Opinion: Case for removing master-slave terminology from music production tools

“a man who has people working for him, especially servants or slaves.”

Wouldn’t that seem to justify moving in a direction of updating these terms?

So, for example, creating a CD master, or remastering, is fine.

The issue is with the master/slave pairing.

It may be relevant to whether or not you could or would likely understand adequately why this might bother someone.

Edit:

Downvotes won’t make this inconvenient reality go away.

Why it's almost as if this is all a distraction that effectively benefits the already comfortable...

"Recent" means about 2-300 years? I thought slavery was abolished in US over 150 years ago, that is several generations that never met, so other than books where are the memories? Have you ever met a slave? Have you ever heard about a slave in your lifetime? Do you know anyone who ever talked to a slave?

Please know that I ask this with all sincerity: does it matter to them? I'm a racial minority, but not black, and I would find it surprising if this was a top of mind issue for black employees in tech. I mean, you'll always find someone who feels some way about some topic, and I'm sure that this terminology would not have been a black person's first choice but is this something that black people in tech, in general, feel needs to be fixed? If so, count me in. I mean it, I'll help. But if not, I'm not sure why taking on a non-trivial amount of work to move the needle a trivial amount is something we should pursue. People only have so much bandwidth, so why not spend it in pursuing causes that will have a large impact?

Racial minorities have good reason to feel like they're often treated as second-class citizens in this country. Having police offers, over and over again, maim or kill people of color with no repercussions, for example, is the type of b.s. that keeps the wounds of slavery alive and raw today. The name of a branch in source code? I'm not denying that it bothers some people, but I'm willing to bet if you fixed the real problems that plague minorities, this type of stuff would not even be an issue.

But who does?

Where I come from (Rome) in 1515 the ruler of the times, the Pope, condemned slavery even if it was legal.

US abolished it 360 years later and it's still not pacified about it.

Maybe there are other issues to address first, in some countries more than others.

Maybe.

Does it apply to the use of "Hitler" in the name of a popular office party game?

Or one of HN's favorite terms "wage slavery"?

My main problem with these changes is that they seem to be done with the intention of virtue signaling by a bunch of white dudes.

Fail to consider: - 90% of the world doesn't share the US experience or baggage with the terminology - Changing standard terminology breaks communication standards, tutorials, and ubiquitous language we use to communicate in our profession.

Finally, this sets a precedent and can and will devolve wasting time, development efforts and making things worse without creating any meaningful positive change.

The other trend going on right now is dropping `master` from use on git repositories, when in reality `master` in that context has nothing to do with race.

Where do we stop? Should we start going after universities for using the term master's degree?

Do we need to boycott the World Chess Championship since chess is inherently racist; after all White moves first!!!

I'm all from inclusivity, for making people feel welcomed, and for us to build a better society; I just don't agree this is how we do it.

As for signalling, Sure we don't need to advertise it to ourselves and give accolades for something so simple. But we can do the bit and move on. I guess a lot of people are in love with the idea that if doing something is good then it must be being done in order to be _seen_ as doing good. That is bullshit unless you happen to know intent.

But let‘s be clear: there’s a race problem in technology, just as there’s a gender problem in technology. If someone whose ancestors were enslaved were working in technology and encountered the terms master/slave … how would they feel? Would this be another of the thousands of microagressions that they face working in technology today? Would they ultimately leave technology because they can’t get any of their white coworkers to take these microaggressions seriously?

The answer, of course, is an ongoing yes to all of those. This is a trivial way to remove offensive microaggressions, and the pushback that is being received to this makes it very clear to racialized peoples that the real privilege is in the people who object to these inaccurate and offensive terms being changed for something more accurate and inoffensive.

That's the problem though - by focusing undue politicized attention onto an ultimately irrelevant piece of terminology opinion, we've detracted from the real problem at hand (regardless if think the real issue at hand is systemic racism oppressing minorities or "SJW"s destroying our institutions).

When you attach the emotional baggage of known hotbed political issues to trivial things asking for people's opinion,we know from the works of psychologists like Jon Haidt and stuff, that these opinions quickly enter into the realm of the sacred. This forces us to first have a visceral emotion reaction, then find all sorts of reasons to back-up our initial response without any regard for counterpoints.

In other words, invitations to bikeshed like this one can't lead to any meaningful or sensible debate because there was never at any substance to debate - just emotional baggage from a much more politicized topic that keeps everyone arguing

BTW, you can recognize this as a cognitive trap to bikeshed while missing the point by considering the hypothetical scenario if a developer one day decided to up and just publish some patch notes to the effect of "master records now renamed to release records to be more semantic", would anyone bat an eye?

We can call these things whatever we want. It's a name for an abstract concept.

Why not change it to something that does not refer to one of the most barbaric, nightmarish relationships between people?

For me personally it makes we wince whenever someone uses "master/slave."

We don't need to be casually throwing around "master and slave" in a professional setting

I find this change somewhat futile as it will not make people less racist, but if it offends black people we could go with a diferent term, why not?

I always found master/slave a bit too idiomatic. I imagined a hardrive whipping the other form time to time. This picture is painful to some, lets update it and show we’re willing to do good.

Im worried though that the change will amount to these types of changes, removing statues, adding disclaimets in history books, old movies etc and then no real change (as in needed change) will emerge. Hope im wrong though

No, you're engaging in inaccurate hyperbole.

The end game for these efforts will be to make "slave" a more precise and specific term, not to erase it entirely. Does the existence of the terms "pork" (pig meat) and "pig" (animal source of pork) strike you as Newspeak?

An Inherently racist game were White fights against Black, and where the White privilege is clearly documented as White gets to move first.

In the context that are being used, it describes the abstraction very well.

Is slavery absolutely wrong? Of course! That doesn't mean we will have to ban the words..

I think it's presumptuous to imply that black people necessarily have a problem with master/slave terminology outside of the "owning people" context. I feel compelled to out myself as a black person to say that its absurd. The issue of the day is that police need to stop killing us with impunity. Believe it or not, there is actually a very limited amount of attention available for issues surrounding systemic racial injustice and distractions like this just exhaust that very limited resource and leave us with jaded citizens who roll their eyes whenever issues of social justice are broached. Even the very idea of "social justice" is considered a pejorative because of the focus on stupid issues like this by a privileged group of people who are so comfortable that they have time to worry about things like arbitrary technology labels.

True, although in the case of this article it's talking more about music technology like MIDI, where rather than "original" or "reference" it usually means something closer to "leader" or "commander".

But this misses the point of the article. The suggestion isn't that we should drop the historic terms to improve the precision of tech communication. Rather, the worry is that habitualizing the terms "master" and "slave" in technology desensitizes us to concept. If we accept that one device is naturally the "master" of other devices, perhaps we are more willing to accept that one human can be the master of other humans. If we accept that the role of one device is to be merely a "slave", perhaps we won't recoil sufficiently at the notion that one human might be enslave another.

Certainly, one can disagree with this premise. Why should using the same language to describe one concept influence attitudes toward another? But rather than suggesting that author is pretending not to understand a standard industry term, you'd do much better to argue about the point the article is actually making.