The crisis and the default. Consider the present Information Technology staffing crisis in the United States. Why has there been such a failure in supplying the IT workforce with new recruits? Can this be linked to problems at the heart of the metaphysics of computing? IT work is frustrating, often repetitive, and spiritually vacuous. While philosophical topics pertaining to various aspects of computing abound today, there is a metaphysical wilderness at the heart of computing technology itself. On the one hand, without connection to an accessible intellectual tradition, there can be no rigorous philosophical study of computing by technologists. There is little reason to delve this deep when the state of the art is in such an excited frenzy. Outside of academic philosophy there are, at best, books written by megalomaniacs and computer technologists waxing philosophical, such as Bill Gates' The Road Ahead and The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musing on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary by Eric S. Raymond. On the other hand, traditional academic philosophy is not prepared to confront computing technology at the level of an expert participant rather than a critic (or, worse, a would-be system architect devoid of a real technical skill set). The quintessentialpractical mental discipline is itself time-consuming and ineluctably compelling, posing an apparently endless program of study in order to gain a comprehensive perspective. Its "state of the art" bristles with impossible demands that seem incompatible with the already busy agendas set for philosophical research. Therefore the rift betweenfoundational philosophy and computing technology can only widen as the latter continues to progress. The present crisis in technology education in America may be a symptom that we are, with respect to computing, philosophically "in default."
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