Yes, I work as a programmer and bits of Foucault that I've read have been transformative for me. Most of my programmer friends are also at least aware of him.

Yes, I work as a programmer and bits of Foucault that I've read have been transformative for me. Most of my programmer friends are also at least aware of him. The portion of his work that I'm familiar with was concerned with the insight that societies are organized by "technologies" of discipline and the "genealogy"[1] of these technologies in different institutional contexts i.e. hospitals, prisons, schools. When I first encountered Foucault's work as an undergraduate, I wished I'd read it much earlier as it would have helped me decode the prison-like experience of school. The contradiction between imposed ideologies of "freedom" (via studying US history, the news, conversation with adults, etc.) and the total control exerted by the state over where I could go, what I could say, and what I was to do nearly every minute of my life resulted in a lot of cognitive dissonance for me. If only I'd learned earlier what "ideology" meant and that it was well-known that "freedom" is not an ethical, political, or ontological given. Foucault's work reveals that we always exist within power structures and illuminates much of how these structures operate. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genealogy_(philosophy)