a journal of software studies
In 2021, my social media feed brought up a CIA recruitment ad entitled I Am Unapologetically Me. The video features a CIA officer describing herself as “a woman of colour, a mom, a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder”.1 Her identity is presented both as a marker of diversity and as …
As the morning sun filters through my windows, I greet the day with a simple, “Alexa, good morning.” The Amazon Echo’s blue ring glows, and Alexa’s voice responds cheerfully, “Good morning! Here’s your daily briefing.” She provides the weather, the latest news, and my schedule for the day, embodying the idea that frictionless interactive elements …
Almost twenty years ago, philosopher and literary theorist Katherine Hayles described the growth of programming languages. Unnoticed by most, new languages are springing into existence, proliferating across the globe, mutating into new forms, and fading into obsolescence. Invented by humans, these languages are intended for the intelligent machines called computers. Programming languages and the code …
The history of science and technology has, until relatively recently, neglected the study of textbooks. However, more recent scholarship has shown how important they have been, not only pedagogically, but also to the creation and direction of various fields like chemistry and physics.1 Arguably computer science textbooks are and have been pivotal for the field …
One of the indubitable strengths of the “Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image” 1 is that it doesn’t offer an answer to what a meme is. In a way, it isn’t even interested in stabilising or fixing the understanding of memes: instead, many of the contributions assembled in it pull at, disorganise …
Continue reading “Review of ‘Critical Meme Reader: Global Mutations of the Viral Image’”
If you have been watching any of the various series recently produced for the Star Wars franchise, you may have noticed a curious kind of continuity editing: the screens that are used to target weapons and navigate outer space display computer graphics in the style of the 1970s. On these screens appear wireframes rather than …
Sondra Perry’s Typhoon coming on sits right at the middle, as well as on the front cover, of Seb Franklin’s recent book The Digitally Disposed. Perry’s artwork consists of a large projection of an animated fragment of J.M.W. Turner’s 1840’s Slave ship, a painting that depicts the infamous 1781 Zong massacre in which over 130 …
Datafication has been the hallmark of modern governance, all the way back to the definition of statistics as “science of data about the state” in mid-18th century Prussia. Creating reductionist regularity, abstracting from the infinite complexity of local, embodied experience, enabled a new scale and complexity by which the state could organize the life of …
The Project This book is an account of the practice of machine learning – that is, the project of configuring software, by means of a learning process, so that it can learn from data and, as a consequence, be able to deal with further data in an intelligent way. However, some of these terms – …
Continue reading “Towards an Archaeology of Machine Learning?”
The notion of execution and its practices, which gave birth to this book, were first examined by a collective of artists, thinkers and researchers calling themselves “Critical Software Thing” in two workshops in Aarhus, Denmark and Malmö, Sweden between 2015 – 2016.1 With these discussions, the group, interested in thinking things and objects from the …
Introduction Russia has historically led scientific invention, however, it has consistently failed to commercialise and implement it. This claim, initially voiced by historian of science Loren Graham, discussing the sphere of innovation and business, is subjected to detailed scrutiny in From Russia with Code. A collection of essays edited by Science and Technology scholars Mario …
Continue reading “Learning from Russia’s hi-tech Soviet heritage. Review: From Russia with Code”
Introduction Charlton McIlwain’s Black Software: The Internet & Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter1 is a recent addition to a growing literature on computing and identity. The book asks us to confront an awkward truth: How a person is racially marked can help to account for how that person is likely to …
Annette Vee’s Coding Literacy is a very timely reflection on current movements and campaigns aimed at broadening access to computer programming. The book’s argument is that computer programming (or coding) can be productively viewed as a form of literacy, and that, in turn, the growing importance of coding is transforming what it means to be …
The authors of Spotify Teardown have written an important book. The first of what may soon become a cottage industry of texts about individual streaming services, Spotify Teardown shows what a multidisciplinary approach toward understanding Spotify can tell us about what drives the development of streaming services, and how they are changing media culture. Spotify …
Continue reading “Thinking Culture in the Age of Global Finance: A review of Spotify Teardown“
An ambitious author in the field of new media has to confront the shelf-life problem, the possibility, if not probability, that their theoretical insights might be overlooked as the currency of their objects, almost inevitably, expire. One way to address this problem is to consider how old mythic past futures feed into the present, figured …
It is difficult to imagine Yuk Hui’s On the Existence of Digital Objects being written by another author. This is not because the subject matter or questions asked are not of interest to many in the field of digital and media theory, far from it. It is rather that it is hard to identify another …
In the first few pages of Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Updating to Remain the Same, Chun evokes Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), particularly Berlant’s articulation of everyday political ways of being as a kind of “impasse”. For Chun, as for Berlant, the present is marked by the becoming ordinary of crisis, making for an “affectively …
A certain wonder at human attempts in the last century to explore outer space (Sputnik; Armstrong’s landing on the moon) might well be part of your historical or long term memory, and perhaps this wonder has been reawakened by the recent arrival on Earth of the visual data from the New Horizons NASA spacecraft that …
In a world of superabundant information and advanced technology it can be jarring to remember how much knowledge has been and is forever being lost. We suppose that the historical record is accumulating around us like Wikipedia or the Web itself, and then we realize its closer resemblance to Snapchat. The history of technology in …
Continue reading “Review of Archaeology of Algorithmic Artefacts, by David Link”
Our starting point is an attempt at explicating a seemingly innocuous, irrelevant, or even perhaps just trivially banal question: why does a book about obfuscation, which co-authors Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum describe as being a mere tool 1, albeit one “particularly well suited to the category of people without access to other modes of …
Computers (or the Internet) did not inaugurate, what Deleuze called, ‘control societies’1. Most of the efforts to theorize society following the advent and proliferation of computers have nonetheless, focused on the socio-economic changes associated with new technologies. Following Deleuze, the desire and frequency for periodization, to demarcate radical differences between the past and the present, …
With Post, Mine, Repeat (2016), Helen Kennedy offers a critical contribution to public debates about datafication, the uses and ethics of social media data mining and a report on a number of research projects that she has conducted with colleagues over the last years. The core question of the book is how is social media …
In his review of the iPhone 6 for The Guardian, the writer, broadcaster, comedian and “Twitter personality” Stephen Fry expressed all kinds of awe and wonderment at the advancements Apple had made. The iPhone 6s are, for Fry, not only ‘utterly gorgeous objects […] of absolutely exquisite dimensions, heft and feel’, but their high end …
Cybernetics poses questions to history and historiography. It is consequential then for a book on the history of cybernetics, like this one, to embrace the circuitous method of its object of research. Sentences are repeated. Experiments and pioneering ideas echo each other across the chapters, with long-distance short-circuits and micro-epiphanies for the reader’s joy. A …
In An Aesthesia of Networks: Conjunctive Experience in Art and Technology Anna Munster seeks to emphasise the relational dimensions of networks and claims that we need to understand the radical implications of distributed neural architectures to gain a subtle and nuanced understanding of the contemporary condition. To this end, her book explores artistic projects, everyday …
From the start, in Contagious Architecture, the proposition is this: uncertainty and incomputability are intrinsic to computation. Looking for ways of accounting for a new digital space composed of ‘alien rule’ and ‘internal anomalies’ and of defining an algorithmic aesthetics proper to the contingencies, abstractions and potentialities of code forms the area of concern of …
Continue reading “Algorithmic Thought: a review of Contagious Architecture by Luciana Parisi”
Re-collection. Art, New Media, and Social Memory by Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito asks the question of how our increasingly digital civilisation will persist beyond our lifetimes. The authors focus on the preservation of new media art as a case study in new media’s broader challenge to social memory. Rinehart and Ippolito are well-known names …
The Wikipedia article “Criticism of Facebook” was created in August 2007. What was once a few paragraphs about privacy and the risks of posting illicit photographs, is, seven years later, a massive litany of psychological effects, censorship cases, lawsuits, hate groups, Terms of Service disputes and security flaws.1 Among some 20 subject headings and 15,000 …
Continue reading “Review of Reverse Engineering Social Media”
As part of the Infrastructures series edited by Geoffrey Bowker and Paul N. Edwards, and with a provocative and engaging title that addresses what the editor of the book, Lisa Gitelman, defines in her acknowledgements as the emerging field of data studies, it is no wonder that expectations of this book run undoubtedly high. Organised …
Continue reading “How Crucial is Rawness? Review of Raw Data is an Oxymoron by Lisa Gitelman (Ed.)”
Ok, it’s fun, but writing a lengthy article like this for that … Wait, a book? – oelmekki, Hacker News discussion about 10 PRINT.1 Aiming to analyze the titular Commodore 64 BASIC one-liner which draws a maze, and referred to as 10 PRINT throughout, the ten authors weave in and out of subjects at will, …
A popular fable goes like this: on May 11th 1997, when a computer called Deep Blue beat the world champion Gary Kasparov in a six-game chess match, researchers in artificial intelligence had to replace their old milestone for another. The event had made it clear that, even if outperforming the world champion in chess, computers …
When our imaginary relationship to our conditions of existence becomes desynchronized with ongoing events, phenomena such as Wikileaks become impossible to comprehend. One snowy Berlin night after the Chaos Computer Congress in 2009, I rather accidentally ended up getting dinner with Jacob Appelbaum and a few other assorted computer security experts. In the context of …
On several occasions over the last few years I have asked new students in digital design to identify and describe the assumptions made in the design process of the touchscreen smartphone. When I ask them what the smartphone would have looked like had it been invented in Denmark where we live, they always look puzzled, …
Since the WTO protests in Seattle and in particular the 2003 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Miami Florida, police agencies around the world have assembled a set of practices and protocols to constrain and immobilize political protestors. Dubbed the Miami Model of protest policing – in recognition of the FTAA summit …
Continue reading “Peer-to-Peer Protesting: Evading the Police Kettle”
The literature on Google has exploded in the last few years. To the extend of my overview, much of it falls into two categories. The first treats Google as the paradigmatic Internet company, active across a large number of domains. Its tone is either celebratory – lauding innovation and creative destruction 1 – or alarmist …
Every couple of weeks, when I walk into a bookstore (or rather, click through www.amazon.com), I am confronted with a rather massive amount of new books with keywords in their titles ranging from “network”, “web”, “internet”, “social media”, “digital” to the simplest and most direct amongst them, with “Facebook”, “Google”, “Twitter” that act as a …
Continue reading “Review of: Networks Without a Cause: A Critique of Social Media”
In 1886, two notorious New York shysters Howe and Hummel published a curious tome entitled Danger!,1 bearing the salacious subtitle A True History of a Great City’s Wiles and Temptations. The Veil Lifted, and Light Thrown on Crime and its Causes and Criminals and Their Haunts. Facts and Disclosures.2 The text starts off with a …
Continue reading “Notes from the Digital Underground: Cyber Illegalism and the New Egoists”
Chile’s Cybersyn project has long needed a thorough, critical history, and now we have one. Eden Medina’s carefully researched book lays out the project’s origins, structure and struggles as a “case study for better understanding the multifaceted relationship of technology and politics.” If there’s a lesson in Medina’s account, it’s that the task of designing …
Continue reading “Review of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”
Everyday life relies heavily on networked technologies that allow for a wide range of actions to take place, from the management of medical devices to the withdrawal of money from a cash point. Despite this, what lies behind these technological assemblages – data, code, and software – has received little attention, effectively remaining an off-limits …
Continue reading “Working Towards a Definition of the Philosophy of Software”
Introduction “In floating such an awkward term as wirelessness, I would invite readers to attend mostly to the suffix ness. Ness seems to me to do a better job than wireless of capturing the tendencies, fleeting nuances, and peripheral shades of often barely registered feeling that cannot be easily codified, symbolized, or quantified. As a …
Last week I bought a bagel and drink from Einstein’s Bagels, a food outlet chain in the United States that specialises in such fare. I handed over my credit card and it was duly swiped – no pin numbers there – and no signing either – and then the person who served me said “Michael, …
Continue reading “Review, Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life”
The Filter Bubble pronounces, in populist terms, the agenda that software studies has been developing since the mid 1990s [1]: everything is governed, enframed and molded by software-mediated processes, while the systems/people creating and overseeing such processes have little ability or power to subject them to doubt, debate, analysis, reinterpretation or control by the public, …
Immateriality earned its scare quotes in media studies. Consider Geert Lovink’s (2004) critique of vapor theory, Lisa Nakamura’s (2008) work on digital racial formations, Matthew Kirschenbaum’s (2008) notion of a medial ideology, Alexander Galloway’s (2004) emphasis on the material substrate of new media, and Katherine Hayles’s (2005) entanglement of electronic texts with subjectivity. The list …
Continue reading “Review: Programmed Visions: Software and Memory”
“By rehearsing the history of cybernetics […]”, Andrew Pickering writes, “I have tried to convey my conviction that there is another way of understanding our being in the world, that it makes sense, and that grasping that other way can make a difference in how we go on” (p. 390). This statement is taken from …
Manual DeLanda has been best known as a significant figure in the introduction of the works of Gilles Deleuze to the English speaking world with numerous examples of scientific phenomenon. Such an approach presents Deleuze as a scientifically informed philosopher who also used science and technology as a pivot to carry out a revolution within …
Continue reading “The Plane of Obscurity — Simulation and Philosophy”