software studies

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Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

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.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

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.


pages: 223 words: 52,808

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing) by Douglas R. Dechow

3D printing, Apple II, Bill Duvall, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, game design, HyperCard, hypertext link, Ian Bogost, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, knowledge worker, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mother of all demos, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, semantic web, Silicon Valley, software studies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

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

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic management, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, create, read, update, delete, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, dematerialisation, digital divide, digital map, digital rights, distributed ledger, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, floating exchange rates, folksonomy, functional programming, global value chain, Google Earth, Hacker News, hive mind, information security, Internet of things, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, nowcasting, open economy, openstreetmap, OSI model, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, place-making, power law, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, semantic web, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, software studies, statistical model, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, text mining, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, the medium is the message, the scientific method, Toyota Production System, urban planning, urban sprawl, web application

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.


pages: 903 words: 235,753

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

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.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

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.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

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.


pages: 359 words: 105,248

Power Button: A History of Pleasure, Panic, and the Politics of Pushing by Rachel Plotnick

augmented reality, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Glasses, Internet Archive, invisible hand, means of production, Milgram experiment, Oculus Rift, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, software studies, Steve Jobs

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/.


pages: 458 words: 116,832

The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism by Nick Couldry, Ulises A. Mejias

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, behavioural economics, Big Tech, British Empire, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, corporate governance, dark matter, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, different worldview, digital capitalism, digital divide, discovery of the americas, disinformation, diversification, driverless car, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, extractivism, fake news, Gabriella Coleman, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, job automation, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, PageRank, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philip Mirowski, profit maximization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, scientific management, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, social intelligence, software studies, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, work culture , workplace surveillance

“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.


pages: 222 words: 53,317

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

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, Ian Bogost

Colossal Cave Adventure, Fairchild Semiconductor, functional programming, game design, Google Earth, higher-order functions, Ian Bogost, Ivan Sutherland, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, SimCity, software studies, Steve Wozniak

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

23andMe, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, disruptive innovation, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fixed income, folksonomy, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, index card, informal economy, information security, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, longitudinal study, Louis Daguerre, Menlo Park, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, RFID, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, social graph, software studies, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, text mining, time value of money, trade route, Turing machine, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks

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.


pages: 374 words: 97,288

The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy by Aaron Perzanowski, Jason Schultz

3D printing, Airbnb, anti-communist, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, cloud computing, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, general purpose technology, gentrification, George Akerlof, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Open Library, Paradox of Choice, peer-to-peer, price discrimination, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software as a service, software patent, software studies, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, winner-take-all economy

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.


pages: 420 words: 100,811

We Are Data: Algorithms and the Making of Our Digital Selves by John Cheney-Lippold

algorithmic bias, bioinformatics, business logic, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer vision, critical race theory, dark matter, data science, digital capitalism, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, informal economy, iterative process, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, lifelogging, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, price discrimination, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software studies, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological singularity, technoutopianism, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Turing machine, uber lyft, web application, WikiLeaks, Zimmermann PGP

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.


pages: 394 words: 118,929

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

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.