[facepalm]

That criticism doesn't make sense: I don't think anybody believes that in general the people in power today are so because of their merits. So how does a call for meritocracy cement the status quo? I think people want people with actual merit in power instead of many of the current crop.

OK, the GitHub carpet perhaps made that claim, but they were truly trying to create a new kind of company. I'm pretty sure they didn't define merit to be "privilege and power" but coding skills and open source contribution.

Now you can make a very complicated case trying to reason why some people are excluded from open source and programming, but I don't really buy it. Everybody can start coding with an investment of perhaps 300$. Maybe some people are unlucky in that they never hit upon the idea. But it would be very difficult to prove that people can be actively prevented from programming (except by ways that would exclude them from everything, like making them slaves and never giving them any free time to do anything).

Also, why does the status quo always have to be bad?

[pron]

> But it would be very difficult to prove that people can be actively prevented from programming

Well, kids growing up in poverty without the right role models are pretty close to being "actively prevented from programming".

> Also, why does the status quo always have to be bad?

It doesn't, but it can't be an ideal either. The status quo can be better than the past (or "relatively good"), but still very far from an ideal. If you believe people should always work to make the world better, than trying to maintain the status quo is pretty bad (unless you see some danger looming).

[facepalm]

"Well, kids growing up in poverty without the right role models are pretty close to being "actively prevented from programming""

Not really - they can still get a computer for 300$, head to the nearest library and get started.

Yes, there are bad fates - perhaps they never learned to read and so on. It's really possible someone never gets the chance. But as I said, programming is then really the last skill that can be blamed for being unattainable, plenty of other professions that would be way more forbidding.

" If you believe people should always work to make the world better, than trying to maintain the status quo is pretty bad"

But wouldn't people be forced to try to have merit, so they would automatically work on improving the world?