industry is aggressively masculine-coded, the core skills and personality traits required to be properly good at the job are very much feminine. Precision, diligence, carefully working through a dull task and making sure that things are going to work in all cases... this is still the same set of values of care and diligence that led to people hiring women for the initial software jobs in the first place. Similarly, software development relies heavily on collaboration, interpersonal skills and being able to communicate well: all stereotypically female traits that are, as they always were, vital to the production of good software. This leads to a contradiction in the social structure of software work, as while to be accepted as part of the tech community requires you to present and emote in very masculine ways, actually being good at the act of producing working software requires you to have personality traits that are considered unmasculine and that are in fact somewhat feminine.
While there have more recently been a fair number of people who went into the field of software engineering because it's a well-paying job, these people don't tend to form the core of the people who form or go along with general opinion in the tech world: the people who take an active role in tech and tech discussion usually end up in the field because, at some point, they had some genuine natural inclination towards software work. And this puts them in a position similar to that of trans people: society sees them in one way and puts considerable pressure on them to act in that highly masculine, superficial uncaring way that our industry rewards. Meanwhile, they have desires, often ones that they can't even put into words beyond "things should be different", to do good, careful software work that moves at a sustainable pace: to be effective software engineers, in fact. This desire, however, is actively punished in most workplaces, which either can't perceive it at all or label it as feminine and of little value in the very masculine workplace that the average tech worker functions in. While some of us, who are either skilled or sensitive enough to the situation, register this and find spaces on the edges of the tech world that value us and allow us to live as ourselves, the bulk of the tech population reacts in the same way that our closeted trans woman from earlier did: they suppress those underlying desires and pursue, for the most part, what general opinion, heavily influenced by propaganda actors, tells them they should be pursuing. Hence the blockchain, LLM coding tools, MongoDB (which we all know is Webscale) and many other horrors. Unsurprisingly it also seems to create people who are miserable in the same way that trans people before transition often are: desperately seeking for something they can't quite put into words that they really badly want, try and fill the void in the socially accepted and encouraged ways, but finding that those ways only make the problem worse and becoming really quite messy in the process. Our first hypothesis, then, is that while most people in tech probably aren't trans, they are often placed in a situation with remarkable structural similarities to the ones that trans people find themselves in, and thus, humans being human, react in similar ways.
The second hypothesis, which builds on the first one, is that the tech industry in general pressures you to behave and think in deeply inhuman ways. Even when you eliminate the bizarre gender dynamics from the equation, being a real, human person in tech is hard. The people who have the funds to see software actually get built are, for many of the reasons listed above, extremely fucked-up, and getting paid to write software means, to a greater or lesser extent, conforming yourself to the value systems of someone like Peter Thiel, who clearly has something deeply wrong with him. To survive in such an environment for any length of time, you really have to consciously suppress your own value system and adopt the one that the people with access to funds have. But that, in turn, means that building anything that creates value for your average human goes out the window, as these people are primarily interested in controlling and exploiting these people. As much as people don't want to, most people who aren't sociopaths will really struggle with that, and that repression will do real damage, of the same kind that we see in dysphoria.
As the bulk of the desires being repressed in this context are bodily, the weird aversion to bodily things comes naturally. It's normal in the tech world, after all, to work in ways that do considerable violence to the body and to utterly lack consideration for human bodily necessities (the open-plan working space is one of many examples of this kind of thing). Moreover, so much of what the industry does requires one to turn a blind eye to the bodily effects of technology: after all, people being blown apart by guided munitions or being thrown into concentration camps on the basis of mass surveillance data is a very visceral, bodily thing. The only way to avoid all of this, in the end, is to deny the importance of the body at all, leading to the dysphoric detachment from the body that we observe.
Fixing the problem (and why it's a problem in the first place)
The fact that we appear to have created an entire industry where people (albeit to a lesser extent than actual trans people) appear to go through a same lot of the psychological stresses that trans people do is a bit of a concern. Practically, trying to get anything done while in the midst of a dysphoric haze is extremely fucking hard. Dysphoria will really fuck you up, and unless you can resolve it in some way, you're really going to struggle to make good decisions or make your way in the world. If you're not even aware that you're suffering from dysphoria, you can even make some truly terrible decisions just by following along with what the crowd's doing and not paying any mind to what you actually want. Morally, I think creating a large workforce that we force to do work that's fundamentally opposed to what they want is abhorrent.Clearly, then, creating a way to do tech that leaves most tech workers feeling less dysphoric is of some importance. While obviously there's a minority group of the population that should really just take the estrogen already (and even then, as I can personally attest, this doesn't solve the problem fully), this isn't going to fix the dysphoria of the people in tech who happen to be cis. I don't think there's much to do about the workplaces: they just need to die out naturally in whatever process that involves, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't work to mitigate the issue. In short, we really need to give tech people outlets where they can express themselves comfortably.
I'm honestly kinda fucked if I know what that's going to look like: all the options I can think of are things that the average tech person would be disinclined to do. Perhaps we could do compulsory opera outings or something, but I doubt that's going to land all that well. On a state level something that could be done could be a) a salary grant program for developers working on projects likely to be of benefit to civil society and b) a state-funded and state-run tech ministry aimed at employing software professionals and putting them to use for the good of the state and its people. I can't exactly say that that'd be perfect, and such a program would have many flaws, but at the very least, it might create spaces where people could write code and do software stuff without having to deal with... gestures.
In any case, we're embodied, human people with very real physical, emotional and social needs. I can't help but feel that one of the most prestigious industries at present systematically fucking up the process of getting those needs met for their workers in ways which are generally held to be deeply inhumane is a bad thing. Because let's face it: bodies are fun. Exercising just for the sake of it, for the sake of being able to see how fast you can run that half-marathon, how good you can get at fighting or how far you can throw that javelin is genuinely fun and worthwhile even if you don't ever become a world champion (and yes, I am frustrated that I currently can't even do long walks without getting faint). Dancing, learning how to move your body fluently for the sheer joy of it is really worthwhile, as is training your voice or learning how to handle a musical instrument. Food and drink, in the appropriate forms of moderation, are great pleasures, and learning how to prepare them in the ways you best enjoy are things that are a shame to miss out on. Bodily intimacy, in both the platonic and the unashamedly sexual forms, is something that's worth enjoying to the fullest. Creating entire forms of enterprise that deliberately get in the way of this and make it difficult seems to me to be a great evil, and one that it's worth opposing in whatever ways we can.
It seems reasonable, then, to suggest that much of the tech world is behaving in ways and making decisions broadly congruent with dysphoria. The question then becomes: why?
