Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by
Geoff Cox
and
Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012
Speaking Code Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011 Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression, text: Geoff Cox; code: Alex McLean, 2012 Speaking Code Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression text: Geoff Cox code: Alex McLean foreword by Franco “Bifo” Berardi The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2013 Geoff Cox All rights reserved.
…
For such understanding they can call upon a strand of texts in the history of computing and new media, they can take part in the rich implicit culture of software, and they also can take part in the development of an emerging, fundamentally transdisciplinary, computational literacy. These provide the foundation for Software Studies. Software Studies uses and develops cultural, theoretical, and practice-oriented approaches to make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software. The field engages and contributes to the research of computer scientists, the work of software designers and engineers, and the creations of software artists.
…
It tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society, reformulating processes, ideas, institutions, and cultural objects around their closeness to algorithmic and formal description and action. Software Studies proposes histories of computational cultures and works with the intellectual resources of computing to develop reflexive thinking about its entanglements and possibilities. It does this both in the scholarly modes of the humanities and social sciences and in the software creation/research modes of computer science, the arts, and design. The Software Studies book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to publish the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at once culturally and technically literate, reflecting the reality of today’s software culture.
What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by
Ed Finn
Published 10 Mar 2017
Historian Thomas Rid describes a fascinating parallel lesson at the Macy conference, where British cybernetics pioneer Ross Ashby demonstrated his homeostat, a “thinking machine” that posed deep questions about the division between organism and environment. Rid, Rise of the Machines, 53-63. 43. Ibid., 68–69. 44. Chun, Software Studies, 2. 45. Ibid. 46. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 255. 47. Chun, Software Studies, 53. 48. Berlinski, The Advent of the Algorithm, 305. 49. Plato, Symposium. 50. Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner, “Google Effects on Memory.” 51. Clark and Chalmers, “The Extended Mind.” 52. Ibid., 8. 53. Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs, 11. 54. Weizenbaum, Computer Power and Human Reason, 12. 55.
…
This is how we can begin to understand the figure of the algorithm as a redrawing of the space for cultural imagination and become true collaborators with culture machines rather than their worshippers or, worse, their pets. Notes 1. For a rich history on the figure of the shaman, see Eliade, Shamanism. 2. Levy, Hackers. 3. Chun, Software Studies, 175. 4. Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture. 5. Kay et al., The World Color Survey; Berlin and Kay, Basic Color Terms; Loreto, Mukherjee, and Tria, “On the Origin of the Hierarchy of Color Names.” 6. Stephenson, Snow Crash, 218. 7. Tully, ISPW ’88. 8. Bogost, “The Cathedral of Computation.” 9.
…
A reading of a particular post on Facebook, or even, say, Note Book, a collection of literary scholar Jeff Nunokawa’s essayistic Facebook posts, would capture only the human side of the collaboration unless it engaged directly with the apparatus of Facebook itself. In this way algorithmic reading draws from the multiple critical forerunners we have already considered here—cybernetics, cultural studies, platform and software studies, media theory, and digital materiality. We are just beginning to work out how to pull these different perspectives together to ask questions about the ethics of algorithms, the legibility of software and the politics of computation. Algorithmic platforms now shape effectively all cultural production, from authors engaging in obligatory Twitter badinage to promote their new books to the sophisticated systems recommending new products to us.
Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by
Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015
The MIT Press has been one of the leading supporters of this, initiating new book series in both software studies and platform studies. However, this critical reading generally still remains divorced from writing. I know of no educational institution that teaches them together (e.g., no introductory programming course that includes introductory software studies content) and I know of only one published scholarly book that includes the writing of software as one of the critical methods it uses in analyzing software (the unusually-titled 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5 + RND(1)); : GOTO 10 [9]). Of course, while undertakings such as software studies seem new to many, for those of us who read Nelson’s work it is simply the continuation of his tradition.
Data and the City
by
Rob Kitchin,Tracey P. Lauriault,Gavin McArdle
Published 2 Aug 2017
Available from: www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/CSD-DHS-CybersecurityRoadmap.pdf [accessed 10 February 2017]. Dodge, M. and Kitchin, K. (2007) ‘Rethinking maps’, Progress in Human Geography 31: 1–14. Dodge, M., Kitchin, K. and Zook, M. (2009) ‘How does software make space? Exploring some geographical dimensions of pervasive computing and software studies’, Environment and Planning A 41: 1283–1293. Donaldson, D.R. and Fear, K. (2011) ‘Provenance, end-user trust and reuse: an empirical investigation’, Proceedings of the Third USENIX Workshop on the Theory and Practice of Provenance. Foucault, M. (1980) Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed.
…
Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Connor, S. (2004) ‘Topologies: Michel Serres and the shapes of thought’, Anglistik 15(1): 105–117. Fuller, M. (2008) ‘Introduction: The stuff of software’, in M. Fuller (ed.), Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gordon, E. and de Souza e Silva, A. (2011) Net Locality: Why Location Matters in a Networked World. Chichester and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Graduiertenkolleg Topologie der Technik (2015) Topological Manifesto [accessed 30 June 2015]. Graham, M. (2011) ‘Time machines and virtual portals: The spatialities of the digital divide’, Progress in Development Studies 11(3): 211–227. 168 T.
…
Finally, this was supplemented by the following tertiary data: •• •• •• reports, press releases, newsletters, web screen captures, presentations; news reports, clippings, videos, etc.; academic literature, theoretical, critical, pragmatic and methodological related to Object OP, OOD, software and database vendors, other implementations, standard, software studies, etc. Most data collection work took place on site at the OSI between March and April 2015. The OSi arranged private office space and full access to its staff. Being embedded in the organization and participating in meetings allowed me to get a sense of the place and to get to know the people working there.
The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
by
Benjamin H. Bratton
Published 19 Feb 2016
Software Studies Matthew Fuller, Lev Manovich, and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, editors Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, 2009 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011 Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));: GOTO 10, Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012 The Imaginary App, Paul D.
…
For such understanding they can call upon a strand of texts in the history of computing and new media, they can take part in the rich implicit culture of software, and they also can take part in the development of an emerging, fundamentally transdisciplinary, computational literacy. These provide the foundation for software studies. Software Studies uses and develops cultural, theoretical, and practice-oriented approaches to make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interventions via) the objects and processes of software. The field engages and contributes to the research of computer scientists, the work of software designers and engineers, and the creations of software artists.
…
It tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society, reformulating processes, ideas, institutions, and cultural objects around their closeness to algorithmic and formal description and action. Software studies proposes histories of computational cultures and works with the intellectual resources of computing to develop reflexive thinking about its entanglements and possibilities. It does this both in the scholarly modes of the humanities and social sciences and in the software creation/research modes of computer science, the arts, and design. The Software Studies book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to publish the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at once culturally and technically literate, reflecting the reality of today's software culture.
Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by
E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012
Free Software Definition. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html (accessed November 28, 2010). Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine. 2000. Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer. New York: McGraw-Hill. Friedman, Ted. 2005. Electric Dreams: Computers in American Culture. New York: New York University Press. Fuller, Matthew, ed. 2008. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Fuster Morell, Mayo. 2010. Governance of Online Creation Communities. Provision of Infrastructure for the Building of Digital Commons. PhD diss., European University Institute. Gallaway, Terrel, and Douglas Kinnear. 2004. Open Source Software, the Wrongs of Copyright, and the Rise of Technology.
…
New York: Macmillan. Goffman, Erving. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays in Face-to-face Behavior. New York: Anchor Books. Good, Byron J. 1994. Medicine, Rationality, and Experience: An Anthropological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goriunova, Olga and Shulgin, Alexei. 2008. Glitch. In Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, 110–19. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Graeber, David. 1997. Manners, Deference, and Private Property in Early Modern Europe. Comparative Studies in Society and History 39 (4): 694–728. 2001. Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams.
…
Edited by H.B. Acton. London: Dent. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. London: Berg. Mitnick, Kevin D. 2011. Ghost in the Wires: My Adventures as the World’s Most Wanted Hacker. New York: Little, Brown and Company. Monfort, Nick. 2008. Obfuscated Code. In Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, 193–99. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Moody, Glyn. 1997 The Greatest OS that (N)ever Was. Wired August. Available at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.08/linux.html, accessed July 20, 2011. 2001. Rebel Code: The Inside Story of Linux and the Open Source Revolution.
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
by
Paolo Gerbaudo
Published 19 Jul 2018
To explore the meaning and consequences of digital platforms, it is necessary to begin from the actual architecture of these platforms, from the various functionalities that are embedded in their design. This is not merely to identify the features which they display, but also to understand the principles and overall ‘philosophy’ which underscores them. In fact, as developers and scholars in the emerging area of ‘software studies’ know very well, software is never a neutral machinery.221 It always involves some considerations about the nature of the world, the subjects involved in it and a definition of aims and objectives that is by its nature profoundly political. Lines of code define the type of actions that can be performed, and the types of behaviour that are possible.
…
Ostrogorski, Democracy and the organization of political parties; and Sigmund Neumann and Frederick C. Barghoorn, Modern political parties: approaches to comparative politics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1956). 221. See, for example, Matthew Fuller, Roger F. Malina and Sean Cubitt, eds, Software studies: a lexicon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 222. To delve into the vast scholarship on algorithms and politics, it is advisable to begin with Taina Bucher, ‘Want to be on the top? Algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on Facebook’, New Media & Society 14, no.7 (2012): 1164–1180; and Tarleton Gillespie, ‘The relevance of algorithms’, Media technologies: essays on communication, materiality, and society 167 (2014). 223.
Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing
by
Rachel Plotnick
Published 24 Sep 2018
Douglas Engelbart, quoted in Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 99. 25. Engelbart in Bardini, Bootstrapping, 101. 26. Logitech, “Introducing the Most Agile Mouse Ever to Set Foot on a Desktop,” Byte (1998): 1. 27. Soren Pold, “Button,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 32. 28. This refers to the concept of “remediation.” For further discussion, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). 29. Wendy Hall, “Ending the Tyranny of the Button,” IEEE MultiMedia 1, no. 1 (1994): 60. 30.
…
Critical Studies in Media Communication 30, no. 1 (2012): 52–68. Plumb, Glenn E. “Plumb Plan for Government Ownership and Democracy in Operation of the Railroads.” In Proceedings of Public Ownership Conference, 59–109. Chicago: Public Ownership League of America, 1919. Pold, Soren. “Button.” In Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008. Pratt, Loring. “Untitled.” Union Electric Quarterly 5, no. 9 (1917): 328. Prawdzik, Ben. “Milgram Experiment, 50 Years On.” Yale Daily News, September 28, 2011. http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2011/09/28/milgram-experiment-50-years-on/.
The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism
by
Nick Couldry
and
Ulises A. Mejias
Published 19 Aug 2019
“Del ‘Extractivismo Económico’ al ‘Extractivismo Epistémico’ y al ‘Extractivismo Ontológico’: Una Forma Destructiva de Conocer, Ser y Estar en el Mundo.” Tabula Rasa, Bogotá-Colombia, 24L (2016): 123–43. Grosser, Benjamin. “What Do Metrics Want? How Quantification Prescribes Social Interaction on Facebook.” Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies 4 (2014). http://computationalculture.net/what-do-metrics-want/. Gurumurthy, Anita. “Big Brother Getting Bigger? The Privacy Issues Surrounding Aadhaar Are Worrying.” First Post, April 3, 2017. http://www.firstpost.com/tech/news-analysis/big-brother-getting-bigger-the-privacy-issues-surrounding-aadhaar-are-worrying-3700365.html.
…
Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Rieder, Bernhard. “Big Data and the Paradox of Diversity.” Digital Culture & Society 2, no. 2 (2016): 39–54. . “What Is in PageRank? A Historical and Conceptual Investigation of Recursive Status Index.” Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies, no. 6 (2012): 1–28. http://computationalculture.net/article/what_is_in_pagerank. Rieder, Bernhard, and Theo Röhle. “Digital Methods: From Challenges to Bildung.” In The Datafied Society, edited by Mirko Schäfer and Karin Van Es, 109–24. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. Rifk in, Jeremy.
Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension
by
Samuel Arbesman
Published 18 Jul 2016
a blog post from Google in 2006: Joshua Bloch, “Extra, Extra—Read All About It: Nearly All Binary Searches and Mergesorts Are Broken,” Google Research Blog, June 2, 2006, http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html. Also discussed in Chandra, Geek Sublime, 124. The bug is a window: A glitch is “a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure.” Olga Goriunova and Alexei Shulgin, “Glitch,” in Software Studies: A Lexicon, ed. Matthew Fuller, 110–19 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008), 114. Errors and bugs as a window into improving a system is a concept also explored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012). For an application of Taleb’s concept of antifragility to software development, see Martin Monperrus, “Principles of Antifragile Software,” http://arxiv.org/pdf/1404.3056.pdf.
Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System
by
Nick Montfort
and
Ian Bogost
Published 9 Jan 2009
Because these approaches deal with the same level, it is at least meaningful to imagine a narratology/ludology debate—an early conflict in game studies over whether games are better understood as essentially rule-based or narrative—while it makes much less sense to think about a psychoanalysis/ludology debate or a remediation/narratology debate. Code is a level where explorations are still only beginning. Code studies, software studies, and code aesthetics are not yet widespread, but they are becoming known concepts. With both the Ars Electronica festival and, more recently, the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) having events with code as the theme, there are more contexts for discussing the way creative work is actually programmed and the way it is understood by programmers.
Raw Data Is an Oxymoron
by
Lisa Gitelman
Published 25 Jan 2013
Her most recent research project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Contributors Council of Canada explores what Canadian media organizations understand about Internet infrastructure. Lev Manovich (http://www.manovich.net) is a professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunication and Information (Calit2). Jeremy Douglass is assistant professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). William Huber is a PhD candidate in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD. Vikas Mouli is a private equity investor with TPG Growth, based in San Francisco.
The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
by
Aaron Perzanowski
and
Jason Schultz
Published 4 Nov 2016
If they use a twelve-second clip of the song in a Buick Enclave commercial, they’ve infringed your copyright regardless of whether a contract was formed or not. Nonetheless, most courts, commentators, and copyright holders continue to think of licenses as creatures of contract law. The free software movement is one notable exception. Developers of free software are committed to the idea that all users should be free to run software, study it, modify it, and redistribute it. Those core beliefs are reflected in free software licenses like the GNU General Public License, or GPL. Examples of free software products include the Firefox web browser, the Apache web server, and MySQL relational database software. As Eben Moglen, head of the Software Freedom Law Center and one of the drafters of the current version of the GPL explains, “Licenses are not contracts: the work’s user is obliged to remain within the bounds of the license not because she voluntarily promised, but because she doesn’t have any right to act at all except as the license permits.”40 An approach that roots licenses in property law is preferable to one that treats them like contracts.
We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves
by
John Cheney-Lippold
Published 1 May 2017
Evgeny Dantsin, Thomas Eiter, Georg Gottlob, and Andrei Voronkov, “Complexity and Expressive Power of Logic Programming,” ACM Computing Surveys 33, no. 3 (2001): 374–425; Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007); Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 92. Kevin Kelly and Derrick de Kerckhove, “4.10: What Would McLuhan Say?,” Wired, October 1, 1996, http://archive.wired.com. 93. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27, no. 3 (1986): 544–560. 94. David Lyon, Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2001); Daniel Solove, The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2004). 95.
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
by
Scott Rosenberg
Published 2 Jan 2006
The software that frustrates and hog-ties us also captivates us with new capabilities and enthralls us with promises of faster, better ways to work and live. There’s no going back. We need the stuff more than we hate it. So we dream of new and better things. The expert who in many ways founded the modern field of software studies, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr., wrote an influential essay in 1987 titled “No Silver Bullet,” declaring that, however frustrated we may be with the writing of computer programs, we will never find a magic, transformational breakthrough—we should expect only modest, incremental advances. Brooks’s message is hard to argue with but painful to accept, and you can’t attend a computer industry conference or browse a programmers’ Web site today without bumping into someone who is determined to prove him wrong.