‘Master’ and ‘slave’: Tech terms face scrutiny amid anti-racism efforts

Apple, Google, Microsoft and other big tech companies have stepped up their comments on the need for racial justice in the face of the protests against Black Lives Matter that have swept through the United States in the past two weeks. Now a growing group of technologists are saying that the language of the industry needs to change itself to fight racism.

The terms “master” and “slave”, used to describe the relationships between two computer hard drives and / or between two camera flashes, have been put under the microscope because of their association with American history of slavery. Similarly, whitelist and blacklist, terms to allow and deny access to a service, are being revised due to their potentially racist undertones.

“I refuse to use” whitelist “https://www.cnet.com/” blacklist “or” master “https://www.cnet.com/” slave “terminology for computers are important, “tweeted Leah Culver, co-founder of the breaker podcast app and co-author of the widely used OAuth registration technology. More than 16,000 people liked their tweet.

Photographer Theresa Bear expressed a similar sentiment on the PetaPixel photo page and wrote that it was time to “make room for our black community” by prohibiting the use of “master” and “slave” to indicate how lightning strikes to be controlled. “Can you imagine being on the set with a black person and the photographer yells at the assistant, ‘Hey, can you put him in slave mode?'” Bear asked.

Other terms proposed for sunset include “white hat” and “black hat”, with “ethical” and “unethical” suggested as substitutes.

Nobody believes that changing the language of technology will bring racial equality to the United States, which is still due to protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, the unarmed black man who was killed two weeks ago, as a police officer Knees on the back stuck from his neck for almost nine minutes. Efforts to change the way technology is discussed, however, recognize how widespread racism is and how eager many people are to tackle it in areas where they could have a direct impact.

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“Your beliefs become your thoughts, your thoughts become your words, your words become your actions, your actions become your habits, your habits become your values, your values ​​become your destiny,” tweeted Mike Bartlett, vice president of Documentation company Slite. citing Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the Indian anti-colonial movement.

Technical terms

The use of “master” and “slave” goes back decades. For hard drives, the terms indicate which pair controls a shared interface in a computer’s internal communication system. If you use multiple flashes to take pictures, the terms refer to which flash is responsible and which responds. You may have seen it in the data store, where a master database is a primary repository and a slave database is a synchronized copy.

The word “master” is also used in the music industry and refers to the primary recording from which other recordings are made. A “golden master” is a similar concept for software. If several locomotives pull a long train, the person responsible is referred to as the master on whom the controls of the supporting motors are “slave”. The clutches of the cars have master and secondary cylinders.

Linguists wondered if a language change actually changes the underlying concepts. Stephen Pinker of Harvard, who described what he called the euphemism treadmill, found that people with little success generate new terms to share ideas about luggage. “WC” becomes “toilet”, which becomes “bathroom”, which becomes “toilet”. The language changed, but the meaning remained the same.

Skeptics quickly mocked the idea on Twitter. One commentator said it missed the point and encouraged people to vote instead of “playing with words.” Another said that the terms had long lost their original meaning in technology and encouraged readers to focus on “major problems”. Contempt dominated the responses to a tweet that highlighted Culver’s tweet.

Persuaded to change

However, the reputation for changing the language of technology has historical precedents. In 2018, developers of the widely used Python programming language dropped “Master / Slave”. Four years earlier, the team behind Drupal, the online publishing software, replaced the terms with “primary / replica”, although the change raised objections from some commentators. In 2003, Los Angeles County asked suppliers and contractors to stop using “master” and “slave” for computing devices.

Many welcomed the current proposals.

Apple software developer John Wilander has tweeted that he deleted the terms “blacklist” and “whitelist”. When calculating, these terms refer to collections of blocked entities such as insecure passwords and to permitted and child-safe websites. He has switched to “blacklist” and “approval list”.

Similarly, Gabriel Csapo, a developer at Microsoft LinkedIn, said he was submitting requests to change terminology at work. “Exclusion and approval lists are better terms because they are better translated and have a similar meaning,” he tweeted.

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