Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards

AWM #91: I wanted to clarify the tech work landscape for myself and instead I wrote this (??) 🪞

The god Tezcatlipoca — Nahuatl for “smoke mirror” — as depicted in the Codex Borgia, p. 21 (16th century). Note the couple of round black-ish mirrors on his head and right foot. Note also the pose: hunched forward, as if he were looking at something flat he’s holding in his hand.

Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahuatl word that translates to “those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors.” They are the ones who have mastered the dark energies at work in the Other World. They are the ones who allow us all to See.

In the olden days the Aztecs would conduct ceremonies in which they looked into their round obsidian mirrors for glimpses of the Other World. Today we all carry an obsidian mirror in our pockets, although in the current fashion they have rectangular shapes. There is no need for ceremony. The mobile engineers have tamed the magic. With a few swipes of the fingers — remnants of an old, complicated ritual dance — you can inquire about the intentions of the sun and rain deities, or you can cast a spell to freeze an image into eternity, or you can establish an immediate link, through the Other World, to any other obsidian mirror on Earth.

How do they do it? They have books upon books of complicated formulae, and they spend countless hours weaving them into spells. Occasionally a talented magician is able to create a useful spell by themselves, but it’s more common for large guilds of them to form and toil together, for months or years, on the making of a single complex spell.

Once the spell is done, it is packaged into an “app” — from the Nahuatl word apazyahualtontli, meaning small container — and made available to whichever Onlookers want it.

Here it must be mentioned that the obsidian mirrors come in two families, accepting different apps. One has as its emblem an apple, representing the act of creation and knowledge that, according to some legends, led to discovering the Other World: a bite of the forbidden fruit. The other has as its emblem an automaton, a crude representation of the minor mechanical deities of the Other World that are believed to enact the spells and allow them to work. The art of spell-weaving differs between the two, and accordingly there are now two great schools of mobile magicians, using different formulae and spell books. They do talk to each other, but translating between their two Arts takes extra toiling.

Of the desktop application engineers we shall say little, for they are apparently a vanishing breed. Those are the magicians who create the apps for the larger mirrors; they used to be all-powerful, but now they have been outflanked by their mobile cousins, and the Wizards of the Web.

In ancient Teotihuacan, which the Aztecs later named “the city of the gods,” they honored a Great Goddess: the Spider Woman. Today her cult yet lives on. She is worshipped by those who spin the Great Worldwide Web, variously called the web developers, or Wizards of the Web.

The Great Goddess of Teotihuacan, formerly known as the Teotihuacan Spider Woman.

The Web is spun in the Other World, and we see it through the same mirrors of obsidian as the apps. Yet within the Other World it has also grown into a world of its own, and it is a rich, dense one, eclipsing much of everything else. The Wizards have accordingly become perhaps the most powerful of all enchanters.

They are customarily split in two groups, with quite a bit of overlap. There are those who have mastered the Smoke. When an Onlooker peers into the mirror, the Smoke arranges itself in patterns according to certain formulae. The Obverse-End Wizards know how to make the Smoke colorful, and make it display letters in a myriad styles, and allow the Onlooker to manipulate the Smoke themselves. The Reverse-End Wizards have magics to move knowledge along the many threads of the Web, bringing it to the Smoke for the Onlooker to See, or from the Onlooker to some distant node of the Web where it will be processed into something of use.

The Obverse- and Reverse-End Wizards commonly work together; sometimes they are even the same person, and we call them the Full-Stack Wizards (stack is a corruption of tzahua, meaning to spin or weave, referring to the Great Web).

The gods of the Other World, unlike what one may think, are not all smart. Many are simple-minded things. They are ready to do the bidding of enchanters, but enchanters must first teach them. Those who are acquainted with such Art are called ML or AI engineers. (Abbreviations that come, obviously, from taking letters at random from yectlamachiliztli, meaning intelligence.)

The craft of the ML/AI wizard is to impart enough knowledge to the small gods that those gods can do something useful, like the familiars of the alchemists. There exist many ways to perform the task. You can teach a god to seek a certain reward, and over time — which can flow much faster in the Other World compared to ours — the god has adjusted its behavior to maximize the reward. Or you can feed the god enormous amounts of knowledge, together with some instructions, and train it so that it accomplishes a task far better — since it is a god — than any human wizard could.

There is fear among some ML/AI practitioners that one day they will train a minor god so well that it will become a Great God; and that unlike the Great Gods of old, who are powerful but whose behavior is predictable, this new Great God might go rogue and destroy the world. There are endless debates about this in wizard circles.

Perhaps the magicians whose magic is the most legible to those not acquainted with the Art are the data scientists, or melahuacatlatamachihuani — “those who measure well.” (Data, of course, in an abbreviation of tlatamachihualiztli, “measurement.”) For what is the world if not countless pieces of information that can be, through the clever use of spells written in the language of Quetzalcoatl, the Great Python, made to reveal truths?

The melahuacatlatamachihuani wrangle the data with skill. They build vast structures of smoke to hold them. They create beautiful magics to inform and impress. Quite often they are ML people as well, harnessing minor deities to find patterns that even the most advanced wizard cannot see. Many people outside the Art now rely on them, for the stories they tell often appear more truthful than the various anecdotes that so often mislead us. But it is unclear how well the melahuacatlatamachihuani are using their newfound powers.

The above are but a sample of all that the magicians do. Many busy themselves with other occupations. Some make spells meant to elicit fun. Some provide support to the rest of the wizard world. Some direct their efforts to cryptic chains of magic that are meant to be immutable for eternity.

But all weave magics, and their magics are eating the world, even as Tezcatlipoca and his black mirrors grow stronger.

More complex depictions of Tezcatlipoca on p. 17 of the Codex Borgia