jim writes:

"Notes on the Politics of Software Culture"

Andreas Broeckmann

[written for the Next5Minutes4 reader; first posted on Nettime]

Software has, over the last few years, increasingly come into view as
a cultural technique whose social and political impact ought to be
studied carefully. To the extent that social processes rely on
software for their execution -- from systems of e-government and
net-based education, online banking and shopping, to the organisation
of social groups and movements --, it is necessary to understand the
procedural specificities of the computer programmes employed, and the
cultural and political 'rules' coded into them. The 'killer apps' of
tomorrow may, as Howard Rheingold claims, not be 'hardware devices or
software programs but social practices'. Yet, these social practices
will increasingly be determined by software configurations of the
available infrastructure and the degrees and types of latitude that
they offer.Aspects of software culture -- a terrain that encompasses software
development as well as the wide and multi-facetted field of software
application -- are being articulated by speculative and artistic
software projects which this text will try to cover in a necessarily
cursory, introductory fashion.
The term 'social software' has been used by Matthew Fuller, Graham
Harwood, and others, to describe a type of software that consciously
engages the social aspects of its application. Whereas a programme
like MS Word, which Fuller has carefully disected in an extensive
analysis, tends to conceal the rules and assumptions that served to
constitute its structure, social software addresses the more or less
specific social context of its application, whether in the form of
the Linker software by Mongrel that offers an easy-to-use
functionality for multimedia production, or in the online
communication platforms that support, for instance, collaborative
software and media development and that can easily be tweaked to meet
the requirements of a certain co-producer community.

For almost a decade, the Nettime mailing list has been an active,
international forum for the discussion of software-related cultural
and political issues. In a seminal essay posted on Nettime, Behind
the Blip, Fuller talks about key aspects of social software and also
refers to the Californian researcher Ellen Ullman who has worked on
software development as a distinctly social practice for several
years. Important practical and theoretical work in this field has
also been done by the Amsterdam-based Society for Old and New Media,
De Waag, whose software development projects have engaged the needs
and possibilities of different user groups by way of models for a
'participatory software design'. In cooperation with De Waag, the New
Delhi-based media and communication centre Sarai has also worked on
both the practical issues of social software development, and on the
critical reflection of software culture on their online Reader-List
and in the Reader print publications. While Nettime has often carried
postings articulating differences between European and US media
cultures, Sarai has, importantly, helped to raise awareness for the
differences in software cultures, esp. with regard to developments in
South Asia.

In his essay, Behind
the Blip, Fuller distinguishes social software
from 'critical' and 'speculative' software, critical software being
'software designed explicitly to pull the rug from underneath
normalised understandings of software'. It critically engages with
existing software programmes and mutates or critically analyses them.
In contrast, 'speculative software' comes closest to what can be
understood as an artistic approach to software: it is, as Fuller
writes, 'software that explores the potentiality of all possible
programming. It creates transversal connections between data,
machines and networks. Software, part of whose work is to reflexively
investigate itself as software. Software as science fiction, as
mutant epistemology. Speculative software can be understood as
opening up a space for the reinvention of software by its own means.'

The notion of 'software art' has recently made the rounds. It is an
attempt to describe a practice that is artistic, non-functionalist,
reflexive and speculative about the aesthetics and politics of
software, and that takes computer programming as the material proper
of the artistic practice. The Berlin-based media art festival
transmediale has been holding an annual competition for software art
since 2001, looking especially at works of generative art whose main
artistic material is program code, or which deal with the cultural
understanding of software. Thus, software is not understood as a
functional tool serving the 'real' artistic work, but as a generative
means for the creation of machinic and social processes. Software
art, in the understanding of researcher, software activist and
co-editor of the Nettime Unstable Digest, Florian Cramer, can be the
result of an autonomous and formal creative practice, but it can also
refer the cultural and social meaning of software, or reflect on
existing software through strategies like collage or critique.

Like transmediale, other exhibition and curatorial projects
(Generator in the UK, Kontrollfelder in Dortmund/D, the ars
electronica's CODE festival, the exhibition 'I Love You' on computer
viruses, a.o.) have sought to circumscribe a field of artistic work
that deals with the aesthetic potential of software. Most notably,
the festival Read_Me (Moscow and Helsinki) has been exclusively
devoted to software art and has led to the establishment of the
Runme.Org collaborative online database for software art projects.
The CODeDOC project has presented software developed by artists and
has included comments and documentation of the programming process
and has thus attempted to introduce an aspect of transparency and the
idea of Open Sources into the discourse on software by and for
artists, an issue which is also being addressed in discussions about
'open content' and the 'creative commons' licenses for artistic
productions. In contrast, Free Software developers like Jaromil, who
is pursuing a.o. the MuSE project for a free audio streaming
software, insist on the necessity to resist proprietary licensing
models altogether.

It is worth noticing that the Free Software and open source models
have increasingly also influenced art-related software productions in
independent labs like the V2_Lab, the Ars Electronica Center or the
MIT Media Lab. The copyright issue, which Georg Greve, president of
the Free Software Foundation Europe, suggests should not be referred
to as 'Intellectual Property Rights' but as 'the question of
industrial control of information' will become crucial for the
information and knowledge society and must be addressed
experimentally in the arts and culture sector, like in the recent
exhibition Illegal Art which presented some of the ridiculous results
of tight copyright laws.
The issues of interface design and interaction have been among the
prime concerns of digital art production, yet, while software has
mostly been treated as a tool towards realism in virtual
environments, software art projects like I/O/D's Webstalker, Jodi's
Wrong Browers or Joan Leandre's retroYou R/C have offered irritating
and enlightening insights into the construction of digital realism by
means of software.

The Internet, while accelerating the demise of utopian hopes once
invested in its liberatory potential, has also become the site of a
multiplicity of collaborative forums, whether on mailing lists,
Wikis, in weblog communities, etc. For the Net in general, software
developments around Java, the Linux system, and online publishing
forums like Slashdot or Freshmeat, have all had shares in a complex
and vibrant cultural development. For software art in particular,
a.o., the eu-gene and linart mailing lists, are continuing to play an
important role. The social and theoretical implications of these
kinds of online cooperation have been investigated by projects of the
interdisciplinary artists group Knowbotic Research for over ten
years, most notably in the IO_dencies series in the mid-90s, but also
in the more recent collaborative hacking projects. Similarly, the
Italian EpidemiC collective explores new forms of software based
online activism in their Anti-Mafia project.

Collaborative and activist projects like these frequently also
involve debates about network security, ironically referenced by
Technology To The People's Phoney(TM), and about privacy issues which
were tackled by LAN's Tracenoizer project and, more recently, by
Franz Alken's Machines Will Eat Itself, both of which instigate a
deliberate erosion of relations between human individuals and their
online data bodies.

If anything, software art projects like these should indicate the
necessity to delve more deeply into the cultural specificities of
software development and application. Software needs to be understood
as a set of digital media which need to be explored regarding their
specificity, their political and cultural dimensions. An immense
amount of knowhow already exists in the open source and free software
development communities, as well as in hacker and art coder circles.
It will be crucial to devise ways how this knowhow can be interwoven,
at times pooled, and exploded across the entire field of software
development and usage. Finally, a 'planetary' project worth
recommending!

Note: For reasons of brevity, there are hardly any references in this
text; most things can easily be found through Internet search
engines. Otherwise, I'm happy to help in locating sources:
Email: ab@transmediale.de (Berlin, 22 Aug 2003)