[lmm]

I don't think there's any less rigour or competence here than in "respectable" philosophy; quite the opposite. There is no excess of metaphor, just an exploration of a technical subject in the terminology that it requires. It's using plenty of jargon and references, sure, but programmers are in no position to throw stones about such things; the jargon is meaningful and clearly defined (indeed, defined clearly at the start, in the case of "zagnets").

[motohagiography]

This is an interesting point, as there is a cognitive style among some programmers (but both STEM and critical people) who don't seem to have internal distinctions between a heuristic, a metonym, a functional synecdoche, a coherent abstraction, a generalization, a codeword, a black box, and a joke reference.

Few people are really dumb, but when we're designing, writing and teaching, it's important to keep track of what logical level of abstraction we are speaking at. My reading was that Lanier in this piece seemed to take a joke reference and a codeword (zombie/zagnet) and treat them both as black boxes, where there was no logical coherence in what the relationship or effect of one was on the other, and it just produced a wandering narrative.

[lmm]

If there's no relevant distinction then why make one? (Indeed, the ability to abstract over irrelevant details is the essence of intelligence). As far as I can see the piece uses "zombie" and "zagnet" entirely legitimately. It does wander, but that's not a crime.