In her book Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011), Wendy Hui Kyong Chun develops her concept of “programmability” to argue that almost all social and economic institutions and procedures of life under capitalism are now shaped by software that pilots the unfolding of the future by intimately knowing data patterns and making extrapolations from the past. Starting from Foucault’s notice of governmentality, Chun sees software as a neoliberal governmental technology that holds together the intense homologous relationship between capitalism and computing. Neoliberalism and computation are a couple. Software enables us to navigate the choppy waters of that tandem. For Foucault, governmentality is the techniques and meticulous ideologies by which citizens in a society are governed, the implemented strategies of power which direct their behavior. Chun’s book is a magisterial disentangling and exposure of the primary function of software as socio-cultural production.
Software, for Chun, is fascinatingly ambivalent in every respect. Software is apparently knowable and accessible with its “user friendliness,” but it is mysteriously unfathomable. No one can fully understand the organizational structures and relations and many levels of complexity which are happening “under the hood.” Software renders the invisible visible, and vice versa. Software is that which can be known and seen, yet simultaneously not known nor seen. It realizes a new world where a great deal that palpably affects our lives is vaguely hidden.
Some common myths about software source code are that of the “all-powerful (male) programmer” who can make happen anything that he wants, and the related assumption that code is a straightforward series of instructions to a machine. Software is in fact embedded in networks of complex systemic assemblages. Source code does not always do what it apparently says that it will do. The code written by the individual programmer gets processed through team code reviews. The execution of the code passes through
many mediations of filtering, translation, syntax-matching, and linking with other code in code libraries, compilers, interpreters, and operating systems. The code can modify itself while it is running. It would require an approach of literary textual analysis to fathom all of this. Wendy Chun identifies code explicitly as a form of rhetoric. She writes that source code is a “generalized writing.”
Source code is an anthropomorphizing of the machine. This becomes clear for Chun as she considers the history of programming languages. The idea of software never occurred to the original builders of computers around the time of the Second World War. In the late 1940s, “programming” experienced a decisive chapter in its gendered history. Male engineers made decisions and gave instructions to female subordinates. They were the “girls of the ENIAC” who physically went around and set switches in the giant computer. These low-paid women operators were the precursors of the command-line interface and the Graphical User Interface, the literal human female incarnation of the Man-Machine Interface.
After the era of machine code and assembler languages, and the low-level manipulation of registers, bits, and bytes, the development of readable and comprehensible languages was necessary. Programming languages are metonymic languages par excellence. Higher-level programming languages mark the capitalist commodification and materialization of software.
Software is ephemeral. It is material and immaterial. Critical of new media theorists Geert Lovink and Alexander Galloway, Chun declares “vaporiness” to be the essence of software. She writes: “Vaporiness is not accidental but rather essential to new media and, more broadly, to software… New media projects that have never, or barely, materialized are among the most valorized and cited.” Against the anthropocentric model of the programmer-as-human-subject holding power over the processor-object as “dead” mechanical machine, the direction of software trends towards the absence of both the human programmer and the machine. Creative projects like software poetry point towards the promise of unknown future paradigms. “Source code may be the source of many things other than machine execution.” In her historiography of twentieth-century computing, Chun further argues that the idea of software code as “logos” did not come from the computer engineers themselves but rather “emanated from the elsewhere” of Mendelian genetic biology. The code of DNA as the blueprint of life was the “larger epistemic field of biopolitical programmability” that set the stage for programmability in software code. Norbert Wiener’s first-order cybernetics made the key link of proclaiming itself to be the science of systemic “command and control,” independent of whether the entities being controlled are machine, human, or animal.
Today computing is evolving toward less strictly “programmable” systems – “in theory if not yet in everyday practice,” writes Wendy Chun. She continues: “The pressing question therefore is: What do we do with this move away from the map that nonetheless presupposes the map in a fundamental way?” This corresponds to my idea of Creative Coding “building on top of” the programmable informatics that was rooted in the axiom of purely “formal language” towards reconciliation with human idioms and intuitively visual expression.
Chun reflects as well on hyperreality, and on simulation and simulacra. She writes: “Digital images challenge photo-realism’s conflation of truth and reality: the notion that what is true is what is real and what is real is what is true.” Analog machines are (representational or descriptive or mimetic) simulation machines par excellence. Digital computers are simulacra par excellence. The universal technology of the computer, with its numerical method of 0s and 1s, can simulate all other previous analog machines which, in their physicalness, were dedicated to specific tasks. The digital simulates other simulations – a pure simulacrum. Chun’s idea that software is evolving towards less “programmable” systems is parallel to the present study.