Apparently, the "masses" read Reddit. Writing in formal academic English is for privileged white people and should be phased in favor of broken, anarchic, meme-inspired vernaculars, except on Wikipedia.
How charming.
I'm not sure I agree with the part about people being mistrusted just because they speak that way though.
No doubt someone will attempt the argument that there is a qualitative difference between a language in which one speaks to a computer, and that in which one speaks to other people, but in this case I contend it's a distinction without a difference. The very reason why coding standards exist, after all, is because what we write in programming languages must be understandable to other people, no less than to the computer, and supine permissiveness as regards writing style impairs the legibility of one's code for the other people who must also read it.
Granted, it takes more effort to live up to the coding style required by whatever project one happens to be working on, just as it takes more effort to express a thought in Wallace's "SWE" than in whatever corrupt vernacular happens to be one's native pidgin. In exchange for this additional effort, one produces a result which is both more generally legible and more likely to be taken seriously. (On that latter point in particular -- would you have read this far if I were writing, not in that acrolect Wallace and his latter-day imitator so deride, but rather in my native Southern American English? Don't seem any too likely to me.)
When you're writing code for a smaller audience, or just one-off code for your own use, standards are much looser. If you're writing a one-liner in Perl, maybe there aren't any standards! And that's the point of the article. It doesn't make sense to apply strict rules about what you can say and how you say it when you're just updating your facebook status or making a blog post. I mean you could if you wanted to, just like "you can write FORTRAN in any language."
Yes, I would have read your post all the way through, and that judgmental attitude you reference is just what the author is arguing we should get rid of.
This assumption strikes me as highly questionable; if anything, lack of standards and disregard for precision in one's effort seems likely to make accurately saying what one means more difficult, rather than less so.
Sonnets can be beautiful and meaningful, but imagine what a pain it would be if everything were written that way.
English is a mix of many different influences, each of which was novel at some point in history. If people want to make up new rules to experiment with (like doge and ragecomics), that's not a bad thing. The more people we have who feel free to experiment, the more options we'll have in deciding what we want language to look like in the future.
This claim baffles and infuriates me.
(In case anyone cares, I keep putting "self-expression" in quotes because all use of language is to some degree "self-expression", which makes the phrase so sloppy in meaning as to be essentially useless, save, I think, for purposes of self-aggrandizement; there seems some inherent presumption that placing something in the category of "self-expression" renders it immune to criticism, which even if true confers no more nobility upon the subject than that afforded to the finger paintings a youngster might bring home from kindergarten.)
I'm afraid I find the entire Techcrunch article redolent of neo-Marxist critical theory, which I think is intellectually bankrupt and antithetical to progress, and which brings on an overwhelming desire to projectile vomit upon its nearest exponent, so I'm a touch biased about this.