Why study the digital and software?

The focus on digital technologies requires approaches that can provide a holistic understanding of the interconnections and relationships that technologies introduce into everyday life and action.

The computer is a device for creating, manipulating, and transmitting symbolic (hence linguistic) objects. Second, in looking at the impact of the computer, we find ourselves thrown back into questions of language - how practice shapes our language and language in turn generates the space of possibilities for action. (Winograd and Flores 1987: 7)

This includes the development of a way of thinking about and critically examining what Borgmann (1984: 14) called the technological furniture of our age. Arguably our technological furniture is vastly greater in scope and deeper in its penetration of all aspects of everyday life than any previous system. Following Moore's Law, which states that computing power would double every 18 months, we are now at an important juncture, as the surplus computing power is enormous and its application to social life and even social control is growing, such as demonstrated by drone technologies, which is highly reliant on computation, which can monitor and even kill at a distance.

We will therefore also need political praxis, and in some instances that political praxis will be technical practices such as cryptography and encryption, the practices of restricting what one is reading and writing in digital systems.

the universe, our physical universe, has that property that makes it possible for an individual or a group of individuals to reliably, automatically, even without knowing, encipher something, so that all the resources and all the political will of the strongest superpower on earth may not decipher it. And the paths of encipherment between people can mesh together to create regions free from the coercive force of the outer state.... Cryptography is the ultimate form of non-violent direct action... a basic emancipatory building block. (Assange 2012: 5-6)

This is an extremely suggestive notion that cryptography as a basic eman­cipatory building block will be a key site of contestation in a computational society, and may be manifested by cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin. In­deed, it seems likely that these new forms of crypto-spaces will be hugely important as a new site of counter-politics, and a new subject position that Assange calls cypherpunks who ‘advocate for the use of cryptography and similar methods as ways to achieve societal and political change' (Assange 2012).⁸ It is clear then that this potential should be fully developed and made available for widespread democratic use and for that it will require political praxis. But while attempts have been made to understand this situation in terms of a liberal moment, that is to defend a space of so-called ‘privacy', the reality is that there is no possibility that an individual, even one as ruggedly individualistic as the neo-liberal subject, can singularly resist the collection of ‘data exhaust' that we leave as we go about our daily life and the compu­tational means to watch, analyse, predict and control us.

... no moment in technology history has ever been more exciting or dangerous than “now” As we learn more about now, we know less about then. The Internet increases the supply of information hugely, but the capacity of the human mind not at all.... The effect of nowness resembles the effect of light pollution in large cities, which makes it impossible to see the stars. A flood of information about the present shuts out the past.... But—the Internet could be the most powerful device ever invented for understanding the past, and the texture of time. Once we understand the inherent bias in an instrument, we can correct it. The Internet has a large bias in favor of now. Using lifestreams (which arrange information in time instead of space), historians can assemble, argue about and gradually refine timelines of historical fact. Such timelines are not history, but they are the raw material of history. They will be bitterly debated and disputed—but it will be easy to compare two different versions (and the evidence that supports them) side-by-side.

It is here that critical theory can contribute to the understanding of the computal and the information society beyond the usual critiques offered at a macro-level of the general principles underlying knowledge-based societies, or micro-analysis of users and the practices. Indeed, we need to pay attention to the dialectical relationship between the two, while being able to apply critical approaches to the identity thinking implicit within many discussions of digital technology. This identity thinking manifests itself in a number of ways in what I term computationality (Berry 2011a). For example, Morozov (2013) pinpoints what he calls two ‘dominant ideologies' in technical circles, ‘Internet-centrism' and ‘solutionism', namely the idea that the internet provides the model to ‘fix' everything or that everything requires a ‘solution', even if the solution subverts or is a poor replacement for its analogue. Morozov argues they,

feed on Enlightenment-era attitudes toward the liberating power of information. More information is always presumed to be better than less; having more ways to analyze the same piece of information is always preferable to having fewer ways. Legal scholar Julie Cohen calls this set of attitudes “the information-processing imperative” and argues that it gives rise to a mind-set that equates information gathering with a “single, inevitable trajectory of forward progress” (Morozov 2013: 86)

Here, Morozov correctly identifies the symptoms and it is an important critique, with the level of analysis focused on what we might call discursive orders of computationality. Indeed I would argue that this analysis is only partially useful as these ‘dominant ideologies' are actually identical in as much as they represent articulations of different moments of computationality, that is, they both understand the world through computational categories and classifications.

Indeed, it is important that the digital is also explored in relation to the insights of medium theory, and the theoretical richness that can be developed by using such a theoretical orientation. Digital technologies mediate the world, and in doing so offer frames and limitations. Increasingly, it is rare to experience any media that has not been transformed by or passed through a digital system. Today newspapers, even print copies, are softwarized to the extent that the desktop software that is used to create them imposes certain logics, structures and hierarchies of knowledge onto the process and final product. This is also becoming more evident with the advent of digital broadcast systems, smart televisions and real-time streaming media. We could therefore argue that the long-predicted convergence of communications and computers, originally identified as ‘compunication' (see Oettinger and Legates 1977; Lawrence 1983), has now fully arrived. As Oettinger and Legates wrote, ‘computers and communications have merged not only in terms of hardware components or techniques, but also in terms of services or, more broadly, in terms of functions. Whether we talk about transmission or storage or manipulation of information, we can no longer tell communications functions apart from computer functions' (Oettinger and Legates 1977: 431).

This process of Softwarization is sometimes problematically called 'reme­diation' in that the old medium (broadcast, print, film, etc.) has become the 'content' of the new one (software) and networked through digital communica­tions systems (Berry 2013).This has two main implications: (1) that the systems upon which the mediums were previously divided between, and which formed the infrastructure and condition of possibility for their existence, is replaced by a new software-based one, and (2) that once digitized, these mediums become the same in as much as they are software-based files that are subject to the same kinds of software control - and can even be transformed into one another, due to the fact that they are all based on a digital format.

We can assume that the broadcast parenthesis, stretching from around 1900 to 2000, will continue to leave a long shadow over the development of new softwarized media. We have a tendency to think in terms of the old mediums when we try to use the content, but older institutions are also organized in ways that reflect this technical bias. For example, many large media corporations still keep TV, radio and film in separate divisions or departments. However, over the next 10 years, the distinctions between them will continue to be eroded and no doubt new distinctions will be created as software continues to change the media landscape (e.g. see the digital first strategies at the BBC, The New York Times and the Guardian).

It becomes clear then that media and our knowledge of it are changing and that if we are not careful we will make the mistake of allowing our assumption from past mediums to limit our understanding of the new software-based media. We certainly need to be aware of the pressure software is exerting on these old ways of understanding media and in moving to a new paradigm of knowledge, ensure that we take with us the old theories of the media that are still appropriate, while leaving behind that which is too closely wedded to the older broadcast technologies. But more than this, software is widely used for the management of other resources, technologies and even people. Software is, in short, a key site for the investigation of capitalist practices in the information age. It is also useful due to its two-phase structure, as both text and machine, allowing its program to be read from its textual script form, and normative structures and intentionalities explored. We should also be constantly aware that software 'offer us an imaginary relationship to our hardware: they do not represent the motherboard or other electronic devices but rather desktops, files and recycling bins' (Chun 2006: 20) and today increasingly: streams, clouds and apps. We should read software critically, even when reading software through software tools, software's palimpsest-like structure means that the medium of the computational is always multifaceted and multi-layered but crucially it need not be opaque.

Software itself is changing rapidly, due to limitations now being experienced in the capacity of hardware to support old software paradigms. For example, many of our computing systems, and certainly those that we have used in everyday life, have been built around single processor systems that we expected to get faster and faster based on the notion of Moore's Law, that is, that computer speed roughly doubles every 18 months. Physical limitations are now being hit in the design of computer chips, and therefore rather than increasing the speed (measured in Hz, MHz or GHz), chip manufacturers are increasing the number of ‘cores' or processors that we have in our machines. This greatly increases the kinds of things that these devices can perform, and also the means by which they do it. For example, mobile devices can now offload processing tasks to huge ‘server farms' which can then return the results to the user, greatly augmenting the processing capacity of a single device - indeed, this is how Apple implemented its ground-breaking voice recognition software, Siri.

Software is therefore one of the new focuses of the massive advances in speed and capability in hardware design. However, most programming is still written in a form that assumes fairly simple computer structures and hardware - like a single core to the processor. These practices are reflected in the habitus of programmers and the toolsets they build and use. We are therefore living in a time of a dual transformation of both: (i) a general move to a softwarized media world, but also (ii) that software itself is about to enter a change in paradigm to take account of rapid change in the hardware and communication environment too, which means more stream-based parallel computation.

What is important for this book is that the captialist system is increasingly softwarized (or becoming digital) and also that software increasingly becomes a replacement (restructures) the previous mnemono-technologies, like paper and film. Indeed, it can be said that we live in a post-industrial knowledge work society created by the ‘management of, and through, media, which leads in turn to the management of management... further, by separating content from both form and materiality, post-industrial knowledge work initiated variable standardization: standardization through databases, and variability thorough the different interfaces that draw upon the database' (Hayles 2012: 201). These imply the formatting of social life through the use of computational technologies, influencing both the economy and the lifeworld more generally. As Liu further argues,

Where the author was once presumed to be the originating transmitter of a discourse... now the author is in a mediating position as just one among all those other managers looking upstream to previous originating transmitters - database or XML schema designers, software designers, and even clerical information workers (who input data into the database or XML source document). (Hayles 2012: 202)

The digital has become the paradigmatic means of explaining what it means to live and work in the post-industrial democracies - this I call computational identity thinking. Indeed, I argue software, computation and code define our contemporary situation, becoming part of the metaphors by which it is even possible to think today (see Chun 2011). However, looking at code and understanding it, let alone decompiling or 'reading' software, is difficult due to its ephemeral nature, technical requirements and the lack of analytical tools. This book will attempt to contribute to this by gesturing towards ways of understanding the 'digital' through a re-articulation of critical theory towards algorithms, code and software pointing towards future strategies and tools that need to be created.

In order to do this, the book examines how critical theory developed and how it can be rethought to critically engage with the challenges of the digital revolution. More particularly, the book seeks to examine the extent to which enlightenment values, which are strongly embedded both within the cultures associated with digital technology and within the materiality of the digital itself, can be understood and used to explain the changes that are taking place across society. Thus, the book seeks to examine the extent to which a dialectic of enlightenment can be discerned within the structures of digital technology (Horkheimer and Adorno 2006; also see Golumbia 2009). The book examines the deep materiality of the digital and how it both crystallizes particular social forms and values, and generates new mentalities, economic forms and social relations.

Throughout the aim is to develop concepts and ideas drawn from the Frankfurt School towards the project of recovering the ability to draw a cognitive map of the present digital world that surrounds us, and in many cases engulfs us. For this book, the key lies in making connections and pathways between critical theory and the digital, but also drawing on the work of the later Heidegger, to create new concepts for thinking the digital, indeed, contributing to a critical theory for the digital. For example, software is increasingly being used in a number of different contexts for forecasting with extremely sophisticated models. Corporations and governments use this software to predict and monitor individuals, groups, organizations or other national states activities (Berry 2012e). The software gives the capability to make decisions and predictions about future activities based on past (archive) and present (real-time) data sources. Within a security setting one of the key aspects is data collection and it comes as no surprise that the United States has been at the forefront of rolling out gigantic data archive systems, with the NSA (National Security Agency) building the country's biggest spy centre at its Utah Data Center (Bamford 2012). This centre has a ‘capacity that will soon have to be measured in yottabytes, which is 1 trillion terabytes or a quadrillion gigabytes' (Poitras et al. 2013). Indeed, the revelations from the whistleblower Edward Snowden about the NSA PRISM programme point in the same direction of a future where governments and their security apparatus seek to obtain the maximum amount of data possible, and attempt to achieve real­time streaming access to it (see Greenwald et al. 2013). Bamford writes, the NSA Utah data centre is,

A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013. Flowing through its servers and routers and stored in near-bottomless databases will be all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital “pocket litter” (Bamford 2012)

The current approach is that data collection should be comprehensive and where possible exhaustive, with these data centres sucking data from the internet, mobile phone, data, satellite and landline networks, in fact, from anywhere that can be plugged into the system. This includes collecting data that cannot currently be used, perhaps due to military grade encryption by a foreign power, the thinking being that in a number of years with faster processors, decrypting the data will be easier, and will provide much-needed context on future conflict, diplomacy and even trade. With adequate data collected in the databases and archives, the next stage of normalizing the data and providing it with structure enables it to be built into forecasting models and prediction systems. Indeed, in the United Kingdom there are plans to start comprehensive collection of data with the proposal for GCHQ (the United Kingdom, Government Communications Headquarters) to have access to communications in real time for tackling crime and terrorism (BBC 2012b). Most of these systems rely on ‘abductive' processes, which enable them to work with flawed, fuzzy and incomplete data sets to undertake pattern recognition in order to identify important problems or raise possible threats. The use of ‘abductive' logics represents a new diagram for the arms of

government or the military which has begun to assess danger and risk in terms of patterns which can be algorithmically handled. For example, in the case of drones, which have grown in use by the US military from 167 in 2001 to 5,500 in 2009 and over 7,000 in 2013, their original function for surveillance has been supplemented with drone assassinations, indeed Schwartz (2013: 13) estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 people have been killed this way in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. To do this, the operators of these drone-killing machines sitting in air-conditioned rooms thousands of miles away must assess the target quickly and to do so the notion of ‘signature strikes' is used,

In a signature strike, a person is made a target not because of their identity but because of certain “signatures”... [these] signatures are patterns of behavior that are detected through signals intercepts, human sources and aerial surveillance... that indicate the presence of an important operative or a plot against US interests. (Schwartz 2013: 13)

In effect the military collects data in large quantities and performs a pattern­matching function upon it to see if such a signature is recognized. This form of reasoning is connected in a strong way with the kind of computational reasoning that is explored throughout this book. This is connected to the notion of the comprehensive collection of data because, ‘if you're looking for a needle in the haystack, you need a haystack,' according to Jeremy Bash, the former CIA chief of staff.

An enormous haystack it turns out - one comprised of the billions of minutes of daily cross-border telephone traffic. Add to that digital streams from high-bandwidth Internet cables that transport data equivalent to that held in Washington's Library of Congress around the world in the course of a few seconds. And then add to that the billions of emails sent to international destinations each day - a world of entirely uncontrolled communication. (Poitras et al 2013)

The scale of the data collection is staggering and will only grow in the future, and according to Davies (2013), for example, GCHQ has placed, ‘more than 200 probes on transatlantic cables and is processing 600m “telephone events" a day as well as up to 39m gigabytes of internet traffic. Using a program code­named Tempora, it can store and analyse voice recordings, the content of emails, entries on Facebook, the use of websites as well as the “metadata" which records who has contacted who' (Davies 2013). This industrial scale data collection spread across a number of institutions and corporations is at an unprecedented scale. By collecting such previously ephemeral information as conversations, movement through cities and consumption habits, these organizations collect our everyday memories and lifestreams and harvest them later for policing, control and exploitation. Indeed, our memory (both cultural and personal) and what might be called 'pre-thought' is also becoming a site for commercialization. This crucial half second before forming a decision about what we want to do has become identified as a site for softwarized intervention. In colonizing out thinking processes, corporations are increasingly attempting to influence the function of cognition and memory: personal, experienced and cultural.

Cultural memory is stored in computational technologies such as online photo storage, document storage, etc., and also through the digitalization of culture with large-scale digital repositories of knowledge (such as the 'Newton Project' an online archive).¹¹ In consequence, we are seeing a realignment of our contemporary culture. From the throw-away consumer experience of disposable objects, through a softwarization of culture and the economy, it appears that we are developing new forms of creativity that link together the potential for human agency and expression, and which are materialized in new technologies as a site of materialized memory and shared politics. This could be the site of a progressive politics that is linked to the importance of education and the attainment of human potential in order to develop the possibilities within each of us, and which clearly draws from the Enlightenment. This could also contribute to developing a new form of progressive economics with a potential for work that is creative, engaging and interesting. It could also reflect a dystopian turn, with real-time streaming systems used to build a panopticon of totally surveilled populations monitored by an all-seeing state, and nudged through the application of a corporate consumerist culture that operates on the level of citizens' pre-thought. Correspondingly, it highlights the importance of current debates over rights to cryptographic software that enables communication to remain opaque to state and corporate interests and the forms of resistance represented by moments like cypherpunks, megaleaks, social media and peer-to-peer networks.

A critical theory needs to address and understand these issues and provide new concepts and theories to be able to take account of these changes. This book is a contribution to the development of such a project. In order to understand, explain and offer a critical response to them, it is increasingly important that we offer a praxis and a politics that is equal to the questions raised by the digital. In the next chapter we will lay the foundations for this move by looking at the early history of the Frankfurt School and some of the key theorists whose work provides inspiration for this book.