SCHOOL SCHOOL OF ARTS AND COMMUNICATION DISSERTATION SERIES LINDA HILFLING RITASDATTER UNWRAPPING COBOL

Lessons in Crisis

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205 06 MALMÖ, SWEDEN MALMÖ, 06 205

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MALMÖ UNIVERSITY MALMÖ

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UNWRAPPING COBOL: Lessons in in Lessons COBOL: UNWRAPPING lecture performance The UNWRAPPING COBOL Doctoral Dissertation in School of Arts and Communication Dissertation Series Faculty: Culture and Society Department: School of Arts and Communication, K3 Malmö University CC* Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, 2020 Designed by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter Layout by Nina Gribat Artworks and photos by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter unless stated otherwise Copy Editor: Janet Leyton-Grant Supported by grants from The National Dissertation Council and The Doctoral Foundation ISBN 978-91-7877-115-8 (print) ISBN 978-91-7877-116-5 (pdf) DOI 10.24834/isbn.9789178771165 Print: Holmbergs, Malmö, Sweden, 2020 * This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. LINDA HILFLING RITASDATTER UNWRAPPING COBOL

Lessons in Crisis Computing

Malmö University Y2K+20

I once worked on a mainframe system whe- re the fan-folded listing of my COBOL program stood as high as a person. My program was sixteen years old when I inherited it. According to the logs, nine- ty-six programmers had worked on it before I had. I spent a year wandering its subroutines and service mo- dules, but there were still mysterious places I did not dare touch. There were bugs on this system no one had been able to fix for ten years. There were sections where adding a single line of code created odd and puzzling outcomes programmers called “side effects”: bugs that come not directly from the added code but from some later, unknown perturbation further down in the pro- cess. My program was near the end of its “life cycle”. It was close to death.

Yet this system could not be thrown away. By the time a computer system becomes old, no one completely un- derstands it. A system made out of old junky technology becomes, paradoxically, precious.

System administrator Ellen Ullman, 1997

CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...... 11

INTRODUCTION...... 17

APPROACHES...... 33

LESSON I: EXECUTION...... 57 1.1 INTERFACING EXECUTION, BANGALORE SEPTEMBER 2014...... 65 COBOL, A COmmon Business-Oriented programming Language...... 67 The Inherent Paradox of User-Friendliness...... 68 Commanding without Command ...... 75 Cobol as a Panoptic Tool ...... 80 1.2 DISPLACEMENT ...... 83 Automatic Management...... 86 1.3 EXECUTING/EXECUTED COBOL...... 89 Perform Until...... 89 Lack of Charisma...... 90

LESSON II: CRISIS...... 97 2.1 BUGS IN THE WAR ROOM...... 103 Bugs ...... 105 War Rooms...... 107 Anxious Flows...... 117 Crisis in Progress...... 122 Economies and/of Execution...... 124 LESSON III: MAINTENANCE...... 129 3.1 PROLOGUE: HUMAN FACTOR...... 135 Conflations ...... 135 Human Factor versus Human Factor...... 138 3.2 A DRAB; A DRIVE: RE-VISITING STUDIES ON MAINTENANCE ...... 149 That Which Sustains...... 149 Improvisation, Creativity, and Complexity...... 151 Beyond Debugging...... 154 Eternal Revisions...... 156 Enacting Ontological Order and Stability...... 157 An Inherent Paradox...... 159 Maintaining Networks and Data...... 162 3.3 BROKEN / UNBROKEN...... 167 Surfacing Maintenance Work...... 167 On Being a Favorite Example...... 170 Which Broken World?...... 171 3.4 MAINTAINING LEGACIES...... 179 Escaped Obsolescence...... 179 Media Undead...... 183 Undead Systems—A Majority of Silence...... 184 Maintaining the Undead...... 186 and the Silent Majority...... 191 3.5 MAINTAINING FLOWS...... 201 On the Production of Spaces of Flows / Global Space...... 202 Global Education Center, ...... 203 Universal, Virtual and Specific Bodies...... 205 Bodies in Universal “Real” Space...... 207 Institutionalization ...... 211 3.6 MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT...... 219 Developed Developing Development...... 222 IV: CRISIS COMPUTING...... 233 4 CRISIS COMPUTING...... 243 Dreams of Full Automation: The Fourth Industrial Revolution...... 247 Encoding Displacement...... 251 Internalization...... 255 Asymmetric Arrangements...... 257 Unsettling Ontologies...... 261

REFERENCES...... 267

A COMPLETE INDEX OF ALL ELEMENTS LEADING TO THE END OF THE WORLD (IN THIS THESIS)...... 291

Acknowledgements

For this project, I am foremost indebted to my COBOL teachers: the educators, engineers, and students of COBOL in who have shared their expertise, experiences, and stories of COBOL with me.

I would like to thank my supervisors Susan Kozel, Maria Hellström Reimer, and Florian Cramer for their tremendous support and en- couragement throughout this thesis project’s different stages. Susan for your precise comments and engaged critique that has been instru- mental to the continued development of my arguments. Furthermo- re, I am thankful for your gentle push to make me take on teaching in embodied interaction design, which I enjoyed and learned so much from. Maria, when I started as a doctoral student, you encouraged me to approach the PhD as a kunskapsresa (journey of knowled- ge), which I should embark on and see where it would take me. I’m ever thankful for your encouraging of this freedom of perspective, without which the project would have been unfeasible. Florian, thanks for your immense support during all these years, which star- ted back when you were the supervisor for my M.A. studies in media design. I have always enjoyed your uncompromising and ever enga- ging insights and feedback, not to mention your unflinching belief in my projects that has helped me keep up the motivation throughout this extensive process.

Big thanks to Matthew Fuller, for your generous commitment when undertaking the role as opponent for my 90% seminar, your thorough, engaging and inspiring comments and critical inputs at that stage were defining for the wrapping-up of the project. For early stage feedback, I would like to thank Temi Odomosu and Tobias Denskus who provided important reflections during the first semi- nar presentation of this project. I am also thankful to my green-light readers, especially Tina Askenius for the detailed feedback.

Gratitude goes out to my fellow PhD candidates at the K3 School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University: Jacek Smolicki, Eric Snodgrass, and Mahmoud Keshavarz for the vibrant discussions and talks and seminars we shared in the early stages of my project, to Anuradha Venugopal Reddy for your ever thoughtful and engaging remarks and comments, Michelle Westerlaken, Marika Hedemyr, Er- liza Lopez Pedersen, Alicia Smedberg, Johan Farkas, Therese Hell- berg, Veera Virmasalo, Sara Gottschalk, Hugo Boothby, and Roel Roscam Abbing for your wonderful support and for creating such an accommodating work environment.

Many thanks to the many other inspiring colleagues with whom I have taught and learned from over the years: Kristina Lindström, David Cuartielles, Nikita Mazurov, Temi Odomosu, Gunnel Petter- son, Tony Olsson, Daniel Spikol, Anne-Marie Hansen, Pia Jönsson, Håkan Magnusson, Elisabeth M. Nilsson, Berndt Clavier, and Jonas Lövgren among many others. And great thanks to my students, who- se challenging reflections and commitment have been an absolutely life-saving contrast to the isolation of writing.

Thanks also to Per-Anders Hillgren and the supervising committee. In this context I would like to thank the K3 management who has been generously supportive and shown dedication to us doctoral students: Sara Bjärstorp, Åsa Elgameil, Susanne Lundborg, Cecilia Hultman, Erik Källoff, Fredrik Lindström, Carina Listerborn and especially Ulrika Sjöberg. Moreover, I thank Simon Niedenthal and Micke Sve- demar for introducing me to your colleagues in Bangalore and the IT staff for your patience with my partitions. Also, many thanks to Janet Leyton-Grant and Nina Gribat, who both came in at a late stage for vital copy editing and layout respectively.

Outside the walls of my home institution, I am grateful to Olle Essvik and Joel Nordqvist from Rojal Förlag, for our invaluable collabora- tion on the Endless Endtime—A Complete Index of All Elements Le- ading to the End of the World book project. Olle, your bookbinding is marvelous, and I have enjoyed your wonderful company during our workshops and presentations. I am looking forward to this pro- ject’s infinite continuation!

As the reader will notice, the concept of execution is central to my artistic practice and research and the initial reflections on this were triggered early on in the thesis project at The Participatory Informa- tion Technology Centre of Århus University. Great thanks to Christi- an Ulrich Andersen and the Centre for the kind invitation to present my work there in the summer of 2014. At this seminar, I had the pleasure of meeting Winnie Soon, with whom reflections on execu- tion as a means for radical artistic interventions flourished and the ideas of developing a collaboration between Århus University and K3 emerged. Back at K3, these ideas were developed even further in conversations with my PhD colleague Eric Snodgrass and together with Helen Pritchard, Magda Tyźlik-Carver, and many others, these conversations evolved into what became the Critical Thing Group. I am deeply thankful to this group for the conversations and discussions we have had among us and with various audiences. Thanks also to Geoff Cox, Søren Pold and Christian Ulrich Andersen at Århus University as well as Bo Reimer at K3/Medea for supporting the group. Furthermore, thanks to Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Susan Schuppli, and Femke Snelting who as part of the group’s “*.exe” events have all contributed to my research with much treasured re- sponses and comments. Especially thanks to Susan Schuppli, your incitement for me, during a stroll through the city of Malmö, to ar- ticulate a concept of my own in my thesis has been decisive for how I have ended up enunciating this research through the concept of Crisis Computing.

The Bugs in the War Room exhibition was hosted by Overgaden Institute of Contemporary Art in Copenhagen in 2016. In relation to that I would like to thank Merete Jankowski, Anna Holm, and Trine Bork for such a supportive and engaging opening of the gallery doors to some Crisis Computing. In 2018, the Winchester School of Art hosted the third installment of the Endless Endtime project with my exhibition Now we have Proof! Here, I would especially like to thank the head of the Winchester Gallery, August Davis along with Ryan Bishop, Ed D’Souza, and Noriko Suzuki-Bosco for your ama- zing support and commitment. Also, thanks to everyone who over the years has supported and encouraged artistic installments of this project including especially the Piksel Festival (Gisle Frøysland and Maite Cajaraville) and the Asimtria Festival in Peru, Sensorium LiU with Norrköping Konstmuseum. Mathias Kokholm with Antipyrine Bookshop at Århus Kunsthal along with many others.

A very special note of gratitude goes out to Zeenath Hassan for your invitation to Kristoffer and myself to join you at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore back in 2010. You intro- duced us to Meena Vari and Prayas Abnihav who became paramount to the initialization and realization of OutResourcing. This was an artistic research and exchange project which supported the develop- ment of the thesis project in its very early stages and also involved collaborations with the Goethe Institute in Bangalore and transme- diale in Berlin.

Thank you Padmini, for your enthusiastic involvement and unbeata- ble COBOL expertise and to your family for opening their home to me. Also, thanks to Bhargava, for your openness, passion and love of COBOL: I sincerely regret your much too early passing.

A substantial part of this project was written and developed in my studio in Gerichtshöfe, Berlin and I would like to thank my studio comrades, especially Wolfgang Spahn and Antti Pussinen for our many chats and coffees together. A further thanks to Christian Fau- bel, Darsha Hewitt, Brendan Howell, Sreejata Roy, Joy Mrityunjay Chatterjee, Sebastian Lütgert, Tsila Hassine, Tina Tonagel, Prof. Di- nesha, Pelle Ehn, Nikita Mazurov, Leslie Dunton-Downer, Archana Prasad, Jo Zahn, Lotte Løvring, Prayas Abnihav, Martin Conrads and Fredrik Svensk for inspiring conversations and inputs at diffe- rent stages of the project.

Furthermore, I am deeply grateful to my dearest friends Nina Gribat, Sheena McGrandles, Vanja Larberg, Laila Lørup, Anders Aarkrog, and Line Strandgaard for always being there, and for the unconditio- nal support from my lovely family: Mom, Dad, Rita and Preben, my brothers, Lars and Niels and wonderful nieces and nephews, Sofus, Signe, Sigurd, and Asta-Fernanda.

And last but certainly not least, I thank the two people who are the- single-most important for this project’s realization, Kristoffer and Wilbur. Wilbur: you have been subjected to my COBOL lessons your entire life, starting from the moment you were only a tiny seed of life in my belly when I engaged with COBOL for the first time back in the fall of 2011 together with my students at Srishti. Later, in 2018, you even became a participant in the extensive research travels yourself. So it should not come as a surprise that as you started to read, you claimed that the word GLOBAL must be a misspelling of COBOL. Just as this research project affected you, it has also been affected by you, hence it has flourished through your changing inte- rests and hobbies from zombies to Scratch programming. Kristoffer, my love and life-companion: our conversations and laughter have gently carried me through this project. I do not dare to think of all the times you have been forced to listen to my analysis and theories of COBOL, or I have asked you for a comment or to double check my texts for typos or grammatical errors, or expected you to share my own excitement of the discovery of yet another term which ac- cording to the Endless Endtime added up to 666 (I guess it is not a coincident that Terence Hill was one of the first terms I discovered :-). Thank you Kristoffer for your infinite patience, your ever-shining brightness, and not the least your wonderfully skewed humor. Thanks for being.

Berlin, Copenhagen and Malmö, July 2020

INTRODUCTION

Finalizing a thesis on the frictions of global flows could hardly have taken place under more dramatic circumstances than during the spring of 2020 as the global world was hit by the coronavirus cri- sis. Symptoms of the new coronavirus, which induces the respirato- ry illness, COVID-19, first appeared in a province in Central China around New Year, but spread quickly to the rest of the world over the course of the following three months, resulting in worldwide lock- downs during March 2020 in an attempt to limit and prevent further spread of the virus. Countries and borders closed down, regions clo- sed down, cities and their workplaces and even homes closed down. In other words, flows ceased to flow and everyday life as we had known it came to a standstill.

As part of the lockdown there was a global call for doctors and nur- ses, intensive care beds, hazmat suits, face masks, respirators, hand sanitizer, but also a rather unanticipated call for a certain type of engineer, namely those familiar with the programming language CO- BOL. On April 4, the state governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, held a press briefing during which he made an urgent call for what he mistakenly called Cobalt programmers. Murphy obviously did not mean the silvery-blue metallic chemical element Co with the ato- mic number 27, which is used in lithium-ion batteries. His call was for programmers of COBOL. It is not without historical irony that Murphy would not remember its name correctly, as COBOL as a programming language has been regarded as outmoded and dead for many years.

The call for COBOL programmers came as a surprise because al- though we are all taught the importance of doctors and nurses, not many of us would even be acquainted with a COBOL programmer, let alone expect COBOL programmers to be key to the up-keeping of society in a state of emergency. To understand this better, we need to take a closer look at the history of COBOL and its implications in the hidden human-computer-interaction, politics, and economics underlying the flows of global information architectures. 177 The overall aim of this thesis is to investigate frictions in such flows through the notion of Crisis Computing, focusing on material mani- festations of execution, crisis, and maintenance. It is the result of more than eight years of engagement with COBOL, an encounter which has led me to reflect on the relations between code, execution, and maintenance on a global scale. Computational execution may appear to be a smooth, seamless process of automating commands, but as I argue in this thesis, such presumptions are based on a uni- versal vision that omits the underlying, blackboxed entanglement of execution with crisis and maintenance. COBOL is a case in point for this entanglement and thus this thesis is structured through a series of lessons, reflecting my own process of learning and reflecting on, and in, this supposedly obsolete language. These lessons are an ex- tension of my artistic research practice, the outcome of which is this doctoral thesis as well as several exhibitions, interventions, perfor- mative lectures, workshops, and an “infinite” publication.

COBOL

COBOL is an for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, a high-level programming language developed by the US Department of Defense at the end of the 1950s. The language was designed to be easily accessible even for non-programmers, through its explicitly “people oriented” design. Good intentions notwith- standing, it is no exaggeration to say that COBOL has, over the years, ended up becoming one of the most detested programming languages of all time. By way of example, the COBOL entry in The New Hacker’s Dictionary (1996) reads:

:COBOL: /koh´bol/, n. [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {code grinder}s to do boring mindless things on {dino- saur} mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL programmers are {suit}s or {code grinder}s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is sel- dom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror.

18 From the outset, COBOL was met with great skepticism and the in- dustry was hesitant to support the new language, which was viewed as clumsy and too verbose by expert engineering culture. Conse- quently, in 1975 the famous Dutch mathematician Edsger Dijkstra boldly stated, that “COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.” (Dijkstra 1982, p. 130) And, although COBOL has become one of the most widely applied programming languages, such discontent holds true even today. This became evident to me in the initial phase of my PhD studies through the following incident: On one of my daily train commutes, I happe- ned to sit next to a highly esteemed professor emeritus in the field of interaction design. As I had just been at work, the professor politely asked about my research and the topic of my thesis, and when I pas- sionately started to describe the case of COBOL and my analysis of it, he gave me a puzzled look. After a short bewildering moment, he said: “I have to confess something to you, COBOL was actually the first programming language I ever learned.” He went on to explain that he had been subjected to COBOL programming during his years of compulsory military service. After the detailed story, he suddenly added, “I have never told anyone that I know COBOL.”

Similar instances to the above have occurred during the course of my research. Another highly acclaimed professor, this time at a Univer- sity in South India, revealed a similar story to me: After pursuing a PhD in physics, he was employed by a private company which offe- red to pay him three times more than he could earn as a researcher but not to work with anything related to his doctoral degree in phy- sics. Actually, the company’s manager didn’t know what a PhD was, but since the professor had graduated from a well-known university, the manager reckoned that the professor was highly intelligent and thus a perfect fit for the job of learning to write COBOL applica- tions. For both the Scandinavian as well as the Indian professors, our conversations seemed to be the first time they ever talked about their hidden COBOL competences. After all, COBOL is not a skill you put on your CV. At least not if you are a well-respected professor of either interaction design or in Sweden or India.

In spite of this omission, or perhaps, exactly because of it, COBOL, to me, takes an uncharted, yet primary, position in the history of interaction design. Despite its history of neglect and dismissal, the

19 language may be the first example of a deliberately user-friendly de- sign interface. In fact, COBOL inhabits a classic dilemma of interac- tion design where on the one hand technologies are blackboxed in order to be as user-friendly as possible, and on the other hand, the blackboxing results in the user experiencing a lack of control and lack of understanding of the actual logic of the technology. Not to mention that COBOL was the first programming language specifical- ly tailored to expanding the domain of computation and making pro- gramming and automatic management integral to everyday life. The language actually presages both the vision of full automation and the drawbacks of the supposedly transparent and user-friendly design of digital interfaces today. There is increased focus on the need to understand the that are the motors of such interfaces and thus interaction design as a discipline also needs to turn its attention away from front-ends to such otherwise hidden digital materialities. As part of this endeavor, incorporating the legacy of programming languages such as COBOL might be a crucial critical revision in the field, as my analysis will show that it offers a prototypical case study in the early history of user-friendly design.

Furthermore, despite its odiousness, COBOL is still around. And re- gardless of the language being disregarded and broadly considered a legacy (old but still running) or even obsolete language (with no one actually using it to develop new applications), the amount of active lines of COBOL code continues to increase every year, simply due to the maintenance of its legacy systems (Micro Focus 2020). This has led some sources to claim, as late as in 2017, that seventy percent of all business transactions are still executed through COBOL applica- tions (Micro Focus 2017). Moreover, according to Reuters ninety-fi- ve percent of all ATM transactions rely on COBOL, forty-three per- cent of banking systems are built on COBOL and eighty percent of all in-person-transactions are done using COBOL (Hartman 2017).

A point in case is the recent surfacing of the importance of COBOL as part of the COVID-19 crisis. As a result of the standstill imposed through the national lockdown, the US unemployment rate escalated rapidly within a very short time span. People were being laid off due to the slowing down or complete halt of business operations. Hence, from a historic low unemployment rate of 3.8% in the US in

20 February 2020, the number rocketed to 14.4 % two months later in April, which is the highest number recorded since the Second World War (Kochhar 2020). This in turn affected the information systems administrating the unemployment benefits. In the US, more than half of all states have key systems like unemployment benefits written in COBOL (Sullivan and Marte 2020). These systems may be more than forty years old and the exploding amount of new unemploy- ment claims as part of the COVID-19 crisis became a struggle for the information architectures administrating them.

For example, the Department of Labor in Vermont would usually be handling around 3200 claims at a time. Their system was designed to handle a maximum capacity of nine thousand, but in four weeks, requests jumped to seventy thousand (Heintz 2020). In New Jersey, unemployment insurance claims in the second week of March 2020 numbered around nine thousand, but the following week there were around 116,000 claims, and in the last week of March the numbers had rocketed to 206,000 claims per week (Miller 2020). Such enor- mous increased pressure on the systems led to breakdowns, errors, and delays, leading to the state governor, Phil Murphy’s public anno- uncement asking for COBOL programmers.

As the above example shows, COBOL is indeed alive and kicking. Accordingly, there are still people adding COBOL skills to their CVs, but as the sudden COVID-19-related demand for COBOL pro- grammers demonstrated, those people are most likely not Western engineers. Given COBOL’s bad reputation and neglected status, the programming language has since long been omitted from computer science education curricula in the Global North. Subsequently, the COBOL workforce of today is mainly to be found in the Global South, which means COBOL’s survival not only challenges linear no- tions of development, but also points to asymmetric power structu- res and interdependencies of technological development and labor manifesting themselves globally. This thesis will, in the course of a close reading of COBOL, expose socio-economic as well as geo-po- litical relations between software, hardware, and global flows, and, not least, inherent social, economic, and cultural divides within those flows.

21 An engagement with COBOL allows for a glimpse into global infor- mation systems and architectures that are otherwise concealed and inaccessible. This undertaking in COBOL reveals a hidden side of human interaction within information architectures: a form of hu- man-machine-interaction, which paradoxically does not come about due to the type of design in which the human is supposed to be the subject of the design process. Instead, it is a hidden and blackboxed form of human-machine-interaction, taking place at the back-back- end of systems. There, humans carry out tedious labor processes that ensure the systems are continuously executing and performing in what appears to be frictionless flows. The workforce is, for instan- ce, programmers working with the maintenance of legacy systems like COBOL, and thereby ensuring the continuous flow of global businesses i.e. bank transactions, logistics, retail, ticket reservation, and so forth. One could argue that these workers are keeping up glo- balization (Henke 1999). Furthermore, this process could be descri- bed as a continuous re-enactment of technological stability (Houston 2017), or as termed in this thesis, “Crisis Computing.”

By calling attention to hidden and opaque aspects of labor that are sustaining our information architectures, my research relates to re- cent studies that, similarly, are unearthing the role of human labor as part of the up-keeping and sustaining of media flows (Roberts 2019; Gillespie 2018; Irani 2016, 2015, 2014; Irani and Silberman 2014, 2013). Through studies of, for instance, Commercial Content Mo- deration or the optimization of AI data-sets through crowd-sourced workers, these research projects have, in different ways, pinpointed the crucial importance of foregrounding the human labor processes taking over where algorithms fall short. Equally important work has been carried out by stressing the underlying exploited labor submit- ted by users within social media platforms (Terranova 2004; Fuchs 2014; Scholtz 2013; Zuboff 2019; Chun 2016).

While building on this wide body of research, a slightly different angle is taken in this thesis. While also being critical of it, my thesis relates to so-called “broken-world thinking” (Jackson 2014) as well as Paul Virilio’s notion of the “integral accident” (2007, pp. 10–11), by arguing that crisis is integral to the execution of all supposed- ly automatic computational processes. Automation, in order to not

22 break down and stop automating, needs to be continuously maintai- ned and sustained as an ongoing and continuous process that I dub “Crisis Computing.” This is an intersectional analysis, because of the multi-level nature of the keeping-up of appearances. Subsequently, in order to understand and analyze COBOL, as it is situated within intersecting and multi-directional power structures, a focus on “mul- tiple layers” of oppression (Combahee River Collective [1978] 2014) through analysis of intersections of domains of power has been gre- atly important to this research (Crenshaw 1991; Collins 2000, 2016, 2019). Accordingly, rather than focusing on human labor in itself, the thesis turns to intersecting and multidirectional power structures reflected in the entanglement of underlying material conditions, tech- nological infrastructures, histories, socio-economic, geo-political, and cultural aspects, in which such back-back-end human labor is embedded. In the following, I examine questions of power in relation to the neglecting of the “keeping up” as they manifest through global information systems.

Execution, Crisis, Maintenance

In this thesis, COBOL becomes a case of what I call Crisis Compu- ting through a process of “unwrapping” that involves three inter- secting concepts: execution, crisis and maintenance. “Execution” is commonly defined as an act “of carrying into effect” (OED, n.d.), but it also brings associations of death and punishment: killing in accordance with the law. And it is regarded as central to power and command, as exemplified by the executive, the one who rules and manages. Code can manifest such power as a performative spe- ech act, through for instance Alexander Galloway’s statement that code is language doing what it says (Galloway 2004, pp. 165–166). However, to me code does not simply enact or execute power but is also continuously executed by its context, for example, its use and its socioeconomic, cultural, and geo-political relations. Therefore, by stepping away from etymological roots and allowing myself to re-read, perhaps even misread and explore the concept of applied execution, I find myself with a rather different understanding of code and execution. Despite visions such as Franz Kafka’s ([1914] 2011) depiction of the perfect execution machine in his short story In the

23 Penal Colony, the one who executes is seldom the one deciding a sentence or commanding. Rather, between the order and the actual execution lies a space of possibilities, of mis-communication, nego- tiation, disobedience, and/or desertion, in other words, a space of crisis, and a possible turning point.

My point is that execution is neither autonomous nor automatic. It is not a one-directional power, but is, on the contrary, constituted by its use/operation and maintenance. Hence, execution is constantly on the verge of breakdown due to its operationality, and needs to be sustained and maintained in order to continue to execute at all. Crisis, execution, and maintenance are in this way part of a tightly interwoven triadic formation, which I dub “Crisis Computing.” The concept of Crisis Computing thus deviates from Galloway and oth- ers’ understanding of code as a performative speech act, and expands on Wendy Chun’s (2008) turn to the machine’s performativity by in- cluding Nathan Ensmenger’s (2009) attention to the social relations of which the code is part of.

Thesis Format

Throughout the thesis, the concept of Crisis Computing is examined and discussed in the course of an iterative close reading, a diffractive “re-turn,” to use Karen Barad’s concept (2014), of the curious case of COBOL, which forms a series of LESSONS. Each lesson looks at one of the main components of Crisis Computing and interrogates this concept through an analysis of different aspects of COBOL.

This proceeds through a two-way implementation of the lesson for- mat fleshed out here: on the one hand, these LESSONS reflect my own subjection to COBOL, and document my research journey to India in order to learn the language. On the other hand, through the- se LESSONS, I am also able to subject you, the reader to this other- wise neglected “criminal offense” of teaching you about COBOL.

In this way, I adapt American artist Adrian Piper’s “Funk Lessons” methodology of using an ambiguous and underrated cultural pheno-

24 mena as a starting point for discussions, reflections, and confronta- tions of asymmetric power structures.1 Piper turned to funk music and explored the lesson format as a means of discussing and con- fronting complex racial and cultural barriers. There is of course no way a lecture in a programming language tailored to writing payrolls could compete with a funk dance lesson. However, I hope that these COBOL lessons will still open up discussion and debate around neg- lected and dismissed narratives and power structures within global digital cultures and their messy and sometimes contradictory sites.

The thesis takes the shape of an ambiguous, double-sided artifact: a book to be read from two sides. The book has two front covers (which also make up the back covers), which are almost identical: they share the same title, but the description differs slightly. If reading from one side, the Lesson is literally a lesson, meaning its one hundred and thirty-one pages consist of a series of slides and transcriptions of a performative lecture, unravelling the histories of COBOL.

If read from the other side, you are reading this introduction along with the rest of the traditional thesis text.

This design choice is a way for me to implement my artistic research practice within the more traditional thesis format, as being not only complementary, but also entangled. In other words, this format is an attempt to avoid a split between practice and theory and follows Hannula’s warning that artistic research should not mean an artist who transforms into a scientist analyzing her own work (2005). I see my research practice as a different means of diffraction through matter and a way to conceptualize the issues that the thesis opens up to and also to reach different audiences, opening up the questions discussed on different levels of association and expertise. This allows for different ways of entering the issues and different mindsets to enter through different materialities and contexts.

The thesis is wrapped in a dust jacket that is a minimally re-app- ropriated cover of my first COBOL textbook, handed to me by my

1 Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons (1982–1984), was a participatory performance project where the artist, through lessons in funk dance and funk music exposed her audiences to funk music and its neglect and thereby opened up discussions on class and race (Piper 1996, pp. 195–216). The lessons started out as intimate dinner events, but developed into large scale events hosted at UC Berkeley (November 1983), the San Francisco Art Institute (February 1984), New Langton Arts (1975–2009), and San Francisco (March 1984).

25 teacher in Bangalore, and which is analyzed in the MAINTENANCE lesson. In order to read the “real” title of the thesis, whether the per- formative lecture-front-page or the thesis-front-page, you will have to literally un-wrap the textbook dust jacket.

Thesis Structure

The thesis is structured according to lessons in the three main con- cepts EXECUTION, CRISIS, and MAINTENANCE, which form the triadic constellation of CRISIS COMPUTING. Each lesson exami- nes one of the main components of crisis computing in relation to COBOL and its entanglement with the other concepts. The MAIN- TENANCE lesson occupies the most space, as it is the core area of analysis and research, having a bearing on the other lessons. A fourth concluding section transports my findings from the first three lessons to a discussion of automation in a contemporary setting.

The thesis opens with the APPROACHES section, which presents an overall introduction to the main methodological and theoretical app- roaches that have informed this research. Here, I discuss unwrapping more specifically as an analytical tool, not primarily for revealing, but for diffraction, where I consider the programming language COBOL from multiple, interconnected angles. Thereby, COBOL’s multiple entangled histories are themselves unwrapped and with them politics and discourses of power through different situations and at different times. I discuss how this unwrapping is informed by the apparatus of observation, which then also includes my own position within the research. This includes a consideration of the Lesson format of the dissertation. Here I review my own experience of subjecting myself to COBOL lessons during my research journey to India, and how be- ing in this learning-situation was affecting the relationship between me as a Western PhD researcher/artist and the engineers I met. From there, I turn to questions of how material engagement on a granular level, as part of my artistic research practice, may be understood as a form of expanded maintenance where I alter and modify the structu- res and systems which I am examining. This is an alteration not in or- der to propose solutions, but which is trying to modify the structures by inserting moments and possibilities for self-critique and analytical

26 understanding of the issues at hand. From there, the thesis sets out on a critical examination of computing within COBOL through the Lessons: Execution, Crisis, and Maintenance.

The first lesson, EXECUTION, examines utopian visions of auto- matic management as they were manifested in the initial ideas and early implementations of COBOL. The main focus is a close reading of COBOL, and the visions behind it, as it was developed in the late 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. The section looks at code, but not in order to single out the code as an authority of power, but rather to investigate the double movement between execution consti- tuted through code, as well as code constituted through execution. My point is that execution is neither autonomous nor automatic. It is not a one-directional power, but on the contrary, is influenced by its context, its maintenance and its operation. Execution can in this way also be understood spatially, as noted by Wendy Chun, as a site which occupies “the gap between code and result, the space for and of execution. A space of determination and thus a space of political agency and action” (Chun 2015). Throughout this section I unfold this spatial notion of execution in contrast to the absolute approach to space as enacted through utopian visions of automatic management. In this context COBOL plays a significant role, since it was specifically tailored for widening the domain of computation and thus include automatic management in various mundane and everyday services and functions, in contrast to previous computa- tion practices which had focused more purely on number crunching. The section critically reflects on the understanding of execution and automatic management as performative activations of abstract sym- bols of code and how this relates to universal world perspectives. Through the use of critical spatial theory, this universalism under- pinning execution is ultimately revealed as a form of continuation of colonial power structures of oppression.

In the final part of the execution lesson, I turn away from the initial utopian visions of COBOL as an interface of frictionless, automatic management. Turning to material conditions such as the influence of hardware, as well as COBOL’s cultural context, I address how COBOL applications are not only executing smooth automation processes, but are themselves being executed. This is introducing the

27 questioning and critique of the dominant discourse of seamless auto- mation, which I will interrogate further throughout the other parts of the thesis.

From the critical look at transparent, user-friendly interfaces and frictionless flows attended to in the first lesson, the second lesson, CRISIS, looks at the moment failure appears and smoothness and flows are interrupted. Through a close reading of the Y2K bug as a prime example of technological crisis, the lesson argues that crisis is integral to execution. The Y2K bug was depicted as something to be put right once and for all, but as this lesson examines, the bug oc- curred as a result of another method of problem solving, that is, the most rational and economic execution possible. The supposed tech- nical error of the Y2K bug was initially itself a clever solution to a problem, which with time turned into a new problem. The Y2K bug exhibits how the bug, and with it crisis, is an integral feature of tech- nology’s situatedness in the world, and thus something that needs to be continuously maintained in order to execute at all. As argued by thinkers from Heidegger to Latour, technological systems only be- come visible to us when they fail and break down. Similarly, a crisis like the Y2K bug, not only exposed the entangled relations between execution, crisis, and maintenance, but furthermore, through its con- nection to the outsourcing boom in India, it also exposed the power structures integral to global information flows. Hence, the CRISIS lesson unwraps neo-colonial divides within global information flows by focusing on the discourses surrounding the Y2K bug as well as its material manifestations in software infrastructure and labor, and how it exposed neo-colonial divides within the global information flow.

The six sections in the third lesson, MAINTENANCE, examine the paradox of maintenance and linear technological development by turning to that which is most often an overlooked part of compute- rization and automatic management, namely the back-back-end ma- intenance of the systems themselves. In line with American perfor- mance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who in her 1969 “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” asked, “after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” I am questioning who is going to be “taking out the garbage” after the digital revolution. In

28 other words, I am concerned with the question of who will be main- taining the automatic systems when all maintenance has supposedly been abolished and replaced by automation. I will address the notion of maintenance in different ways: In the prologue and the two first sections from a more general perspective and in the last three sections more specifically through a tracing of topologies of maintenance in the context of software through a close reading of the programming language COBOL.

The lesson opens with a prologue presenting a general discussion of maintenance through a comparative investigation of human factors in technology. From there the first section moves on to critically re-evaluating the notion of maintenance as an object of study within different fields (from philosophy, sociology, ethnography, science, and technology studies to computer sciences). In the second section a post-colonial reading of maintenance is presented and here I examine studies dealing with the “surfacing” of maintenance work, while at- tempting to critically scrutinize intersecting power structures at play when we as researchers are turning to that which is hidden. Here I fo- cus on the politics of the concept of “broken-world thinking” when this concept is relocated from its initial context of a Western design research environment and instead applied to a third world context. Possible pitfalls of “broken-world thinking” are discussed and an alternative intersectional approach is introduced.

This part relates to the conditions of my own particular case study which involves studies of maintenance of global information archi- tectures carried out through outsourcing for Western companies by IT consultancy companies located in India. These studies are presen- ted as typologies of maintenance throughout the last three chapters.

Section three, “Maintaining Legacies,” consists of an analysis of the material, cultural, and structural domain of the maintenance of le- gacy systems exemplified by COBOL applications that are still in use despite their invisibility and supposed obsolescence. The chapter looks into how they are still running and asks why they are still run- ning as well as under what conditions they are still running. Further- more, I ask what it means for our preconceptions and discussions of the supposedly linear technological development. These examples are discussed in relation to the concept of linear technological deve-

29 lopment as integral to capitalist ideology, as well as in relation to me- dia and design theoretical approaches which diverts from teleological and evolutionary linear development.

The lack of programmers with COBOL skills today is a big issue. In section four, “Maintaining Flows,” I turn to the meta-spaces of ma- intenance, more specifically to sites where the maintainers themselves are being “produced.” In India, like the rest of the world, COBOL is not part of computer science curriculums at universities. Noneth- eless, the large Indian software consultancy corporations have their own training institutes, where newly hired employees are trained. In this context, I examine the corporate campus as a “global space,” which appears to be a virtual space but which, through my analysis, turns out to be a colonial space. As a further reflection on these spa- ces, I discuss and criticize Thomas Friedman’s concept of “Globali- zation 3.0” (2005).2

In the final section of the chapter, “Maintaining ‘Development,’” I turn to the meta production of global flows as seen through the per- spective of the teaching of COBOL and I ask what it actually is that these COBOL engineers are being educated to become. Here I draw on Christian Fuchs’s analysis of the racist manner in which space is being re-organized through outsourcing, in order to exploit Indian software labor in a global context (Fuchs 2014, p. 205), as well as Doreen Massey’s analysis of globalization, as a form of “claustrop- hobic holism” characterized by a teleological developmental project (Massey 2005, p. 77). My own analysis, however, shows an inherent contradiction to this aspect, as the Indian engineers are maintaining business critical legacy systems of the supposedly developed Global North.

The fourth and final chapter of this thesis, CRISIS COMPUTING, takes the “lessons” learned from my engagement with COBOL in the previous parts of the thesis, and transports them into a broader

2 Even though this is a concept stemming from a neoliberal business journalist, and not a proper research framework, I turn to Friedman because his vivid accounts of visits to, for example, the In- fosys Bangalore headquarters have been central to the conception of a “flat world.” Friedman’s ideas have become integral to production of the imaginary of India’s tech boom and his books cannot be avoided. In Bangalore they are in every bookstore as well as being sold on street corners by local street vendors.

30 discussion of Crisis Computing in relation to current understandings of automation. The concluding chapter is an investigation into recent years’ buzzwords and terms such as the “Fourth Industrial Revolu- tion,” “Second Machine Age,” and “Industry 4.0.” It examines how the claims inherent in these terms—of new eras promoting automa- tion, boosted by neural network-based AI, as key to fundamental economical and societal changes—are grounded in utopian visions of automation and execution, which neglect crisis, maintenance, and human labor as integral to the execution/automa- tion processes themselves. From there, I turn to the un-wrapping of different sites of Crisis Computing where human labor is blackboxed in the name of automation. The first example examines the back- ends, which (similarly to the overall systems maintenance taking pla- ce at the back-back-ends) are blackboxing human labor in different ways. This ranges from back-ends literally being hidden spatially by displacement, either through outsourcing to places far away from the users or to the far end of high-tech campuses where the workers are employed. They can also be functionally hidden, by being black- boxed behind wrappers () which are turning human labor into scalable infrastructure (Irani 2014). In the second example, I turn to the front-ends and examine how labor is internalized as users allow themselves to be subjected to omnipresent tracking and surveillance.

Finally, I examine how a term like “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is being hyped in developing countries, and how this furthermore re- sembles the way developing countries were marginalized in relation to the Y2K problem at the turn at the millennium, as examined ear- lier in the thesis. A call for designers to, through the concept of Crisis Computing, engage in a more situated practice with the awareness of the socio-political and spatial inequalities of users, maintainers, and developers alike, wraps up this final lesson.

31 32 APPROACHES

The main object of research for this thesis, COBOL, is a contempo- rary anachronism, which is both culturally, technically, and structu- rally difficult to access and encounter. Culturally, COBOL is by and large regarded as obsolete and thus no longer existing. As technical infrastructure, COBOL applications are blackboxed behind smooth, up-to-date, front-end user interfaces. Moreover, structurally, pro- grams written in COBOL are shielded behind the corporate gates of the powerful Fortune 200 companies,3 which are still dependent on them, along with the correspondingly solid walls of the software consultancy corporations who are taking care of the displaced main- tenance of the programs in India and elsewhere.

Anthropologist Brian Larkin states that, “[b]ecause the basic object of infrastructure is so diverse and can be analysed in so many different ways, the choice of methodology is a theoretical question” (Larkin 2013, p. 338). Following Larkin’s line of thought, my engagement with COBOL has forced me to theorize and reflect on what it means, as an artist researcher, to unwrap and reveal that which is otherwise hidden and concealed. Throughout this chapter, I outline these in- tertwined theoretical as well as methodological reflections, beginning with a discussion of notions of power in relation to my methodology of unwrapping. Here, I first discuss Bruno Latour’s theorization of the concept of “blackboxing,” which involves exercises of mapping and tracing, and an encouragement to “follow the action,” as part of a reverse-blackboxing of how systems and structures are construc- ted. This at first appears to come close to “unwrapping.” However, I critique and extend Latour’s model, which I argue is too linear, first through expanding upon how power, with Foucualt, is always multi- directional and transversal. I propose intersectional theory as means of analyzing these complex, multidirectional domains of power and I discuss how the researcher’s own role and position is influencing the

3 “Fortune 200 Companies” are companies ranked in the top 200 on Fortune Magazine’s annual list of the 500 largest U.S corporations in regard to their yearly revenues (Fortune 2020).

33 research process itself. This leads me to Donna Haraway’s diffracti- ve model, rather than Latour’s reflective model of blackboxing, and how this has guided my research process.

With this chapter my own position as part of the research should be- come clearer to the reader, in particular my immersion in and subjec- ting to COBOL, through engagement with COBOL lessons in India. Subsequently, I discuss the learning situation as a model of ethno- graphic engagement where lessons may become means of infiltration and amusement, albeit also some embarrassment. With inspiration from Adrian Piper’s Funk Lessons, I discuss how the lesson-model, as part of my own artistic research practice, is a way to subject my audiences to the otherwise neglected and dismissed histories of CO- BOL. In relation to this discussion, I unravel my own take on artistic research practice, which I have articulated as a means of diffraction through matter: where the unfolding of the research through a diver- se range of materialities and formats (code, exhibitions, written the- sis, workshops, performative lectures, interventions etc.), opens up the research and allows for it to be accessed in different contexts and on different levels, and thereby reach disparate audiences. Further, I discuss how such practice may be regarded as a way of maintai- ning the systems and structures that are being studied. Not in order to restore them, but rather through modifications and interventions that challenge and reflect on and through them by offering means of misusing their domains of power.

Unwrapping Black Boxes

In “The Ethnography of Infrastructure” (1999), American sociolo- gist Susan Leigh Star makes “a call to study boring things” (Star 1999, p. 377). Star builds on Bruno Latour and Emilie Hermant’s 1998 study of the Paris sewer system, “Paris: Invisible City,” which foregrounded the importance of studying the otherwise neglected networks of sewers and power supplies in order to understand key aspects of power in relation to city planning (Star 1999, p. 379). Star stresses the need to use a similar approach in the study of informa- tion architectures. She notes:

34 Study an and neglect its standards, wires, and settings, and you miss equally essential aspects of aesthetics, justice, and change. Perhaps if we stopped thinking of as information highways and began to think of them more mo- destly as symbolic sewers, this realm would open up a bit. (Star 1999, p. 379)

Regardless of whether they are depicted as highways or sewers, the- re are difficulties getting access to and studying back-ends of global information flows, which tend to be, as Star puts it, “buried in inac- cessible electronic code” (Star 1999, p. 379).

Although COBOL is said to be taking up key functions within cont- emporary global information architectures, it is hard to get a glimpse of it. Not only is the programming language buried away in inac- cessible code, as suggested by Star in the above quote, COBOL is in itself inaccessible code. COBOL was one of the first high-level programming languages, which meant that the source code could run on any machine as long as it had a COBOL instal- led. Nevertheless, as the source code compiles into binary machine language, it turns into object code no longer readable by humans. Reverse engineering attempts can be made, but it is impossible to be entirely sure.4 The source code is thus blackboxed as the program becomes executable. Today, COBOL is a legacy programming lang- uage, which means that it is outmoded, but still performing critical functions. However, this contributes to the language becoming even more inaccessible: COBOL programs are often enclosed by wrapping the existing old program within a new program and thereby reducing its functionality to in- and out-puts, which are then called by other, more modern programming languages5 (see the fourth section in the MAINTENANCE chapter for a detailed discussion of the practice of wrapping). Wrapping can be thought of as a form of blackboxing the legacy COBOL code inside a more modern language.

The concept of “blackboxing” has been adapted by Bruno Latour from a cybernetic scheme of reduction in order to model feedback

4 Unless, of course, the source code is intentionally made accessible along with the object code as in Free and Open Source Software. 5 This is basically the cheapest way of modernizing legacy systems written in COBOL.

35 processes. In cybernetics, the concept is used as a way to deal with incomprehensible complexity by blackboxing this in such a way, that it is possible to accept its in-and out-puts without having to pay at- tention to that which is happening inside the box (Latour 1987, pp. 2–3; Ashby 1957, p. 86). Latour uses the notion of “blackboxing” in two instances: Firstly, as a way to illustrate the social construction of science in itself, when it goes from being “science in the making” to “ready-made science” (Latour 1987, p. 4). Secondly, Latour uses the concept of “reversible blackboxing” as a way to trace the network of agents (objects and actors) making up a technological apparatus, in other words as a research technique for opening up the machine (Latour 1994, p. 37).

In his 1987 book Science in Action, Latour deploys his concept of blackboxing to describe how science develops from being “in the making,” a process depending on resources, participants, time, ti- ming economy, equipment and even luck, to be “ready-made” and thus settled as truth. In the book’s introduction Bruno Latour sets out to open “Pandora’s Black Box” in order to analyze how scienti- fic truth is being constructed through socio-economic processes (La- tour, 1987, p. 1). Such processes of social construction are revealed through Latour’s long-term ethnographic field work in laboratories. Latour exemplifies his analysis with a depiction of science as a Janus face consisting of an old and young researcher (Latour, 1987, p. 4). The older is a bearded, successful researcher, whose findings have been settled into truth. The younger, on the contrary, is not there yet, as he is still “in the making” and in order to succeed, his findings have to become as settled as the older researcher’s.

On a different occasion, Latour uses a broken overhead projector in order to exemplify the idea of what he calls “reversible black- boxing” (Latour 1994, pp. 36–37). Here Latour describes how the apparatus, upon breakdown, changes from being an enclosed object to a network of different agents—actors and objects—making up the notion of the overhead protector, for example: bulb, Fresnel lens, and the repairman entering the room in order to fix the broken machine. Thus, through the process of “reversible blackboxing,” in this case through a failure that didn’t allow the machine to function as expec-

36 ted, the user’s attention is directed from the system as an enclosed object to an awareness of the different parts that make up the system (Latour 1994, p. 36).

I am focusing on Latour’s theory of blackboxing here because it constitutes an example where the researcher sets out to uncover, trace, and reveal how what we perceive as given truths, or “enclo- sed objects,” are constructed. This is also important to my own method when attempting to reveal the hidden workings of COBOL. However, when considering the blackbox approach, it is important to be mindful of the limitations associated with a totalizing approach to revealing vis-à-vis a more contingent and relational one. I unfold this critique in the following section.

“Obviously, he had not made a note of when he had made a no- te!”6—The Problem of Revealing

In order to exemplify “reversible blackboxing,” Latour’s choice of an overhead projector seems surprising. After all, the apparatus is not a convincing example of a black box. On the contrary, on a technolo- gical level, an overhead projector’s open surface and seemingly easily accessible inner components are hard to compare to that of the com- plexity found in, for instance, networked information architectures. Such simplification is, nevertheless, eventually what makes Latour’s example of “reversible blackboxing” work: after all it is fairly easy to “follow the action,” and thus trace and map the different elements making up the “system” of the overhead projector. But then again, even in this rather simple network of bulbs, lenses, and repairmen, a paradox of recursivity keeps knocking on the door: while mapping the bulb, it starts forking into new networks (for example that of heat, metal-thread, wolfram, and halogen molecules), which again fork into new networks and so forth and so forth. And this is just an overhead projector: imagine how it would be to try to “follow the action” of, say, a broken laptop. Is this ever-expanding network not a contradiction within any attempt to “follow the action” and to map out in order to reveal?

6 This phrase is a quote from Bruno Latour and Steven Woolgar’s Laboratory Life: The construc- tion of Scientific Facts, 1986 p. 245.

37 A rather different approach is to be found in Michel Foucault’s es- say “The Subject and Power.” Foucault proposes a way of analyzing power relations through the “antagonism of strategies” as opposed to analyzing power from what he calls “the point of view of its in- ternal rationality” (Foucault 1982, p. 780). In order to understand power mechanisms, Foucault examines relations which are esca- ping or resisting power rather than the relations constituting power mechanisms themselves.

When Latour and Star turn to the hidden and discarded, it is for the purpose of revealing, or in Star’s words, “surfacing” otherwise lost aspects, such as, for example, “invisible work” within informa- tion systems (Star 1999, p. 385) or, as in Latour’s work, the network of actors and objects making up technical apparatuses. In contrast, Foucault works with the idea of a double movement in which the one constitutes the other, and through which we can understand the co-dependency of the visible and invisible, mutually constituting each other as possibilities for knowing. Whereas Latour and Star re- present all encompassing researchers, out to reveal and map how our realities are constructed, Foucault on the contrary points to interrela- tions, contexts, and multi-directional and transversal power structu- res. To understand something about society’s dark sides such as mental illness (i.e., historically speaking, insanity), Focuault ([1961] 2009) therefore importantly highlighted the need to investigate how society understood and defined sanity.

At first, COBOL as a programming language with a history of being detested, relegating it to illicitness, makes it akin to aberrant pheno- mena such as spam and viruses within information architectures. But then again, if COBOL is running seventy percent of the entire global worlds’ business transactions (Micro Focus 2017), or is behind nine- ty-five percent of all ATM swipes (Hartman 2017), it is not really an outsider or the other. With this contradiction in mind, COBOL can perhaps best be understood as similar to spam, as a marginal phe- nomenon that turns out to be absolutely central to communication, since it makes up more than fifty percent of all emails.7 This makes

7 “Global spam volume as percentage of total e-mail traffic from January 2014 to September 2019, by month,” Statista, accessed Feb 15, 2020, https://www.statista.com/statistics/420391/spam- email-traffic-share/. See also Kristoffer Gansing’s discussion of spam as simultaneously marginal and central to online communication in “Spamculture: The Informational Politics of Functional Trash” in Christensen, Jansson and Christensen (2011).

38 COBOL a marginal phenomenon that can be studied in a way similar to how the studies of spam and viruses by Finn Brunton (2013), and Sampson and Parikka (2009), or Parikka (2007), which, in line with Foucault, examine the anomalous in order to understand hegemonic discourses in communication systems. From this perspective, I see COBOL as absolutely central to, not communication flows in this case, but the flows of global business.

COBOL’s ambiguous state of being simultaneously marginal and central further manifests multidirectional domains of power such as Foucault studied. As a later development, intersectional theory today provides means of critically interrogating such interlocking or multi- directional power structures by addressing how power is constituted through relationships rather than universal categories. The approach has its roots in black feminist activism in the US in the 1970s, whe- re practitioners and writers addressed the needs for understanding complex power structures in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and class and how they were mutually constituting each other.8 At the beginning of the , Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) applied the term “intersectionality” in her analysis of the marginalization taking pla- ce through interlocking means of oppression in favor of hegemonic mono-categories of power.9 Crenshaw’s interrogations were situated within legal studies. She emphasized the focus on three main doma- ins of power: the structural, the political, and the representational domain (Crenshaw 1991, p. 1244). A slightly different approach was later proposed by Patricia Hill Collins, who foregrounds the ways in which the intersecting oppressions are organized in, what she terms, the matrix of domination (Collins 2000, p. 18). Collins proposes an analysis of power across, not three, but four “domains of power”

8 The Combahee River Collective was a group of Black feminist lesbians engaging in activism, writings, and discussions in the 1970s. Without actually using the term “intersectional” their text “A Black Feminist Statement” advocated for a multi layered approach to oppression (1978, p. 275), and demonstrated how traditional forms of mono-categorization lead to marginalization. They were ex- periencing how their positions as black and lesbian made it difficult to identify with existing activist groups, i.e. the Black nationalist movement, attended stereotypical and sexist gender structures (pp. 276–277), whereas white feminist movements neglected the specific conditions for black women (p. 278). Accordingly, the Combahee River Collective acknowledged the needs for working transversally with not only one, but “a whole range of oppressions” (p. 276). 9 Crenshaw’s article contained a thorough analysis of how Black women are being marginalized and discriminated against, not only by the hegemonic powers, but also through social work, since the womens’ “intersecting” relations of oppression (they were Black and women) were neglected by the activist groups who were concerned with either women or Black people. In this way the women who were the most oppressed were actually neglected (Crenshaw 1991).

39 (Collins and Bilge 2016, p. 27). Throughout my research process, I have been strongly influenced by Collins’ take on intersectional theo- ry and used her four domains as a guiding principle in my analysis of how COBOL is situated within a multidirectional matrix of different domains of power. These are the interpersonal, the disciplinary, the structural, and the cultural domain (Collins and Bilge 2016, p. 27). Collins encourages a wide application of intersectional theory in the context of critical social theory, rather than restricting it to research only related to identity politics (2019). A case in point is Collins and Sirma Bilge’s interrogation of the social unrest related to the 2014 FIFA World Cup tournament in Brazil (2016, pp.5–13). Through their analysis of how power played out within the four different do- mains, the authors reveal how a mass media spectacle like global football serves political ends.

An examination of how power structures are “intertwined and mu- tually constructing” and thus amplify each other (Collins 2016, p. 7), may also help to avoid jumping to quick conclusions, as when Western scholars exoticize the maintenance and repair work that ta- kes place in developing countries. This is part of my discussion of so-called “broken world thinking” (see the Maintenance chapter). Here, intersectionality can, importantly, highlight the researcher’s own position within the research, which I will examine further in the following part.

The Problem of Authority

In Bruno Latour’s example of Pandora’s Box, it is implied that the two different sides of the Janus face, the old and the young resear- cher, are one and the same: If the “young” scientist has to manifest himself and succeed, he has to become “blackboxed” like the older researcher. But is this the only way to imagine research? That suc- ceeding in science equals blackboxing? Is there no way for science to embrace “solid” fluidity rather than just solidifying (truth versus non-truth)? Somehow, the statement from Latour seems to repro- duce the same authority as the authority which he is criticizing. It is the all-encompassing uncovering without paying attention to the researcher’s own position in the uncovering process. As the problem

40 of revealing shows: revealing is also constructing... and thus even- tually concealing. Although Latour’s agenda is to reveal the social constructions of grand narratives/settled truths, he himself ends up re-producing this grand narrative. The young researcher ends up ha- ving a beard. Consequently, through the act of revealing, objects and networks are constructed anew.

A similar critique of Latour’s method has been put forward by Don- na Haraway in her 1997 book Modest_Witness@Second_Millenni- um. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. Latour’s approach in his influential Science in Action is characterized as unwittingly reproducing the same power structures it seeks to dis- band: “The story told is told by the same story. The object studied and the method of study mime each other.” (1997, 34). In “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective,” Haraway had already scrutinized the myth of infinite vision by drawing attention to how the history of science is tightly interwoven with “militarism, capitalism, colonialism and male supremacy” and how “to distance the knowing subject from everybody and everything [is] in the interests of unfettered power.” (Haraway 1988, p. 581) Haraway notes:

Technologies are skilled practices. How to see? Where to see from? What limits to vision? What to see for? Whom to see with? Who gets to have more than one point of view? Who gets blinded? Who wears blinders? Who interprets the visual field? (Haraway 1988, p. 587).

As Haraway argues, the problem of authority relates to the problem of vision. Haraway states that vision is a question of having the power to see, but also violence implicit in the practice of visualiza- tion. Haraway thus proposes to reclaim vision as a form of situa- ted knowledge of feminist objectivity (pp. 582–583), where situated knowledge draws attention to the position from where the research is carried out and to the relation between the researcher and those being researched. For Haraway the “understanding of how systems works: technically, socially, physically is a way of embodying femi- nist objectivity” (Haraway 1988, p. 583). Haraway is, like Latour, investigating how things are constructed, but by including a critical reflection on her own position as a researcher in the research.

41 In order to develop an alternative method of creating what she calls “worldliness,” that can help us to move away from a Universal vi- sion, Haraway proposes the concept of “diffraction” (Haraway 1997, p. 16). To diffract means to break apart. The concept, like reflection, stems from optics, but unlike reflection, in which an entire source is mirrored and thus reflected by a given surface (and where the quality of the reflection is dependent on the quality of the reflec- ting surface), diffraction transforms the initial source by splitting it into patterns of interference with light and dark areas. So, where reflection is about mirroring and thus sameness, diffraction is about “patterns of difference” (Barad 2007, p. 29). An example of diffrac- tion is the color patterns appearing on the surface of a CD or DVD, when it is tilted in the light: through diffraction, the light source is split and re-organized in different areas of interference (areas of light as well as darkness) and different colors on the data-imprints of the surface. It happens because different colors have different intensity, though that is not evident when you look directly into the light. Only when meeting an obstacle and through diffraction, is it made visible that what looks like white light actually consists of multiple sources of different intensity and in effect of different colors. As Haraway notes, “A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear” (Haraway 1992, p. 300). Hence, similar to Latour, Haraway sets out to trace how a source is being constructed and made up of different elements. However, unlike Latour, Haraway includes the researcher, as the “ob- stacle,” and the way this affects how the source is being diffracted. This is not an attempt to reproduce the grand narrative of science, but rather to contest authority and state that the research is interde- pendent of the researcher—a situated and positioned knowledge in which the concept of diffraction emphasizes how the observed and the apparatus of observation mutually affect one another.

The famous double-slit diffraction experiment by Niels Bohr showed that the state of electrons as either wave or particle comes into being only as an effect of their interaction with the measuring device (Ba- rad 2014, p. 180). Writing about the consequence of this for under- standing diffraction, the feminist philosopher of quantum physics, Karen Barad writes:

42 So while it is true that diffraction apparatuses measure the ef- fects of difference, even more profoundly they highlight, exhi- bit, and make evident the entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the world, including the ontology of knowing. In fact, diffraction not only brings the reality of en- tanglements to light, it is itself an entangled phenomenon. (Barad 2007, p. 73)

In other words, the double-slit diffraction experiment reveals diffrac- tion to be understood not only on a metaphorical level, but rather on a granular material level pointing to the integral queerness of matter, and how it is becoming (coming into being) through the engagement and interaction with the apparatus of observation. In the case of this dissertation, I would like to bring this insight with me into the re- search and artistic practice in order to understand the diffraction taking place regarding my position within the institutions of interac- tion design and how that in turn affects the research.

Being Situated

On August 9, 2009, a user named “Cezar” participating in an online discussion on horrifying coding scenarios on the “Coding Horror” blog, stated that he had never, in his “entire so-called ‘professional’ programming career, met anyone who was actively writing COBOL code.” The next day another participant called “Brian” replied, ”You would if you’ve ever worked for a bank, an insurance company, or anywhere in India” (Coding Horror 2009).

I have never worked for a bank, an insurance company, or as a pro- grammer in India. However, I am acquainted with COBOL and as part of this chapter on approaches I would like to unfold my own position by outlining the rather unlikely and winding road which led me to eventually becoming a student of COBOL in Bangalore back in the autumn of 2014.

The journey began shortly after the turn of the millennium where I, as a Scandinavian student of film making and architecture with

43 a specific interest in tactical media production, public spaces, and intersections between the global and the local, was drawn to Sarai, a Center for Media Art at the CSDS—Center for the Study of De- veloping Societies in New Delhi. Sarai was then a vibrant meeting point for practitioners as well as theorists for discussions, reflections, and actions focused on intersections of media, urban life, and the public domain (Sarai 2020). In spring 2004, my partner, Kristoffer Gansing, and I responded to a call for contributions and were accep- ted to present our projects at the Sarai workshop: “Language City and Urban Politics.”10 At the time, I was a postgraduate researcher at the Bauhaus Kolleg in Dessau, Germany, examining intersections of the local and global as part of a research project on the transport corridor between Berlin and Moscow.11 The visit to Sarai in Delhi was short but immensely inspiring and made a on me. Consequently, Kristoffer and I were invited to return to Sarai for a residence in order to collaborate with the Cybermohalla project,12 later in the autumn that same year. Hence, in the autumn of 2004, I found myself in the main space of Ankur, where a system adminis- trator, named Karim, helped me install the first LINUX partition on my laptop. Furthermore, it was at Sarai’s space at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Rajpur Road that I coincidentally met two Dutch students of the newly established Master of Media Arts Education at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Two years later, I myself would end up joining that very same education program, graduating in 2008.

This short biographical detour serves to emphasize that my initial travel to Sarai and India was an important turning point, in which my journey as a young artist interested in spatial theory and media structures was pushed in a new direction towards a particular focus on software and the politics of code. A path which I have been fol- lowing since and which eventually would lead me back to India and to COBOL.

10 April 2–3, 2004. 11 See, for example, Gribat and Hilfling in Bittner et al. (2006). 12 Cybermohalla was a network of open-source labs set up in different neighborhoods in New Delhi for young working class people to explore and experiment with self-expression and educa- tion. The project was initiated by Ankur: Society for Alternatives in Education, New Delhi and Sarai-CSDS, New Delhi in the year 2001 (Sarai 2020b).

44 In 2010, a colleague, designer Zeenath Hassan, invited Kristoffer Gansing and myself to join her as teachers at the Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore for two and a half months. We were very excited to finally get a chance to visit Southern India, especially Bangalore’s Alternative Law Forum and the CIS—Center for and Society which we had been acquainted with from a distance since our time at Sarai and Cybermohalla. At the Center for Experimental Media Arts at Sristhi, we met Meena Vaari and Prayas Abhinav and during many chats and discussion about arts, obscure media artifacts, and the politics of local-global infrastructures, a col- laborative project called OutResourcing took shape.

OutResourcing was a practice-based research project, through which artists and designers based in Bangalore and Berlin would engage in research and artistic production on the phenomena of outsourcing as a site for the production of “new hybrid subjectivities and eco- nomies” (transmediale n.d.). The project was set up as a collabora- tion between CEMA, Center for Experimental Media Arts at Sristhi School of Art, Design and Technology in Bangalore and transmediale in Berlin and supported by the Goethe Institute.

As a consequence of the OutResourcing project, I returned to India in 2011 in order to carry out research on outsourcing in Bangalore. The Srishti institution also invited me to do an interim project in re- lation to this research. In this way, together with design BA-students, I set out to investigate un-dead media occurrences throughout diffe- rent locations in Bangalore over the course of three weeks.13 Initial- ly, I was particularly interested in acquiring more knowledge about OS/2, a failed IBM , and wanted to investigate how it was somehow magically being kept alive because of its ties to cri- tical infrastructure. However, during preparations for the interim course I stumbled over a quote referring to COBOL as triggering the infamous Y2K bug, which again triggered the outsourcing boom in India. I dismissed the reference as dubious and rather problematic

13 This first three-week research phase, as part of the OutResourcing project, resulted in four film- ic statements in a mock-instructional format produced by the students. The films were injected into the everyday information flow of local advertisements displayed across Bangalore. From December 10, 2011 to January 10, 2012 the four films were running at Paratha Plaza (Krishna Complex: Rmw ii Stage: Aswath Nagar); Shree Sagar (aka CTR: 7th Cross, Margosa Road, Opp. Malleswaram Club, Malleswaram) and M.T.R Moments (185/Y: 12th Main: 3rd Block (Near Bashyam Circle), Rajaji- nagar) as part of the existing advertisement displayed on the restaurants’ screens.

45 because it seemed to reduce India’s outsourcing boom to Western society’s neglect of antiquated coding skills for solving the Y2K bug, and thus not recognizing India’s advanced computer science educa- tion. Notwithstanding, during the course of the interim project, se- veral of my students shared stories of how their aunts or uncles, or other relatives and friends of their families had been involved in sol- ving the Y2K bug, and how some of them had worked with COBOL to do it. I was puzzled by the blackboxing of not only COBOL as a living dead language, a sort of language, but even more by the displaced labor enmeshed with COBOL in regard to Y2K.

It happened to be that on November 25, 2011, as I had just arri- ved in Bangalore, an article was published in the Computer Business Review Online bearing the title “IT industry facing growing skills crisis—Despite 2.6 million UK unemployed, tech firms still can’t find quality staff.” This article highlighted the current need for COBOL programmers in the UK, and that the British software company Mi- cro Focus was initiating learning institutions for COBOL in India, since it was no longer possible to acquire COBOL skills at Western universities. However, I would not notice the article until after my return to Berlin in January 2012 and while reading through it, I rea- lized that in order to understand the asymmetrical up-keep of global flows, I would have to return to India and encounter that which is wrapped behind the seamless global interfaces. Eventually, that be- came the initial reflections leading to this research project, through which I, in the capacity as a PhD student in Interaction design at Malmö University, two and a half years later, would return to India in order to learn COBOL.

Submitting to / Engaging with Cobol

As described in the introduction to this chapter, COBOL is blackbox- ed. Not only technically, as in wrapped back-back-end applications, but also by being sealed off by the walls of the high-ranked multina- tional companies still depending on COBOL, as well as the top-bran- ded software consultancy corporations in charge of their outsourced up-keep. Hence, in order to undertake this COBOL-research, I com-

46 mitted to a research process similar to what anthropologist Hugh Gusterson has described as “polymorphous engagement” (Gusterson 1997, p. 116). This is an ethnographic methodology initially outlined by Gusterson as an expansion of Laura Nader’s concept of “studying up” (1974, p. 284), which means to carry out anthropological stu- dies of people and organizations belonging to power and elite classes (Gusterson 1997, p. 116).14 In this context, as Gusterson emphasizes, traditional means of engagement through participatory observation may not be possible at all, simply because those with power in a given field do not see the reason why they should allow researchers any access. Hence, Gusterson suggests that in such contexts, parti- cipatory observation should be de-emphasized in favor of a more eclectic approach, where a broad mix of a number of different rese- arch techniques and sources are applied. My own research has been shaped through such a polymorphous engagement with “the field,” which I have approached through the reading of newspaper articles, historical documents, corporate websites, internet forums, popular culture occurrences, or carrying out interviews via phone, along with a whole range of artistic research techniques, but also importantly through two research trips to India: the first in order to learn CO- BOL in autumn 2014,15 and a follow-up stay in spring 2018.16

Lessons as Sites of Infiltration, Embarrassment, and Amusement

From 1982 to 1984, American artist Adrian Piper ran a series of per- formance actions, the so called Funk Lessons, where she sometimes improvised (when, for instance, having friends over for dinner) and at other times held more formally organized events (like a public dance), to engage her audiences in participatory lessons in funk mu- sic and funk dancing (Piper 1996, pp. 195–216). The contemporary art scene had been quick to embrace pop music, but kept neglecting funk, and Piper foregrounded this as a sign of racism, since funk

14 Laura Nader’s study made a call for the study of banks; insurance companies; law firms, gov- ernment regulatory agencies along with the communication industry and so forth (Gusterson 1997, p. 115). 15 This was a three-week stay in October, 2014. 16 This was a two-month stay, March–April, 2018.

47 music held an ambiguous status of being a style of African-American music tightly connected to Black working class culture (Heiser 2018, p. 40). Hence, the participatory funk-lessons became means for Piper to engage in discussions on and confrontations with xenophobia and racism (as in the case with participants from the white upper-middle class) as well as elitism (as in the case with participants from the Black upper middle-class) through a party-like setting (Piper 1996, pp. 195–216). Piper’s aim was to get her participating audiences to “Get down and party. Together.” (Piper 1996, p. 195—my empha- sis).17

My research journey to India in order to learn COBOL was, in a way, a reversal of Piper’s exploration of the lesson-format. Rather than subjecting anyone else to COBOL, I subjected myself.

Prior to my trip, I looked for someone to teach me COBOL. I sear- ched for a teacher via different online learning sites. As of fall 2014, forty-three persons in Bangalore advertised themselves as COBOL teachers on the Indian online “marketplace” for teaching, Thinkvi- dya. Seventeen of them were women. I wrote personal messages to a couple of them and posted a general note requesting assistance. I got two replies. My future teacher was one of them, and for three weeks, a small conference room, next to an open gym area on the penthouse floor of a modern private apartment building block located in the South of Bangalore, was one of several learning sites for me to get acquainted with COBOL.

There were a few other sites, too. They included a local, indepen- dent training institute situated just around the corner from where I was staying in Indiranagar where I joined a class on Mainframe Maintenance with another student, an informal training site on the outskirts of the city, and finally the in-house campuses of some of

17 At the beginning of the Funk Lessons the participants received two hands-outs. The first was a Performance Hand-Out Summary, which presented different characteristics of “Black Dance” and Funk Music (Piper 1996, pp. 213–214). The second hand-out contained a bibliography and a dis- cography with Funk classics like Aretha Franklin’s Jump To IT and Marvin Gaye’s Midnight Love, but also derivations of Funk such as for instance The Clash’s Combat Rock (which Piper syntaxed as “Punk as Funk”) or Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues (Syntaxed by Piper as “New Wave as Funk”) (Piper 1996, p. 215). Piper would go through the hand-outs. Afterwards, she would give hands-on instructions in Funk by breaking down the dance movements into simple exercises for each body part like the head, shoulder etc. In the very end all moves would be combined and everyone would dance Funk together in a party-like setting.

48 India’s largest software consultancy companies located in Bangalore and Chennai where I joined classes of up to thirty-four students.

While learning COBOL, I engaged with people in ways analogous to Piper’s. I entered into dialogues and chats, sometimes I conduc- ted interviews. COBOL affected the power relationship between me and my informants: the learning situation turned our meetings upsi- de-down.

Sometimes, the lessons became a source of amusement, and, to riff on Piper, we had a “we-get-down-and-party-together-as-COBOL-co- ders-moment.” One such moment was when I proudly showed my teacher my own COBOL script, “Proof,” as part of my ongoing art project Endless Endtime (see pp. 60-63). She then burst into laughter, because it is such a silly script, and for a brief moment it even made her consider becoming a software artist herself.

At other times, the combination of COBOL and my position as a PhD researcher acted as means of infiltration: it allowed me to pass through the strictly surveilled gates of the global corporations located within gated business parks at the outskirts of the cities, and opened up for conversations about the back-back-ends of global information systems which are otherwise not supposed to be discussed. During my previous visits to Bangalore as an artist and teacher at an Indian Art and Design School, I had never been able to get access granted to the gated premises of Bangalore’s Electronic City for myself or my students. Later, however, as a PhD student at a Swedish University, kind colleagues helped me establish a kinship through their friends and connections in Bangalore. Subsequently, the global corporations welcomed me. I was not entirely comfortable with this new position, well aware of my own overall unfamiliarity with global business eti- quette.

The global corporations are heavily surveilled and despite being in possession of a formal invitation, there are strict security processes at the gates. I stood in line with international businessmen in dark suits and ironed shirts. We were all asked to leave our cameras, USB sticks, computers and so forth at the entrance. At one company I was asked to leave my digital recorder and microphone too.

49 Inside of the companies, the line-managers and employees are ex- tremely open-hearted and welcoming. People introduced me sponta- neously to their colleagues and asked them to join our conversations. So the research took shape as a result of moments of “serendipity” where I was constantly interacting and improvising as a reaction to unexpected meetings and events. I recorded some of our conversa- tions. Often, exchanges took place as informal chats during a coffee break or over lunch. Those conversations were not recorded, but I kept a research journal where I noted down my experiences and reflections afterwards. I was mostly introduced to those employees who were involved in challenging and rather prestigious COBOL migration projects as well as the in-house teachers of COBOL. At one point I was impulsively dragged into a team-meeting. There, I was asked to introduce my research interest in COBOL and my prac- tice as an artist working with software and code-poetry. For sure the team leaders were using my presence as means of boosting the team spirit. I was never introduced to those working on everyday mainte- nance work—the usual production support—although they are the majority of the companies’ employees. When I returned three years later in 2018, many of my initial informants had changed their job/ position or moved on to a new corporation.

When taking part in in-house training sessions in the large corpora- tions, I was handed over to teachers and sat in as part of the trainee groups. During that form of participatory observation, I consistently took notes and made small sketches, and wrote a more detailed re- port in my research journal later.

I was never covert about doing ethnographic research. Whether during in-house lessons or meetings in corporations or lessons in training centers or with my private teacher, I was careful to introduce myself and explain that I was a PhD researcher and artist and that our conversations were part of my research on COBOL, and our conversations were recorded to emphasize that that was the case. The employees I spoke with in the big corporations carefully com- plied with the companies’ codes of conducts by avoiding naming any specific clients or projects.

Since COBOL is the least popular stream in most companies, and since it is not so often that anyone shows interest in COBOL at all, I

50 was aware that some of the people I spoke with may have been taken by the moment and the sudden attention to their domain of experti- se, and subsequently might have been telling me more than the com- pany would appreciate. Hence, in order to protect them, I have kept their identities anonymous. This, however, was not an easy decision. While these informants are, on the one hand, part of an elite context in India, they are at the same time part of a neglected and dismissed group within a global setting. So the last thing I would want to do is to render them nameless, and thereby reduce their visibility further. Nevertheless, it has been more important for me to safeguard them by not exposing their identities to the companies they work for. This is ultimately a way of protecting the research in itself as well, which otherwise would have risked being edited in order to comply with the companies’ approval. In this case, the dilemma of naming or not naming exposes a part of the subjection to COBOL, which relates to embarrassment.

Critics have interpreted Funk lessons as “less uncomfortable” than others of Piper’s more confrontational works (Costello 2018, p. 176). However, through the learning process, the funky dance moves, with their history and cultural connotations, are transferred to the parti- cipants’ bodies, which in turn may be said to re-enact the confronta- tional dichotomies of prejudices and privileges through their bodily movements. Eventually this manifests as a form of intrinsic embar- rassment lurking amidst the party-like atmosphere.

By taking lessons in COBOL, I was being subjected to geo-politi- cal situations where I was privileged, and in which it was difficult to negotiate which roles I had—was I the researcher, the artist, the co-student, the friend or just an interloper who could comfortably escape the maintenance field after class, in contrast to my co-stu- dents? An illustrative example was the moment my co-student in the independent training center and I both realized that after completing the course, he is bound to be carrying out maintenance work for my bank, whereas I will return comfortably to my research project (this example is elaborated further in the Maintenance Chapter).

Such social awkwardness was also present when my private COBOL teacher assumed that I want her to write my PhD thesis, since she is used to getting paid for completing the assignments of North Ame- rican students and thus expected me to ask her to do the same for 51 me. Both examples were moments of embarrassment, which are not easily handled. They are the effect of difference and parts of the diff- ractive model of this thesis: that what appears to be labor or work in Bangalore is smoothness, albeit with shame in say Malmö or Berlin. My way of trying to deal with this conundrum has been to expose the issue of COBOL itself, but then again, what is the best way to expose the issue if you cannot shed light on the voices that contribute, and you instead have to render them invisible in order to protect them? The tight focus on COBOL, and the choice of analyzing maintenance labor as part of a larger interrogation of Crisis Computing, including practical interventions and engagements with COBOL, has been my way of working through or in spite of this embarrassment, not as a solution, but as a humble attempt to produce knowledge within this complex field. Hence, my hope is that this research will be a first step and that the work will be taken further by other researchers/prac- titioners on/of COBOL, which through their relations and situated positions will be able to expose the issues raised here differently than I have been capable of, due to the limits of my knowledge, capabili- ties and relations.18

Defraction Through Matter: Artistic Research Practice

Irit Rogoff stresses how the inhabitation of the position as researcher makes the artist part of certain histories, memories, protocols and institutions. Rogoff does not see this as compromising the artist’s work. On the contrary, she highlights the artist’s involvement and in- clusion in institutions as allowing for means of re-writing the structu- res from within. This is not in order to conform to the systems or

18 There are great examples of critical analyses made from the inside of other parts of India’s IT industry. A case in point is graphic designer Joy Chatterjee’s personal account of working in the IT industry in India at the turn of the millennium (Chatterjee 2001, pp. 159–166). Chatterjee busts the myth of creative and playful IT work culture. He does this through personal reflections and accounts of the symbiosis of bio-political discipline and control linked to “fun” (i.e., music or aerobic), as integral to the management’s craving for ever increasing productivity, which, however, does not lead to an increase in employees’ salaries (pp. 163–164). A more recent example is Mathangi Krishnamur- thy’s studies of Indian call center culture (2018 and 2018b). Krishnamurthy extends more traditional forms of ethnographic fieldwork by taking up the position as a trainer within a call center. Yet an- other approach is taken by the Bangalore-based poet, S.S. Prasad, who while working as an engineer has injected what he calls nanopoems in the micro-chips. The small poems are written on the silicon chips and only visible through a microscope, when someone examines the chip, for example, in case of repair and maintenance. See: https://nokturno.fi/en/poem/images/ (accessed on July 22, 2020).

52 oppose them, but re-write them “through their very workings” (Ro- goff 2019). Similarly, Kathrin Busch foregrounds artistic practice as a subversion of science, quoting Foucault’s ideas of art as “less about ‘…showing the invisible, but rather showing the extent to which the invisibility of the visible is invisible’“ (Busch 2009, p. 4). Contrary to the paradigm of revealing present in the work of Star and Latour, Donna Haraway poses the question: “What other sensory powers do we wish to cultivate besides vision?” (Haraway 1988, p. 580). An answer might go through Rogoff and Busch’s hope and commitment to artistic research practices and may not be related to the senses at all, but instead concerns powers of putting into effect—to inter- vene and act within the structures one is positioning the research. The artistic in artistic research, thus constitutes a reconfiguration of the given, a challenge which happens through an active engagement. Which also, in turn, can be compared to design and the role of the designer. My approach to practice-based research comes from artistic research, but this also applies to design research.

Since returning from India I have continued my engagement with COBOL through performative lectures, workshops and code. This practice turns my deployment of lessons around, now it is my audi- ences, and not myself, who are being subjected to COBOL.

Such practice may, through a re-reading of maintenance studies (see in depth discussion in the Maintenance chapter), be formulated as a form of expanded maintenance and enhancement of the structu- res and systems which are being examined. Here the structures are re-appropriated, not in order to propose a solution, but rather ac- cording to how I find they may become self-reflective and embrace their own critique. In other words, “tinkering” with COBOL on a granular scale opens up possibilities for direct intervention into a wider social and political context, as a form of direct, non-expected confrontation through expanded maintenance. This opening up reso- nates with Haraway’s more recent work on staying-with the trouble (Haraway 2016), which in this case is a moving away from the dua- lism of developed/developing and execution/maintenance towards a non-binary idea of co-constituting processes that are contingent with social transformations of complex global scales and flows.

53 Such an approach links to American artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and her lifelong practice of maintenance art (e.g. Ukeles 1969). I similarly see my practice as intervening in and thereby maintaining existing structures. However, contrary to Ukeles, this is a maintenan- ce practice happening not in order to restore structures back to their initial state, as I am instead maintaining through alteration. This can be seen as a way of applying Bruno Latour’s notion of “reversible blackboxing” to a design process. However, not in order to “follow the action” or having the breakdown itself as the final goal. Instead, the breakdown is “prescribing” an initial breakdown back into a given service, and thus enhancing it into a dysfunctional-functional tool (like the Endless Endtime fax-installation, see pp. 144-147), si- tuations (workshops and interventions) or objects (the Endless End- time book-series, see pp. 234-241). Humor, absurdity and paradoxes here reveal not just the place where the given system fails and its inadequacies become visible, but at the same time offers alternative means of (mis-)using and modifying its territory.

Karen Barad diffracts the notion diffraction by describing it as a way of “returning,” not a returning to the same as a reflection would do, but rather “re-turning as in turning it over and over again—iterati- vely intra-acting, re-diffracting, diffracting anew, in the making of new temporalities (spacetimematterings), new diffraction patterns” (Barad 2014, p. 168). The iterative close reading of COBOL, as well as my material engagement with COBOL, which forms this thesis, become means of un-wrapping the language in relation to interse- cting power structures within the flow of global information archi- tectures. Through the thesis’ three main sections, Execution, Crisis, and Maintenance, I turn the language over and over again by tracing it through these three different main concepts, situations, times/tem- poralities and spaces. The unwrapping of COBOL thus becomes the unwrapping of entangled histories, politics, and discourses of power as they intersect through the programming language during diffe- rent situations and times. Such unwrapping and re-reading of the histories of COBOL and my engagement with the language should here not be understood as Latour’s term of “reversible blackboxing” setting out to map and reveal, but rather as an approach taking the double-slit diffraction experiment quite literally: understanding the means of unwrapping, as the means of wrapping as well. Here, the

54 un-wrapping of COBOL also becomes an un-wrapping of the current understanding of automation and technological progress and how it forms part of a neo-colonial dependency. At the same time, the unwrapping is also a means of addressing ontological constructions of the relation between execution/automation and maintenance—of machines and humans, which COBOL in itself is enclosing.

55 56 LESSON I: EXECUTION

57 EXECUTED CODE

A letter to the editor of Endtime Magazine, spring 1999.

In the spring of 1999, when the world was panic-strick- en by the so-called millennium bug threatening to cause the collapse of technologies worldwide, a reader of a conservative Christian magazine wrote a letter to the editor. The letter-writer carefully descri- bed how he could prove computers were the work of the devil with a numerological system. According to the algorithm, the word “computer” had the value of 666—the number of the . The letter-writer’s self-satisfied conclusion reads, “We have speculated that the computerchip will be the Mark, now we have proof!”

58 59 CODE TO BE EXECUTED

An Endless Endtime script

In the fall of 2014, fifteen years after the infamous Y2K millennium bug, I went to India to learn COBOL. It was one of the main programming languages bla- med for contributing to the Y2K bug, but today, despi- te being considered obsolete in the West, COBOL still comprises a core element of global business IT systems. Using COBOL, I adapted the computatio- nal rationale of the original letter to the editor into a script that is capable of continuously reenacting the numerological system which it described, applying it to new words. This COBOL script takes a given input (letters of a word) and analyzes it according to the numerological system. If the values of the input add up to 666, the script prompts: [input] + “ is the Mark, now we have proof!”.

60 61 62 63 64 1.1 INTERFACING EXECUTION, BANGALORE SEPTEMBER 2014

It is Monday morning and I am about to embark on what is to be my very first lesson ever in the programming language COBOL.19 I am sitting in a small conference room, next to an open gym area on the penthouse floor of a modern private apartment building block, located in the south of Bangalore. Over the following three weeks this meeting room will be one of several learning sites where I get acquainted with COBOL. The teacher begins the COBOL lesson by introducing the background history of the programming language. She takes me back to the US in the 1940–50s.

The first electronic computers were built on-site and literally took up entire rooms. This makes me reflect on the extent to which com- puters and programming languages are closely interwoven with no- tions of spatiality. John Walker describes the operation of this first generation of computers as “the user went one-on-one with the com- puter, in the computer room, operating the computer at the switch and knob level. Because the user was the operator of the machine and controlled it with little or no abstraction, there was essentially no mediation between the computer and its expert user”20 (Walker 1990, p. 440). Hence the first electronic computers may be characte- rized as local and site-specific machines according to their interface design and operationality.

By the end of the 1940s, a second generation of computers was de- veloped following the so called von Neumann Architecture.21 All in-

19 My teacher is a newly retired computer engineer. She had worked at one of India’s largest software consultancy corporations for ten years but decided to retire due to her parents’ health con- dition. Currently she is working as a freelancer from home. She finds jobs online through different sites. She mainly helps North American students with homework or preparations for exams, but more than once she has been faced with not being paid for her work. It is not so easy, she remarks, to work long distance. 20 Walker’s use of the term “little or no abstraction” may sound as if this was the dream of the transparent interface already come true but, in fact, there was of course a very complex procedure that the operator of the machine had to understand. 21 Von Neumann Architecture is a developed by John von Neumann based 65 structions in this type of computer are basically executed as “on” and “off” circuits within the logic gates of the machine. In contrast to previous machines in which the circuits had to be manually switched, the circuits are (similarly to today’s computers) controlled by binary instructions of true and false represented by zeros and ones, switching the circuits on and off. Accordingly, these machines, in contrast to previous computers, were operational without any necessary direct tinkering with or configuration of the actual hardware. However, it was important to have an elaborate knowledge of the inner workings of the hardware of the actual machine in order to map the instruc- tions to the specific machine’s logic gates. Notwithstanding, the bina- ry numbers controlling the on and off instructions carried out in the machine’s circuits were extremely difficult for humans to remember, which is why the first programmers created a system for writing the instructions to the machines in abbreviated forms. That became what is known as machine language, which would translate into binary numbers to be executed. Machine language thereby became the first symbolic, abstract human interface to making the digital electronic computer carry out operations.22 Yet, the language proved tedious, time consuming and error prone. Engineers and managers started to ask, what if the computer instead could be operated through an interface understandable to humans and thus even more abstracted from the machine’s inner workings?

In order to avoid errors and reduce work time, the programming processes were organized into sub-routine . These could then be called and copied as needed. With the development of ,23 it became possible to automatically translate programs into instruc- tions, through “automatic programming”24 (Hopper and Mauchly 1953; Hopper 1955). The reasons were foremost cost saving sin- on Alan Turing’s “Universal Turing Machine.” The architecture features a stored-program computer concept, where instruction data and program data are stored within the same memory. The architec- ture is controlled by a central processing unit (CPU), which fetches the instructions from the memory unit and executes them (Garfinkel and Grunspan 2018, p. 98). Moreover, the architecture includes mechanisms for in- and out-put and external storage. 22 Initially, von Neumann assumed that a human would be the one to “translate” the machine language into binary numbers, but British computer pioneer Maurice Wilkes had the idea of letting the computer itself make the translation from machine language into binary numbers specific for the machine (Campbell-Kelly et al 2014, p. 168). 23 A compiler is a that translates higher-level instructions into low-level ma- chine code, which in turn can be read and executed by a machine. 24 Grace Hopper also used the term “automatic coding” (1955).

66 ce “[t]he complexities surrounding the ‘black art’ of programming [had] translated into escalating computer costs that both users and manufacturers of computer equipment hoped to lower” (Beyer 2012, p. 265). In a 1953 paper titled “Influence of the Programming Tech- niques on Design of Computers” one can trace Grace M. Hopper and her co-author John W. Mauchly’s motivations:

The need for automatic programming has been growing for se- veral reasons. The present shortage of trained programmers is not likely to be relieved in a short time, since new computers are going into use at an ever-increasing rate. Computers are be- ing applied to larger and more complex tasks and this tends to increase the cost of the programming effort. There is also the inescapable fact that human beings do make errors, and that complex programs usually contain some errors, even after they have been subjected to several independent checks. (Hopper and Mauchly, 1953, p. 1251)

Put simply, “automatic computing” through compilers, did (ideal- ly) allow a faster, more efficient, error free, and consequently less expensive programming process.25

COBOL, A COmmon Business-Oriented programming Language

A meeting was held at Pentagon at the end of May 1959.26 A group of around forty people met to discuss the possibilities, needs, and outlines of a new programming language which was to be a high-le- vel language, predominantly for the use of business data processing.27 The people attending the meeting represented different organizations, institutions, governments, manufacturers, and user groups.28 As a re-

25 However, early experiments with automatic computing were rather ineffective. The A-0 compiler, developed by Grace Hopper in 1952, would take up to an hour to translate a program into machine-language, eventually making it ineffective (Campbell-Kelly 2003, p. 34). 26 May 28–29, 1959. 27 Although as Sammet notes, there was no definition of what the term business data processing actually meant (Sammet 1978, p. 219). 28 The manufacturers represented were Burroughs, GE, Honeywell, IBM, NCR, Philco, RCA, Remington-Rand Univac, Sylvania Electric Products, and ICT. Notably there was only one partici- pant from academia (Sammet 1978, p. 201).

67 sult of the meeting, a listing of the desired features of the new langu- age was drafted (Phillips 1959 quoted in Sammet 1985, p. 289). The working group emphasized the need for widening “the base of those who can state problems to computers.” In order to accomplish that, the group needed to develop a programming language, which would be “easier to use, even if somewhat less powerful” (Phillips 1959 quoted in Sammet 1985, p. 289). In line with Grace Hopper’s propo- sals of a more human-like approach to programming, a predominan- ce of the participants preferred that the language was structured in a human-like way, through the use of common English (Phillips 1959 quoted in Sammet 1985, p. 289). Hence, the idea of COBOL was to provide an easily accessible programming language which could be applied across different hardware platforms and thereby actively reduce the complexity and escalating expenditures involved in pro- gramming processes.

The Inherent Paradox of User-Friendliness

In the small conference room on the penthouse floor in Southern Bangalore on the same Monday morning in September 2014, the teacher continues our COBOL lesson.

She introduces the syntax of COBOL and explains how the lang- uage is organized into four main divisions: Identification Division, Environment Division, Data Division, and Procedure Division. The identification division is mandatory. The program is assigned an ID with a program-name and author. The Environment Division is the place where source and object—today both are the same—are as- signed. The Data Division is the input and output control, where variables are declared in the working storage section. Care must be taken in assigning the correct level numbers and clauses, since that defines the sort of data that will be at hand later in the code: e.g., the amount of decimals for a number, or whether the variable is a single or group item. The Procedure Division could be called “the heart of the program.” It is where the different commands are stated, i.e., what the program actually is going to do with the sources, resources, and variables as declared in the previous sections. This can be, for ex- ample, about accepting inputs/outputs, doing arithmetic operations, and so forth.

68 Everything is written in capitals. Each section contains paragraphs, sentences, and statements. All sentences have to end with a period (.) but statements do not.

During the lessons, we work with a modern version of COBOL. Ne- vertheless, the program still contains interesting traces of its early context—the world of computers in the 1960s and 1970s. For in- stance, in the Environment Division it is possible to state source and object, a feature which dates back to the times when the work was carried out via dumb terminals. Also, the entire structure is depen- dent on level numbers, a format that stems from the days when pe- ople were manually writing the program onto sheets of paper before transferring them to punch cards.29

What still today stands out as the most significant feature of CO- BOL is the use of English-like language to express commands. The first high-level programming language, FORTRAN, written by John Backus for IBM, used a syntax of algorithmic logic as its interface (Backus et al. 1957, pp. 189–191). Hence, FORTRAN, was desig- ned to follow the standards of logic simplicity as close as possible to machine language, but still more useful or user-friendly with its mathematical standards of arithmetic notation. Whereas, COBOL on the contrary was heavily influenced by Grace Hopper’s idea of “user-friendly” interfaces30 (Hopper 1980, p. 11). This, in turn, tur- ned the human machine operator into the subject of the program- ming process through the design. Consequently, in COBOL you do not have to write A+B = . Instead, instructions to, for example, compute the payment of an employee’s overtime can be expressed as:

MULTIPLY AMOUNT-TIME-HRS BY TIME-PAY-RATE GIVING TIME-PAY-TOTAL

In fact, Hopper had been advocating this approach even since the beginning of the 1950s in her arguments for the introduction of

29 Punch cards are mechanical means of storing and transferring data and instructions used in the early days of computation. The punch cards consisted of cardboard in which punched holes in predefined positions, through their presence or absence represented the data. This could be fed into and read by the computers. 30 In an interview from 1980 Grace Hopper explains this approach: “I kept calling for more user-friendly languages. I’ve always tried to do that, that’s why I want these other languages that are aimed at people. Most of the stuff we get from academicians, computer science people, is in no way adapted to people.” (Hopper 1980, p. 11)

69 sub-routine libraries and automatic computing.31 She had emphas- ized the need for the design and development of an intuitive “pseu- do-code,” not for mathematics, but for tasks like payroll calculations (Hopper 1955, p. 5). This turn towards computers applied in the processing of everyday life was part of her vision of making com- putation widely available to users who weren’t programmers.32

In an interview in 1980, the then nearly seventy-five-year old Grace Hopper recalled:

What I was after in beginning [to use] English language was to bring another whole group of people able to use the computer easily. The people that used English, not symbols. It was my own understanding of the different kinds of people, and I knew darn well most people didn’t like symbols. And you had to give them something else to work with, and obviously the next-best thing was English.33 (Hopper, 1980, p. 11)

So, Hopper suggested exchanging algorithmic symbols with hu- man-like speech and thereby create a fairly easy accessible user inter- face. Importantly, this also resulted in an ingenious self-documenting language, where even anyone without a programming background was capable of reading and understanding what the program was doing.

In relation to this emerging user-paradigm in computing, John Wal- ker notes:

The very way in which the user perceives the computer (his men- tal model of it), the degree to which specialised knowledge and

31 See, for instance, Hopper (1952): Hopper describes the troubles related to the application and use of computers when a mathematician (which is what she was initially), has to become a program- mer. Hopper notes: “This situation remains static until the novelty of inventing programs wears off and degenerates into the dull labor of writing and checking programs. This duty now looms as an imposition on the human brain.” (Hopper, 1952, p. 243—my emphasis) 32 Although Hopper also wrote, “Please remember, however, that automatic programming does not imply that it is now possible to walk up to a computer, say ‘write my payroll checks,’ and push a button. Such efficiency is still in the science-fiction future.” (Hopper 1955, p. 5—my emphasis). Hopper’s statement foretells current implementation of AI voice assistants—now as our science-fic- tion present. 33 Actually, one of Hopper’s demo versions of the compiler, FLOW-MATIC (the syntax of which inspired the design of COBOL), was able to translate code written in not just English, but even French and German into machine language (Hopper 1980, p. 9).

70 extensive training are required to use it, and therefore the extent to which the computer becomes accessible to a very broad seg- ment of the populace is largely controlled by the means through which the user operates the computer. (Walker 1988)

This statement points to a widespread understanding of the relation between interface-design and user- as a means of demo- cratizing the use of computers in the wake of increased access to computers at the end of the 1980s. So-called transparent modes of machine operation, meaning unobtrusive interfaces, were put at the forefront (Weiser and Brown 1997).34 This approach to human com- puter interaction design turned the user into the subject of the inter- face by placing them in the center of machine operation. In this way, a whole new idea of user was born. Subsequently, such an approach was heralded as the archetype of so called “good interface design” (see for instance Jacob Nielsen’s “heuristics” (Nielsen and Mack 1994) or Don Norman (2013)).

Despite its general neglect within the history of interaction design, the syntax of COBOL had already, more than twenty years prior to these canonical examples, constituted an important turning point in interface design and computer accessibility. The transformation from second to third-generation programming languages may be described as a form of democratization of access to computing. John Backus argued that his aim of abstracting the operation from the machines’ inner workings was in order to challenge the early 1950s “black art” of programming (Backus, 1980, p. 126). Yet, Grace Hopper took this approach even further through her radical break with abstract sym- bols and the turn towards a “people oriented” user-interface design, in which the interface, instead of featuring mathematical arithme- tic symbols, was aimed at creating an intuitive operation system by applying human language itself as a means of operation. Since this approach was implemented as the design strategy for the develop- ment of COBOL, the language may be read as an important agent of empowerment in and democratization of computation.

34 Exemplified in the graphical user interface of Apple’s first Macintosh personal computer from 1984 characterized by simple, intuitive and smooth means of operating the machine through its min- imalistic, frictionless, point-n-click graphical user interface, along with its predecessors: Apple’s Lisa from 1983 and the Xerox Star from 1981, which also had graphical user interfaces.

71 Through its turn to transparent and user-friendly means of machi- ne operation, COBOL ran contrary to its contemporaries, which were based on expert abstract mathematical interfaces. COBOL was additionally, on a structural level, developed as a collective process (government initiated) and distributed freely, and has therefore been dubbed “one of the first examples of free software” (Garfinkel and Grunspan 2018, p. 156). Furthermore, COBOL’s team of designers included some of the most brilliant women mathematicians and pro- grammers of the time.35 As a result, COBOL may be interpreted as a possible first manifestation of a feminist approach to program- ming,36 at least if considering such an approach as a representation of feminist standpoint theory.37 According to standpoint theory, wo- men’s experiences are seen as a means of challenging more broadly accepted male-biased understandings (Harding 2004, p. 128). In the case of COBOL, this can be exemplified through how the language’s problem domain moved away from complex mathematical calcu- lations and number crunching (which characterized languages like FORTRAN) towards business processing, a field that Jane Abbate has pointed out relates to more “feminine” aspects of computation (Abbate 2012, p. 208). Just a few years before COBOL was envisio- ned, Grace Hopper’s former employer, computer pioneer Howard Aiken38 noted sarcastically:

35 According to computing historian, Michael Mahoney, Grace Hopper is probably the most well- known and acclaimed woman computer scientist of all time (2011, pp. 106–107). Hopper’s FLOW- O-MATIC compiler was a great influence on the design of COBOL, she participated in the initial CODASYL consortium and moreover served as a technical consultant on the overall project. Howev- er, although Hopper is said to be the “grandmother” of COBOL, she was not directly involved in the actual design or development of the programming language (Sammet 2000, p. 32), where a decent number of other women played important roles. Within the initial Short-Range Committee, three of the nine members with critical positions in the design team were women. These included Mary K. Hawes, who had initiated the first meeting on the development of a business specific programming language back in 1959, Frances E. Holberton, who had been one of the six women “computers” pro- gramming the ENIAC—the first general-purpose electronic digital computer to perform calculations for ballistics trajectories during the Second World War, and Jean E. Sammet, who would develop the FORMAC programming language in 1962 and become the first female president of the ACM in 1974. Furthermore, at different times, there were four other women working in the Short-Range Committee including Deborah Davidson, Sue Knapp, Nora Taylor, and Gertrude Tierney (Gürer 1995, p. 179; Holberton 1983). 36 A similar approach is to be found in Julia Flanders’ article, “Building Otherwise” in the anthology Bodies of Information: Intersectional Feminism and the Digital Humanities, ed. Losh and Wernimant. Flanders briefly proposes COBOL and FLOW-O-MATIC as possible examples of “building otherwise” (Flanders 2018). 37 Feminist standpoint theory is a way of describing epistemologies foregrounding the specific knowledge of women or groups of women. It was developed and made popular by feminist scholars such as Nancy Hartsock, Patricia Hill Collins, Dorothy E. Smith, Hilary Rose, and Sandra Harding among others (see Harding 2003). 38 Howard Aiken developed Harvard’s first electro-mechanical computer, Mark I, which Grace 72 If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered. (Aiken [1956] as quoted in Davis, 2000, p. 140)

Notwithstanding, COBOL was indeed specifically tailored towards what may be characterized as rather mundane computing tasks such as making bills in a department store, calculating payrolls, organi- zing retail, and managing ticket reservations, all services that instead of being productive, may be seen as having a somewhat reproductive nature, i.e. they simply ensure that the wheels of the overall produc- tion machine are turning. Furthermore, Hopper did continuously in- sist on taking what we today might articulate as the user’s embodied experience as the starting point of the design development, which made her challenge the otherwise more rational and cost-effective use of abstract symbols and instead approach human language itself as an intuitive and thus ideal user interface.

When putting the traits described above into further critical perspec- tive, COBOL’s seamless, easily accessible, and user-friendly interface may, however, also point to the asymmetrical gender hierarchies as performed by the operator and human computer in the early days of computation. In 1949, Warren Weaver depicted information theo- ry as “a very proper and discreet girl” (my emphasis) working as a secretary in telegraphy. Weaver noted “She pays no attention to the meaning, whether it be sad, or joyous, or embarrassing. But she must be prepared to deal with all that come to her desk” (Shannon and Weaver [1949] 1964, p. 27). Such ideals of frictionless information processing and execution is, as analyzed by Wendy Chun, expressing the “dream of seamless execution” that reflects a gendered military history, which as she describes is linking “an automatic ’yes, sir’ in respond to commands” (Chun 2015).

As a critical scholar of information systems and their histories, Wen- dy Chun points out how the concept of programming and softwa-

Hopper programmed.

73 re as we know them today are manifestations of the shift between “commanding a ‘girl’ to commanding a machine” (Chun 2004, p. 33). In Chun’s words, the introduction of automatic programming “sought to displace women: their nimble fingers, their numerical abi- lities, their discretion, their ‘disquieting gazes’ (Chun 2004, p. 36). The problem of this transition, however, was that computers even- tually “weren’t computers” (Chun 2004, p. 35). Although discrete, the women computers were not machines who simply followed or- ders, instead they were interpreting the commands and instructions given by their male colleagues. Hence, the transformation between human computers and machinic computers,39 leads to an absence of programmer and machine, as well as a shift of power, from a man commanding a girl, who correspondingly would instruct the machine so it executed the man’s commands, to machines becoming universal and supposedly executing by themselves.

Thus when execution today is perceived as a smooth and frictionless automation process, it eventually reflects gender roles of the 1940s and 1950s. In this context, Hopper’s visions and the advocating of a simple, easily accessible, humanlike computation interface, aimed to bridge the difficulties of computers who “weren’t computers,” and conceal this complexity behind a user-friendly interface. Accordingly, COBOL may be said to manifest as a “discreet girl” who pretends to understand human-language and commands, and thus allows the programmer to avoid engaging with algebraic syntax and instead simply just command. In this way, COBOL continued the hierarchy between commander/programmer and operator/computer through its human-like language interface. Today, such hierarchies are even further re-inscribed and implemented as exemplified in the rise of chatbots and AI voice assistants such as Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Google Assistant among others. The so-called conversational interfaces,40 discreetly and willingly accept and process user commands and in this way, paradoxically more

39 See Grier (2005) and Hayles (2005). 40 The gender of voice assistants is predominantly female. Three out of the four most popular voice assistants: Alexa, Cortana, and Google Assistant all have female only voice options (with the exception of some of Alexa’s advanced features like “skill-building,” which offers alternative voices such as celebrities). Apple’s Siri has featured a male option since 2013, however the voice assistant is by default a female voice in seventeen of its twenty-one language settings (except the language settings for Arabic, British English, Dutch, and French) (West et al. 2019, p. 116).

74 than seventy years after Weaver’s statement, have come to embody and re-enact these ideal, proper girls, who discreetly and without friction are prepared to deal with anything, anytime.41

Commanding without Command

The design process of COBOL additionally reveals the programming language as an interface to the machine which on the one hand al- lows control of the machine (it is a fairly easy Turing-complete langu- age), but on the other hand hides and thereby blackboxes the techno- logy of computation, through simplified access and human language syntax. This can be further exemplified by the initial design team’s long dispute over the users and the judgment of what so called “bu- siness-type users” were capable of doing or should be allowed to do with COBOL. Jean Sammet describes the argument that related to the expression of mathematical formulas (which was disapproved in FLOW-MATIC) by recalling how:

[…] those committee people who felt they knew the business-ty- pe users said that those users could not (and should not) be for- ced to use formulas, and hence it was necessary and appropriate to supply the four arithmetic verbs: ADD, SUBTRACT, MUL- TIPLY, and DIVIDE. Conversely, those people on the committee (including myself) who had mathematical training said that we had no objections to providing those verbs but that we could not tolerate a situation in which some-body who understood what a formula was nevertheless was prevented from writing one! (Sam- met 1985, p. 295)

41 Quartz’s 2017 study on four voice assistants found that they responded to verbal harassment predominantly positively or playfully (Fessler 2018), and never in an upset manner. For example, Apple’s Siri would respond to the comment: “You’re a bitch,” with “I’d blush if I could.” Amazon’s Alexa replied with “Well thanks for the feedback” (see also West et al. 2019, p 107). Recent up- grades have been made since Quartz’s study (for example, Alexa now says she is a feminist and Siri responds to “You’re a bitch” with ‘I don’t know how to respond to that’ (West et al. 2019, p. 108). Nevertheless, the voice assistants still never push back. Ian Bogost points to the structural sexism inherent in female voice assistants and the need for not only updates and fixes but more structural changes by stating that ”’software, made a woman, made a servant’—cannot be undone with simple, one-off software updates, but requires instead a rethinking of the enterprise of gendering machines” (Bogost 2018 quoted in West et al. 2019, p. 108).

75 The debate went on for several months until a compromise was sett- led by including both possibilities (Sammet 1985, p. 295). Formulas were triggered in COBOL by the reserved word: COMPUTE. Im- portantly, however, the standard would be ADD as described above, whereas COMPUTE could be viewed as an exception since it re- quires the additional command COMPUTE (you cannot simply wri- te x+y as in most other programming languages, but have to write COMPUTE X + Y or ADD X TO Y). Subsequently, the human-like syntax of COBOL may appear rather clumsy and potentially result in extraordinary long programs, which again leads to barely legible applications. It was an issue I came to understand better through conversations with Indian engineers who work with the maintenance and debugging of existing COBOL applications that contain more than 100,000 lines of code. This confirms a statement by Kurt W. Beyer, author of a Grace Hopper biography: “What was supposed to empower the user seemed to restrict programming creativity and hampered one’s ability to commune [sic.] directly with the compu- ter.” (Beyer 2009, p. 300) In fact, COBOL may represent one of the first, if not the first instance of the classical dilemma of interaction design: in which technology is blackboxed in order to make it more user-friendly and reach a larger audience, but the blackboxing simul- taneously results in the user experiencing a lack of control on a dif- ferent scale than that of the user-friendliness and a fundamental lack of understanding of the technology. Howard Bromberg, who led the development of the first Cobol compiler, describes the assumption on which COBOL was built as, “a language has to help people talk to people. People do not talk to machines” (The Computer Museum 1985, p. 9).

COBOL can thus be said to have prototyped and embodied all the pitfalls of user-friendly computing as we are experiencing them to- day. Although text-based, the language is a forerunner of the design principles that guided the development of Graphical User Interfa- ces (GUIs) along with the drawbacks of these very principles: GUIs are no doubt extremely useful for navigating unknown territories. However, their ready-made and wrapped environments are not only time and computer memory consuming but, more importantly, make computational processes across applications very difficult, if not im-

76 possible, to run.42 Furthermore, GUIs are hiding access to the lower levels of a computer’s system architecture. These issues demonstrate the paradox of trying to create access through increased usability, while at the same time limiting access precisely due to this increase in usability. And this is as relevant today as ever, if not more so. In the last decade there has been a boost in the turn to so-called unobtrusive and concealed user-friendly interfaces, not only manifested through the widespread rise of chat-bots and voice assistants43 (as discussed above), but also through visual programming environments. These turns are often perceived with the common, though contestable, equ- ation that access to the giving out of commands that automate com- putational executions equals control.44 Such an approach is exempli- fied by the sensational title “Google Blockly Lets You Hack With No Keyboard” published in Wired in relation to the launch of Google’s visual programming environment, Blockly, in 2012.45

In the Wired article, Neil Fraser, one of the developers behind Google Blockly, stated that “Programming has followed a steady progression of becoming more and more accessible.” And he continued:

From Assembly, to Fortran, to C++, to Python, to Block- ly, each generation gets to use an even higher-level in- terface. Eventually one will be able to instruct compu- ters with completely natural language. At which point everyone will be able to tell a computer what to do. (Metz 2012)

Perhaps not surprisingly, given its disregarded status, COBOL was neglected by Fraser although it is the main forerunner of natural

42 Unlike the pipe-function of UNIX command line interfaces, which allows users to, for instance, take a specific frame from a video-file, and within the same command process the image graphically, scale it, and afterwards send it by mail to a list of friends. 43 Voice-based internet searches accounted for a fifth of mobile internet queries in 2019 and are expected to reach fifty percent this year (2020) (West et al. 2019, p. 92). Gartner predicted in 2016 that by 2020, it would be more common for an average person to have conversations with digital assistants than with a spouse (Levy 2016 as quoted in West et al. 2019, p. 92). 44 Access to code and programming has often been associated with means of empowerment and democratization. According to the Free Software Foundation, which has been advocating free acces- sible source code for the last thirty years, “The non-free program controls the users, and the develop- er controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power” (Stallman 2019). 45 Blockly is a client-side JavaScript library developed by Google for creating visual programming languages (VPLs) and editors based on visual blocks, which users link together in order to build programs. The programs built in Blockly can be used to generate code in Python, JavaScript, Dart, Lua and PHP, but is also further customizable in order to generate code written in any other textual programming language (Google Blockly 2020).

77 language programming design. Of course, “natural language” pro- cessing is one of the principle tasks of so-called AI of today, and thus at the heart of the current drive to automation. Neglecting to mention COBOL in this history is maybe predictable, but what is more alarming is how Fraser conflates instructions, commands, and control while inscribing it in a linear, progressive history of develop- ment. Yes, indeed everyone might be able to tell a computer to do something, but the question of what the computer will be able to do through this command remains. Studies of block programming, as a means of introducing programming to beginners, have shown that visual programming languages, undoubtedly, make it easier for be- ginners to start programming. At the same time, the wrapped graph- ical coding environment eventually restricts the complexities of the kinds of programs that can be made with it (Krutz et al 2019, p. 93).

A case in point is the visual programming language Scratch, a block language developed by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT Me- dia Labs and specifically tailored to introducing coding to children (Scratch 2020). Programs are created by dragging around Lego-like blocks and literally building the programs. At first Scratch impresses by seemingly equipping children with a programming environment that empowers them to easily create their own games. The level of programs possible to quickly achieve with Scratch would otherwise be rather difficult for a child at, say, the age of seven, and would require learning an advanced language like Python. In spite of its relative ease of use and scope, the Scratch environment inevitably comes with a wide set of restrictions. Similar to shrink-wrapped GUI environments, the visual Scratch language does not allow its users to work across applications, and furthermore does not even allow a simple function like the calling or writing to a local file on the user’s computer. Subsequently, it is not possible to execute simple opera- tions such as saving high scores to a local text-file. To get around this problem, the Scratch team has introduced what it calls “cloud variables.” The cloud variables allow the creation of a list of global high scores saved in the cloud (meaning on Scratch’s servers). But in- terestingly, due to security reasons, “the Scratch Team currently does not allow letters within cloud variables,” meaning further scripts are needed in order “to encode and decode the data into sequences of numbers” (Scratch 2020b). Subsequently, kids are forced to embed

78 the encoding of their high-score data before saving them in the cloud variable—creating illogical and unnecessary extra labor in order to comply with the limitations of cloud-based and proprietary com- putational infrastructures.

As Scratch is foremost a pedagogical tool for introducing program- ming to kids, there is an inherent irony in the fact that kids are not taught about file structures and how to call them from their program, which would be a subsequent means of empowerment in introducing the machine’s inner architecture and giving them an idea of how it is structured. On the contrary, kids are instead taught how to com- mand the encoding and decoding of strings to integers in order to add them somewhere in the cloud (and it might not be obvious to a child that the cloud is just another computer). Furthermore, the cloud variables have a 128-character limit and it is only possible to create a maximum of ten cloud variables for each project.46

When Lawrence Lessig boldly claimed that CODE=LAW in the late 1990s (Lessig 2000), he meant to call to attention the power inherent to the underlying codes that make up our information architectures. Lessig suggested a turn to code as a necessary means to (re-)claim control and power over the restrictions imposed within online servi- ces, the equivalent of social network platforms of his day. However, as my above analysis of both COBOL and Scratch implies, code and commanding is not law. On the contrary, the code and its comman- ding should be understood as a user interface itself, where the code on the one hand is enabling control and allowing the user to pose executable commands, but on the other hand is also controlling what can be commanded.

The turn to source code as instruments of power, as suggested by Lessig, relates to an understanding of code as a performative speech act (Arns 2004). A strong proponent of this approach is Alexan- der Galloway’s statement that “code is the first language that actu- ally does what it says—it is a machine for converting meaning into

46 Please note, my analysis is not meant to be exhaustive, this is just a few of several restrictions. Another more obvious restriction is that Scratch is not a native program, but executes via the pro- prietary framework of Adobe Flash. That means it is dependent on corporate and closed software, even though it is also open source, adhering to the sharing-principles of open source communities, by encouraging its users to sample and thus literally “scratch” existing code snippets into their own programs.

79 action” (Galloway, 2004, pp. 165–166). However, as Wendy Chun emphasizes, the idealization of source code as transparency simplifies computing to a one-directional source of power: a convenient autho- rity (Chun 2008, p. 315). In contrast, Chun turns this understanding on its head by directing our attention to the fact that a programming language is actually not a language doing what is said, but rather that this perspective “overlooks the fact that to use higher-level alphanu- meric languages is already to anthropomorphize the machine, and to reduce all machinic actions to the commands that supposedly drive them” (Chun, 2008a, p. 309).

Elsewhere she has noted:

The relationship between masters and slaves is always ambiguous. This handing over of power has been hidden by programming languages that obscure the machine and highlight programming (rather than execution) as the source of action. (Chun 2004, p. 36)

It may be said that COBOL is a perfect example of this, since the high-level language was designed in order to be as easily readable as possible, however as already analyzed above, its accessible human language-like interface obscures the machine’s inner workings. So yes indeed, in the future everyone might be able to tell the computer what to do, however, the giving of commands does not necessarily mean being in command.

In the next section, I examine the concept of control more deeply in relation to COBOL’s interface design. More specifically by turning to another important design decision made during the initial deve- lopment of COBOL, which exemplifies how the syntax of the pro- gramming language reflects power asymmetries between employers and their workers, namely managers and their programmers.

Cobol as a Panoptic Tool

COBOL was specifically designed with novices in mind. However, it is striking to notice that the documen- tation of the development of COBOL focuses on legibility through readability rather than learnability. Jean Sammet recalls:

80 […] although we wanted the language to be easy to use, particularly for non- professional programmers, we did not really give much thought to ensuring that the lang- uage would be easy to learn; most of our concentration was on making it “easy to read” (Sammet 1985, p. 295).

Sammet furthermore emphasizes that most controversies over the design were solved “using the criteria of ease of reading” (Sammet 1985, p. 296). Thus, the main design principle was not easy inte- raction with the machine after all, but being able to easily moni- tor machine interaction through increased readability. Subsequently, COBOL could be described as an example of the dialectic of enligh- tenment, similar to how Foucault describes the panopticon as the flip side of enlightenment liberalization (Foucault 1995, p. 222). The programming language, due to a design aimed at increased accessi- bility, and targeting non-programmers without prior knowledge of programming or mathematics, paves the way for stricter internal, top-down controlled working environments. Those who were going to be able to easily read the programs were managers, who now had the means to look over the shoulders of programmers in order to monitor and control what they were doing. In other words, COBOL was perfectly tailored to the power structures of business environ- ments by, on the one hand being easy to learn and thus accessible to a large interchangeable labor force of, as stated by Sammet, “non-pro- fessional” programmers (1985), while on the other hand, the langu- age made it easy for the managers to monitor the labor force (Beyer 2009, p. 272). Correspondingly, COBOL perfectly embeds the hie- rarchy of the business world into its user-friendly, albeit panoptic in- terface design, as being a tool for the micro-management of the office environment. COBOL thus exhibits an ambiguity, that is, opening up code to the masses at the same time as this happens within a context of control, made possible by that very same increase in participation.

Today, such an approach has been further developed, refined, and widely implemented to such a degree that COBOL, as the first digital tool deliberately designed to allow managers a peep into the employ- ees’ work, seems rather innocent compared to the omnipresent means of surveillance and control which characterizes today’s work environ- ment. An artillery of software is now being developed for managers

81 to continuously keep track on employees’ working hours, attention spans, handling of money, location coordinates, breaks, steps, water intake, and even sleep.47 Furthermore, online platforms are offering services for reducing human labor to computational interfaces (Irani 2014). A case in point is the online crowdsourcing platform Ama- zon Turk, where employers (the managers) are capable of delegating work tasks and accessing workers in various ways, including through an API, and thus basically turning workers into programmable com- mands (see the concluding chapter, CRISIS COMPUTING, for an in-depth discussion of this example).

47 A company like Aetna provides monetary compensation to employees who sleep at least seven hours at night. The workers can track their sleep automatically through a health tracking device linked to Aetna’s wellness program platform. For every twenty-day streak the employee has slept seven hours or more per night, they are awarded twenty-five dollars. The maximum reward is $300, which takes 240 nights (DiGiulio 2016).

82 1.2 DISPLACEMENT

In the previous section, I did a close reading of COBOL as a suppo- sedly user-friendly interface, which nevertheless embodies a duality of openness and control in relation to friction-free and smooth means of execution. In this section, I intend to put this into perspective by investigating how COBOL’s integral functionality on micro as well as macro levels relates to utopian visions of frictionless execution. I will discuss how COBOL, as a third-generation language, embodies not only utopian visions of universal and frictionless flow, but also how this flow is executed through a displacement of command from action, and is thus spatially constituted in a way that relates to ideals of absolute space.

It may be said COBOL performs and thus executes universal and friction-free flows on space on a macro-level through its applications and programs, which manage global movements and transactions. Through its specific level of abstraction from hardware, it also works on the micro-level. As one of the earliest third-generation program- ming languages, the so-called high-level languages, COBOL belongs to what Walker has also defined as a third user interaction generation (Walker in Laurel 1990, p. 441). Here, user interaction is abstrac- ted from not only the machine, but from machine-specific languages through “automatic programming.” Programs written in “pseudo code” are translated through a compiler to fit the specifications of certain machines.48 The programming language is independent of any specific machine, and instead a given program can be moved and compiled on numerous machines. As a result, the high-level pro- gramming languages are capable of carrying out the execution of in- structions and commands as transportable entities that can be moved across systems, assuming that the environments are compatible, uni-

48 Please note that the original use of the term “pseudo code” had a very different meaning to how it is used today, where it indicates a humanlike/programming syntax referring to the structure, flow, and processes within a program, before it is written in an actual programming language.

83 fied in nature yet distant from each other—a vast and ideally smooth space of execution.49

Integral to third-generation programming languages are thus an initi- al absence, not only of the machine (since the languages now, at least in theory, can be moved freely across any kind of computer as long as they are equipped with a compiler for the given language), but also an absence of the programmer, since the program can now be executed anywhere, anytime, independent of the programmer who initially created it (Chun 2004, p. 30). Consequently, programming emerges as a globally transportable interface, in contrast to earlier generations of computation which were local and site-specific50 (as analyzed in the previous section). Wendy Chun refers to Derrida and his analysis of the absences integral to acts of writing, which, accor- ding to Derrida, is what makes writing and speaking different. As the instructions are separated from the machine, a separation of com- mand from action is taking place (Chun 2004, p. 30). In other words, the execution becomes displaceable, and may be literally manifesting the ideal of an absolute approach to space.

An absolute spatial approach presupposes space as being ideal, universal, and eternal. Space is here quantitative, measurable, and subject to general applicable laws. The approach was emblematic of the enlightenment and described in 1687 by Sir Isaac Newton in his foundational Principia Mathematica. “All things are placed in time as to order of succession; and in space as to order of situation” (Newton 1687, p. 79). Space is thus presented as a surface on which the physical phenomena of life are taking place, while those pheno- mena remain independent of the actions and events themselves (a city can be blown up, but the actual spatial distance cannot be removed). Subsequently, integral to an absolute approach to space is a belief in positivist objectivity, where the one who observes and measures is removed from the subject of the measurement, and thereby perfor- ming the “god trick” as expressed and criticized by Haraway (1988, p. 581).

49 Today, all programming languages except Assembly are high-level languages, and the level of hardware abstraction has only increased (for example, C/C++ has manual memory management in contrast to Java or Python). The increasingly popular language Rust has more recently been reversing the trend (since it is manually memory-managed like C/C++) (Walton 2013). 50 For example, a corporation would have to re-write all of their software when changing to a new computer. 84 Since a third-generation programming language like COBOL can (at least in theory) be moved, copied, and distributed to any machine anytime, infinitely, and the computational instructions thereby are in themselves (supposedly) indestructible and globally applicable in universal space and time, it can be said to embody the ideal of an absolute approach to space. In the following section I examine how the functionality of COBOL programs extends this even further through, for instance, retail, logistics, bank transactions, and ticket reservations systems. Such COBOL programs automatically coordi- nate, distribute, and displace goods, people or money through their execution, as an enforcement of absolute space as it expands within globalization.

This instrumental view of technology was criticized by German phi- losopher of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, who formulated his renowned “The Question Concerning Technology” essay in the post- war era concurrently with the development of the first high-level pro- gramming language, FORTRAN.51 Heidegger was not writing about programming languages, but his critique of how technology trans- forms nature into what he called “standing reserves,” resources to be moved and activated at will, is perhaps even more characteristic of the then emerging world of automation through computation, than the examples actually used by Heidegger himself. For Heidegger, the way modern technologies transform things is by unlocking and ex- posing resources and through new means of storage and distribution, transforming the environment into “standing reserves” (Heidegger 1977, p. 17).“Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.” (Heidegger 1977, p. 17)

In other words, “standing reserves” are at hand when needed, ready to be shifted around. Heidegger gives the example of an airplane. The machine might at first simply be perceived as an object placed in a runway in an airport, however Heidegger suggests that the airplane foremost represents a transportation opportunity, i.e. the fact that it is conceivable any time to take off to anywhere. Heidegger thereby

51 The text was originally entitled, “Die Frage nach der Technik” and was presented as a lecture in Bremen in 1949. It was first published in Germany as part of the collection of lectures and essays, Vorträge und Aufsätze in 1954.

85 argues that the airplane no longer stands against us as an object, but that it has been turned into a capacity, a standing reserve that ensures the possibility of transportation. As Mark Blitz notes, Heidegger is out to warn us that “what is dangerous is that technology displa- ces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly” (2014). From a necessary critical distance, Heidegger’s analysis is useful today as a description of an emerging paradigm of technology as a displacement in space.

Automatic Management

Gilles Deleuze’s 1992 essay, ”Postscript on the Societies of Control” analyzes how computation has permeated every aspect of society, even human life itself. Deleuze re-visits Foucault’s analysis of the dis- cipline society and examines how it is transforming into a society of control. He describes these transformations within different aspects of society and how key institutions such as education, work, money, etc. are affected. In the discipline society, the individual is constitu- ted as a single body within a larger system of governance exercised through the closed environments of family, school, factory, hospi- tal, prisons or barracks (Deleuze 1992, p. 3). According to Deleu- ze, the society of control is, however, characterized by omnipresent control targeting dividuals, rather than individuals. This control is exercised through code, where for instance digital passwords allow or refuse access to information (Deleuze 1992, p. 5). Thus making it possible to modulate access from person to person making the con- trol “a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other” (Deleuze 1992, p. 4). Deleuze describes how this furthermore affects means of production. Where the nineteenth century’s production was based on raw products being processed and turned into finished products, the capitalism of the society of control is no longer involved directly with production, which has instead been displaced to the third world. It is, of course, not outside of capitalism, but geographical differentiation where post-production versus production becomes a means of differentialization. Instead, businesses are now occupied with a sort of high-order production in which finished products are bought, re-sold or simply assembled (Deleuze 1992, p. 6).

86 Systems written in COBOL appear to be key agents in this form of control society, for instance through the management of retail. By way of tracking and rigid quantification of stock and sale, a retail system not only keeps track and automatically manages and dist- ributes, but also continuously ensures the flow of commodities and their presence. Deleuze, however, stresses that although the computer is foregrounded as characteristic for a society of control, machines in themselves are not determining, but rather expressing the “social forms capable of generating them and using them” (Deleuze 1992, p. 6).

If we turn to contemporary research on spatiality and the digital, geographers Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge foreground this charac- teristic of software—altering old models of organization and control by generating new modes of management and governmentality—and dub it “automated management” (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, p. 85). According to Dodge and Kitchen, automatic management:

originated in the need to more effectively and productively propagate and sustain the emerging capitalist system and its associated processes of industrialization, urbanization, and co- lonization, and to maintain order and discipline among a ra- pidly growing population and facilitate a dramatic adjustment in socioeconomic relations. (Kitchin and Dodge 2011, p. 81)

Deleuze analyzes the transition between the modern and post-mo- dern era without using the term absolute space, but Deleuze’s theory nevertheless suggests how computation is highly integral to (though not presupposing) a society in which a universal approach to space is continuously enacted.

British feminist geographer, Doreen Massey, situates her analysis of space within a globalized, post-colonial world and discusses how asymmetrical power structures are enforced through an absolute approach to space. Massey points out that by understanding space as a surface, other people and cultures may be conceived of mere- ly “as phenomena ‘on’ this surface” (Massey 2005, p. 4). In other words, through the reduction of space to an absolute surface, on which everything is interchangeable, the universal space becomes a

87 suppressive, colonial project52 (Massey 2005, p. 4). Since high-level languages allowed the displacement of the executable instructions in space and time53 and thereby turned the art of programming from local, site-specific and highly specialized acts to generally applica- ble automatic instructions, a third-generation program may be said to execute its instructions universally. Furthermore, in the specific case of COBOL, the program is not only universally applicable, but also universally executes the management and distribution of bank transactions, ticket reservations, retail systems, the managing of con- tainers, and so forth. Thus, through Massey’s approach, COBOL may be understood not merely as an interface for creating tools and applications that assist in the automatic management of a globalized world, by moving goods and resources, money and people around. Since such possibilities for continuous exchange and displacement are integral to COBOL applications, through their automatic ma- nagement of transactions, COBOL may be said to be continuously executing a universal and absolute understanding of space, which again to follow Massey’s arguments, may be characterized as a colo- nial approach.

52 See also Anne Buttimer’s pointing to the critique of imperialistic implications integral to the absolute approach to space of applied mechanistic geography (Buttimer 1993, p. 151). Or Walter Mignolo’s critique of the colonial and racist implications of Enlightenment geography (Mignolo, 2011). 53 In fact, low-level languages also allow this displacement (as we see today in the mass distribu- tion of binary software), but with the constraint that the displacement is limited to identical machine architectures.

88 1.3 EXECUTING/EXECUTED COBOL

“Nothing comes without its world”, Donna Haraway, 1997.

It could be said that COBOL reflects a double movement between visions and reality. On the one hand, the language was providing a foundation for the omnipresent, ubiquitous computation which ma- kes up our environment today, but on the other hand, external en- tanglements affected the reception, handling, and executions of CO- BOL applications, which were then formed differently to that of the initial visions and expectations. As examined in the previous chapter, COBOL is indeed one of the first programming languages that, at least in theory, executes and thus enacts a universal approach to spa- ce. However, the execution of the language is in itself “becoming”— meaning that its contextualization is affecting this execution. Accor- dingly, in turning away from the initial utopian visions of COBOL as an interface to frictionless, automatic management, it is revealed how applications written in COBOL are not only executing, but in return themselves being executed. Put differently, the conditions for such execution are affected through contextualization and entang- lements with the surroundings, socio-economic conditions, cultural connotations, through the executions’ embodiment within the world.

Perform Until

One of the main characteristics of applications written in COBOL is that they are batch processed. You might have noticed that your ATM transactions are not displayed immediately on your bank sta- tement. That is because the transaction is processed through batch processing. Batch processing is the automatic execution of many pro- grams at once within JCL, the Job Control Language, which was introduced in 1964 with the IBM System/360. It was in the days of punch cards and, basically, instead of punching one program onto

89 a card and then executing it, it was more efficient to punch a whole stack of cards with programs, and then execute all of them at once. Today’s batch processing uses the same principle (though of course without the punches and the cards) by collecting tasks from different programs in batches and then executing them automatically, one after another. That means the task is not executed immediately after it has been requested, but instead displaced in time, as an overnight job, for example.54 Consequently, the execution of COBOL programs sup- port and assist the automated management of various business tasks, but this very management is also in itself automated and displaced in time through the batch processing.

The reasons for batch processing are cost-saving through optimiza- tion and effectivity. Batch processing makes it possible to share com- puter resources and distribute them in time, and thereby optimizing the use of computer resources by avoiding costly idle computer time. While batch processing seemingly further displaces the displaceable, as the jobs themselves are queued, they are actually revealing the distribution and displacement systems’ dependency on underlying material conditions. Through batch processing, execution is revea- led to be, after all, not entirely universal and unbreakable but, on the contrary, dependent on foundational circumstances, in this case the processing power of the hardware (and the costs of that). This reveals how the execution in itself, echoing Massey, is “becoming” (Massey 2005, p. 21): it is not merely executing, but the execution is in itself constituted by its contexts.

Lack of Charisma

This last sub-section of the EXECUTION lesson investigates the entanglement of the cultural perception of COBOL and its execu- tion. How COBOL on the one hand has kept executing despite being despised and neglected, while on the other hand COBOL has been despised and neglected owing to its wide popularity and execution.

In conversation, an executive from IBM’s Asia Pacific draws con-

54 Today’s cryptocurrencies based on the Blockchain framework such as Bitcoin also often rely on batch processing in order to handle an otherwise unmanageable number of simultaneous transaction requests. Thereby, they ironically resemble traditional COBOL based ATM transactions.

90 nections between the economy of the easy-to-learn-and-understand- aspect of COBOL and the programming language’s wide implemen- tation. The executive emphasizes that:

The pay roll was the first application which was ever written using COBOL. But the fact that the value, people realized, that they were getting out of automation was so rapid, people star- ted to writing code left, right, everywhere. Every organization, which wanted to have the computed advantages, so that they could reduce costs, they automated. When they automated, they had to write programs. They wrote in COBOL, because it was cheap to hire a COBOL programmer […] Because of that every organization had IBM computers with COBOL running on it.55

As the executive points out, a complex entanglement of design decisions, as well as socio-economic aspects paved the way for the wide implementation of COBOL making it an interface to bringing computation to as many aspects of everyday life as possible. Ne- vertheless, despite its wide usage, COBOL has never been popular, as Jean E. Sammet notes:

It is hard to pinpoint the reasons for lack of charisma in a language, and it has very little to do with the actual use. For example, BASIC and COBOL are very widely used langu- ages, but I doubt whether many people are personally ent- husiastic about either of them. (Sammet 1972, p. 603)

Such “lack of enthusiasm” or even discomfort with COBOL has per- haps been expressed most boldly by Dutch computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra in a notorious 1975 rant on COBOL. He not only describes the teaching of the language as a ”criminal offense” (Dijkstra 1982, p. 130), but states that “...with respect to COBOL you can really do only one of two things: fight the disease or pretend that it does not exist” (Dijkstra 1982, p. 129). Dijkstra’s opposition to COBOL was rooted in a systemic view of execution having to be carried out as effectively and seamlessly as possible. In an earlier, influential letter to the editor of the ACM, Dijkstra had focused on the problem of the GOTO statement, which complicates the execution process of a program, and which he regarded as “an invitation to make a mess of

55 Interview, Bangalore, October 2014. 91 one’s program.” (1968) Dijkstra stressed that the wise programmer should do their “utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the corresponden- ce between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible.” (Ibid.) Actually, not only does COBOL contain GOTO statements, but its entire syntax, the particular texture of human-like language, allows for a sprawling of code that eventually results in very long programs. The intended legibility eventually turns the code illegible. This again decreases CO- BOL’s maintainability while at the same time increasing its need to be maintained. In his COBOL critique, Dijkstra dryly concludes, “Most Computer Science Departments have opted for the latter easy way out”—namely, the rejection of COBOL (Dijkstra 1982, p. 129).

Computer scientist Ben Schneiderman experienced the same issue, as he set out to investigate the relation between COBOL and the computer sciences a decade later. Schneiderman asked a well-res- pected programming languages expert about COBOL, and received a counter question as a reply: “What’s COBOL?” (Schneiderman 1985, p. 350). Such a reply exemplifies a common practice within the computer sciences of ignoring or even neglecting the existence and widespread use of the programming language. Schneiderman no- tices that in several of the contemporary computer programming text books of the 1980s, (e.g., MacLennan 1983), COBOL was not inclu- ded in the index (Schneiderman 1985, p. 350), despite the fact that in 1985, allegedly 60% of all existing computer programs world-wide were written in COBOL (Chairman of the COBOL committee, Do- nald Nelson, as quoted in The Computer Museum 1985, p. 8).56

Schneiderman nevertheless pursues his investigation of the nature of such discomfort in the article, “The Relationship between COBOL and Computer Science” from 1985. He opens the article by noting that as a computer scientist writing on COBOL, his actions may be interpreted as “bordering on heresy” (Schneiderman 1985, p. 348). Nevertheless, Schneiderman chooses to ignore any possible dismis- sal of his computer-science-trustworthiness and proceeds with an

56 The quote by Neil Fraser from Google Blockly, discussed in the first chapter of this lesson, perfectly adds to this tradition of neglect.

92 analysis of the development of COBOL and its relation to academia supplemented with interviews and conversations with around forty computer scientists and professionals in order to examine the ad- vantages and disadvantages of COBOL and compare them with the stereotypical image of the programming language as it takes form within the computer sciences.

As pointed out by Schneiderman, COBOL was marked by a certain distance from academia from the outset.57 The developers of COBOL consisted mostly of a commercial community including the users and manufacturers of computers and data processing systems. There were no academic computer scientists who participated.58 But as he notes:

In 1959–1960 very few academics could have been classified as computer scientists, of course, and few of them could have made useful contributions, but engaging them might have been benefi- cial. (Schneiderman 1985, p. 348)

Schneiderman observes that people who were regarded as computer scientists in 1959 tended to not be interested in any problem do- main related to COBOL’s, which were primarily problems related to commercial file-processing (see Howard Aiken’s sarcastic statement above). Instead, they were concerned with challenges related to nu- merical analysis, physics, engineering or system programming (Sch- neiderman 1985, p. 349).

Conversely, the developers of COBOL didn’t seem to be particularly interested in academia. In the 1962 May edition of ACM, thirteen papers were published reflecting on the development of COBOL. All of these papers were written either by someone from the industry or the government, but since only four of the thirteen papers actually included any references, Schneiderman mentions this as a possible “indicator of intellectual separatism” (Schneiderman 1985, p. 349).

57 As an artist doing a PhD in Interaction Design, this example highlights disciplinary boundaries even in quite a multi-disciplinary domain. The sense of what does and does not constitute a valid research area applies. Schneiderman points to the industry-academia divide but he’s still grounded in the perspectives of the Global North. As discussed in the APPROACHES lesson my turn to COBOL comes from academic/artistic research practice, which, despite having a foot inside, is twisting and turning (and thus re-turning) COBOL in a very different way from him. 58 Jean Sammet’s record as quoted previously in this thesis, stated that there was one participant from academia, however this person was not necessarily a computer scientist.

93 Schneiderman states that, “The rejection of COBOL by most com- puter scientists is a product of their desire to avoid the business data processing domain, their pursuit of mathematically oriented theory, and often their lack of knowledge about COBOL” (Schneiderman 1985, p. 350). A lack of knowledge which often leads to critique or simply distaste. Schneiderman suspects that “this prejudice emerges from the bias of many computer scientists against the problem do- main and the wordy, non-mathematical style of COBOL, rather than from any serious consideration of the technical weaknesses” (Schnei- derman 1985, p. 350).

Janet Abbate has suggested that computer scientists’ and software engineers’ disdain of COBOL may be linked to a “devaluation of the feminine,” which not only meant having many women involved in the development, but moreover the fact that the problem domain of business data processing in itself was due to its “people-oriented” na- ture, considered feminine (Abbate 2012, p. 208). Furthermore, the- re has been a tendency to evaluate the problem domain of COBOL as “relatively simple” (Schneiderman 1985, p. 350). Schneiderman quotes Pratt’s programming language textbook, stating that COBOL has “an orientation toward business data processing ...in which the problems are...relatively simple algorithms coupled with high-volu- me input-output (e.g. computing the payroll for a large organiza- tion)” (Pratt 1975 as quoted in Schneiderman 1985, p. 350). But as Schneiderman himself replies, it is hard to characterize a payroll system as simple (Schneiderman 1985, p. 350), and thus we can ass- ume that the disavowal of these COBOL applications has more to do with their down-to-earth and everyday life character, indicating that computer scientists have traditionally been disinterested in mundane labor relations and their politics.

In spite of such dismissal, today, more than sixty years after its deve- lopment, COBOL still plays a key role in global information archi- tectures. An engineer at laughs while noting that: “COBOL and English are the world’s largest languages.” And indeed, per- haps surprisingly, he is right. COBOL is still the main programming language for global business transactions and said to be executing around seventy percent of all such applications (Micro Focus 2017). Consequently, the process of keeping legacy applications written in

94 COBOL alive is affecting technological development within govern- ments, corporations, and institutions worldwide. In 2016, the US federal government spent more than two-thirds of its fiscal budget on operation and maintenance (Byrd 2016, p. 2), a sign of how au- tomation and the digital society is not necessarily moving unilinear- ly forward (see the MAINTENANCE lesson for in-depth discussion of this issue). Despite these facts, there is still a tendency to accept execution as supposedly friction-free and part of linear progressive technological development. However, a re-turn to COBOL may be a necessary means of unravelling rather different stories, namely that of inherent paradoxes of execution.

COBOL was supposed to make computation and automatic mana- gement part of everyday life through its smooth interface design, which was made to be easily accessible and legible. And so it did. However, the code embedded tighter control at the same time, while becoming increasingly illegible due to its very long programs, which again made it hard to maintain, and which resulted in it being even more disliked than it already was. Eventually, there were not many people who actually wanted to work with COBOL, but the language was still not ready to be relegated to the annals of obscure computer history. In fact, as the next lesson on CRISIS demonstrates, COBOL never went away and surfaces again within the discourses and prac- tices surrounding supposed states of crisis.

95 96 LESSON II: CRISIS

97 EXECUTING CRISIS

Bugs in the War Room, Solo exhibition, Overga- den—Institute of Contemporary Art, Denmark, 2 April–29 May, 2016.

Born in the midst of the Y2K hysteria, the absurd historical narrative surrounding the Endless Endtime algorithm is computationally extended and expanded upon, throughout various iterations of the ongoing Endless Endtime project series on paranoia and in- formation architectures.

The exhibition Bugs in the War Room was the first in- stallment of this series. I accepted the combination of technophobia and doomsday prophecy evident in the 1999 letter to the editor at face value and presented 666 new letters that resuscitated the numerological system of the original letter. From the many new let- ters, it emerges that computers are not alone in being the work of the devil. So far, “Santa Claus,” “humani- ty,” “New York,” “Ipad Touch,” “Terence Hill,” “Cherry Coke” and many others have proven to be satanic.

Page right-top: Excerpt from 666 New Letters to the Editor. Page right-bottom: Excerpt from 666 New Letters to the Editor. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

Pages 98-99: Bugs in the War Room. Exhibition overview. Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

98 99 100 101 102 2.1 BUGS IN THE WAR ROOM

In the mid-1990s, the Year 2000 problem, or Y2K bug as it was dubbed primarily in the Western world, was beginning to draw significant popular attention. Since the early days of computation, it had been a routine as well as a technical standard to indicate year dates with two digits instead of four, leaving out the numbers specifying the millennium in order to save costly computer memory. Awareness of the potential implications of such a practice began to emerge. At the turn of the millennium in the year 2000, computers would not be able to distinguish the 00 of 2000 from the 00 of 1900. It was assumed that:

Unless reprogrammed, bypassed or replaced these systems will malfunction at the turn of the century, if not before, with wide ranging consequences. (Downing 1998)

The Y2K bug, it was presumed, would lead to failures within major financial institutions like banks, stock exchanges, payroll systems, telecommunications, and power systems (Koskinen 2000).

Sixteen years before the crucial change from 31-12-1999 to 01-01- 2000, a book was published with the alarming title Computers in Crisis: How to Avert the Coming Worldwide Computer Systems Collapse. The authors, Jerome and Marilyn Murray, pointed to the problem of the widespread use of two-digit dates instead of four-digit dates. The book got a rather lukewarm reception. When reviewed in Computer World, June 11, 1984, George Harrar stated that most of the book could “be overlooked” (Harrar 1984, p. 43). However, the authors had gone out of their way to depict, in great detail, the possible horror scenarios related to the bug. One of their examples suggested it would take five hundred programmers, if each managed fifteen lines of code a day, twenty-one years to debug a Fortune 500 company’s library of fifty thousand COBOL programs. Nevertheless, Computer World’s reviewer dismissed the example by stating that the

103 book “overdramatizes the date-digit problem” although not without acknowledging that this was indeed a means to draw attention to the problem since, as he noted, “others have ventured the same thesis more quietly and stirred up little or no interest” (Harrar 1984, p. 43).

Despite the Murray’s “over-dramatising” or perhaps because of the harsh critique put forward by the Computer World reviewer, the pro- blem the authors attempted to highlight largely remained ignored. Five years would pass before the so-called TODAYS-DATE function (solely returning the two last digits of a year) was replaced by a func- tion returning all four digits, the CURRENT-DATE function, as a new standard (Haggin 2018).

Accordingly, in the mid and late 1990s, when awareness of the problem started to spread, the prospects of avoiding “the Coming Worldwide Computer Systems Collapse” seemed bleak due to the lack of programmers with skills in COBOL, which even then was already considered a legacy language, and thus obsolete. In the UK alone, it was estimated that there would be a shortage of thirty thou- sand IT professionals to make computer systems Y2K compliant, that is, to fix the date function bug (Downing 1998, p. 44), while re- presentatives of US industries claimed there would be a shortcoming of 340,000 (Downing 1998, p. 44). Moreover, Cap Gemini, an IT consultancy company, announced in April 1998 that they expected demand for IT professionals to exceed supply, which in turn would mean that due to a lack of COBOL programmers, eleven percent of companies, as well as many large corporations, would not be able to meet the deadline for making their systems Y2K compliant (Dow- ning 1998, p. 44).

Consequently, a new level of dramatizing the crisis was introduced. In 1997, the UK TaskForce 2000 chief Robin Guenier stated:

The side effects will be horrifying—from social security payments to power system failures to payroll problems to food-retailing to bank accounts; very many files will be inaccessible and therefore effectively lost ...It is the most expensive single technical and pro- fessional problem facing humanity. (The Guardian, 1997 as cited in Knights et al. 2008, p. 297)

104 While the Western world immersed itself in apocalyptic reverbera- tions, scores of the available Y2K job positions were outsourced to Indian companies specializing in Y2K compliance.

Fifteen years later, in the autumn of 2014, I travelled to India in order to learn COBOL (as described in the previous lesson). Parallel to my lessons in COBOL programming and mainframe maintenance, I had conversations with Indian programmers about their work experien- ces during the years prior to the turn of the millennium. It was later said that the Y2K bug fueled India’s outsourcing boom, but from a Western perspective, the period was characterized by hysterical doomsday paranoia. Through the many conversations I’ve had with programmers and computer scientists both in India and elsewhere, I’ve come to realize that investigating the Y2K bug opens a back door into the otherwise invisible underlying conditions of global networks. The bug opens up complex relations between hardware, execution, maintenance and global flows, while at the same time disclosing in- herent divides within these flows.

What follows is a close reading of the Y2K bug,59 an unfolding of its different contexts, which towards the turn of the millennium caused a world-wide crisis of computer systems, and thus stirred up the glo- bal economy. The lesson elaborates on the previous lesson’s notion of execution as a continuous and incomplete process, always on the ver- ge of breakdown, but now looks at its connection to technological, social, and economic systems and how this relates to global flows.

Bugs

Chennai, South India. I am sitting in a senior engineer’s office at one of India’s largest IT- companies. It is fall 2014, but our conversation takes us to the years prior to the turn of the millennium. She recalls her experiences of working within one of the many teams busy fixing the Y2K bug. The engineer describes the “war room,” a space in which she and her colleagues spent twenty-four hours observing the

59 I am aware that “close reading” has a history of being associated with analysis of textual, literary works. Later theorists such as Mieke Bal (2002) have opened up the term to stand for an interdisciplinary cultural analysis of cultural phenomena, which in my version also includes their technological and socio-economic dimensions.

105 world’s transition from December 31, 1999 to January 1, 2000. She says:

Well, they thought that on January 1st, 12 AM in the morning all planes will stop, all towers will stop, all trains will stop, all the clocks would stop, and all systems will come to a standstill...

In my Approaches chapter, I discussed Bruno Latour’s notion of “re- versible blackboxing,” which illustrates how a bug, in causing a sys- tem to fail, is reverse-blackboxing the system. It directs the user’s attention away from the system as an enclosed object and towards the discreet parts from which the system is made (Latour 1994, 36). Latour suggests the example of an overhead projector, which appears as an integrated, closed, blackboxed object, but upon breakdown, its network of interconnected objects and actors: lens, lamp, cooler, ca- bles, etc. are made visible. Following these lines of thinking, the bug that terminates a running process, a process of execution, draws at- tention to the relations which the execution process is part of as well as to the construction of the system that they are formed in, which for me here have to do with the politics of development.

The senior engineer explains:

We had set up something called the war room to monitor the systems’ changeovers. Because we were working across all the verticals like banking, critical transaction, transportation, i.e. where the planes have to land—they thought that some planes might not even land because of the Y2K problem.

At its core, the Y2K bug can be said to have been caused by a practi- ce of executing as economically as possible. The co-chairman of the Year 2000 working group for the Society for Information Manage- ment, Leon A. Kappelman, evaluated that the “use of two-digit years in a program written in the 1960’s would have saved more than $1 million per billion bytes of data stored over the following 30 years” (Feder and Pollack 1998). The Y2K bug thus reflects the socio-eco- nomical dimensions in the development of three of the computer’s core components: processor, memory, and storage. The economic aspects of these three parts evolved over different times and scales.

106 Processors were quickly made capable of performing faster in rela- tion to price, that is, it became cheaper to produce faster processors. The same was not true of memory, which stayed expensive (storage became cheaper, but not reliable). Because memory was very expen- sive it became a praxis (as well as a technological standard) to reduce the four digits of a given year into two digits, or one byte, the so cal- led “pack decimal.” It is this praxis that at the turn of the millennium would give rise to the label “Y2K bug.” In other words, the sup- posedly technical error was initially a clever solution to a problem, which only over time turned into a new problem. Consequently, the Y2K bug highlights hardware as well as socio-economic relations en- tangled with the process of execution. The execution process is here likely to be an interrupted one, revealing a dependency on external relations and thereby leading us to abandon a linear understanding of execution as simply enacted code, and instead moving us towards the more complex understanding of execution as part of what I call Crisis Computing.

War Rooms

The senior engineer continues:

The war room was a 360-degree room where everybody was ha- ving a terminal to monitor the systems, talk to the clients. Then there were the alternative phones, they thought even the phones would fail, even the phone companies, so there were alternative communication methodologies. There was a backup link. The- re was a fiber optic link … There were not many people in the room. Only the key people, about 50 of us.

The senior engineer’s description of the Y2K war room of the Indian IT corporation bears a resemblance to Ken Adam’s set design for the war room scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy Dr. Strange- love or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The movie’s war room was also equipped with a 360-degree table. It also had around fifty people gathered in the room—each and every one equipped with a terminal and a phone.

107 108 109 . 66 Samples of Materials for Covering a War Room Table Excerpt from 66 Samples of Materials for Covering a War Pages 109-110:

110 Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Photo: 66 Samples of Materials for Covering a War Room Table. Room Table. Page 108: Excerpt from 66 Samples of Materials for Covering a War In “Lessons Learned from War Room Designs and Implementations,” US military consultant, Steven M. Shaker describes how war rooms have played an important role in “developing tactics and grand stra- tegies” within the US military. Shaker traces the transformation of the war room from “rooms concentrated on maps, and on game ta- bles with miniature flags and models representing force disposition and movement” to how “[w]ith the advent of modern communica- tions and near real-time reconnaissance and intelligence these rooms have refocused to concentrate on command and control rather than long range planning and strategy formulation” (Shaker 2002, p. 3). War rooms are spaces of concentrated power from a distance, and by way of modern telecommunication technologies, this power is com- pressed into a site from which commands to be executed are given.

Adam’s war room set was indeed an iconic manifestation of such power. The story goes that when Ronald Reagan became president of the United States, he asked his “chief of staff to be shown the war room of Dr. Strangelove” (Adams 2008). Reagan assumed that this was a real room, located within the Pentagon. Even though this anecdote is also revealing of Ronald Reagan’s skewed relationship to reality and war,60 it further confirms how Ken Adam’s war room design, with the 360-degree table in the center, had manifested itself as a dominant visual imaginary of the epicenter of power and control in the Cold War era.

Kubrick’s Strangelove also depicts how the supposedly straightfor- ward execution of top-down orders can be disturbed. The war room is the backdrop of desperate attempts to counteract an order for a nuclear air strike against the Soviet Union issued by a mad general. Finally, the film presents how the inherent loyalty and discipline of military officers and soldiers, coupled with technological malfunc- tions, makes it impossible to avoid the destiny of execution. The irony of the film is that the technology does not actually execute the

60 Or maybe the other way around, namely DARPA’s skewed relation with reality and war. After Operation Desert Storm, there was sharp critique of General Schwartzkopf’s live televised appearances from a tent where he was simply pointing at a map while presenting his briefings, which was considered an embarrassing representation of US military command (Shaker 2002, 3). As a consequence, measures were taken within DARPA to hire Herman Zimmerman, the set-designer of Star Trek, to develop a mobile war room dubbed the “Enterprise Room” based on his design for the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 Bridge.

111 orders perfectly but individuals committed to the system ultimately carry through the execution.61

Stanley Kubrick insisted that despite the fact that the film was shot in black and white, the war room table should be covered with green felt, as he wanted to give an impression of how the powerful men gathered around the table “were playing for the fate of the earth like a poker game” (Adams, 2008). In trying to follow Kubrick’s rationale, I started wondering what kind of materials Kubrick would have chosen to cover the table of the Indian Y2K war room, in case he, thirty years later, had set out to depict the madness of the Y2K paranoia, as it was played out at the end of the 1990s. This table did not assemble top leaders or represent a top-down hierarchy of order and execution. On the contrary, it gathered what could be labelled an emergency brigade, or the caretakers of global information ar- chitectures, thus ultimately calling for a different understanding of the war room’s relation to power. The new understanding requires moving away from top-down management of commands followed by execution, towards a model of continuous maintenance and feed- back.

The operations room, or Opsroom, of the ambitious management control system, Cybersyn, was an example of a “war room” contri- ved on the basis of a continuous feedback system. The project was designed and partially implemented by British cybernetic theorist Stafford Beer, mainly in order to manage the struggle of Chile’s na- tional economy during the transition to Allende’s socialism at the beginning of the 1970s.

The Opsroom was the focal room of the entire system. Production units from all over the country were connected to the room, from which managers were able to monitor and give feedback to the en- tire national production. Strongly inspired by cybernetic principles, real-time infographics were displayed on the surrounding walls to provide government managers what Beer described as “a synoptic view of the whole battle... made plain, so that the total system can be encompassed by human powers of foresight” (Beer 1994, p. 448).

61 Eventually, one plane attacks the USSR as requested, thus triggering the MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction] doctrine, likely leading to complete annihilation of Earth’s population. With the excep- tion of the group of men gathered in the war room of course, who are being moved to a safe place underground.

112 Beer likened the Opsroom to a “a set-design from a futuristic film” (Beer 1994, p. 448). Seven white plastic armchairs with orange uphol- stery (resembling Eero Saarinen’s iconic Tulip Chair) were placed in a circle in the middle of the room, surrounded by walls covered with wooden panels and the data displays. The sci-fi aesthetics notwith- standing, Beer stressed that: “it is no science fiction: it is science fact” (Beer 1994, p. 448). Telex machines were set up in factories to transmit a diverse range of production details spanning production status, fuel supply, distribution, and so on (Medina 2011, p. 149). The data was displayed on screens on the walls, and each armchair was equipped with large knobs, by which the managers could inter- face the data on the screens (Medina 2011, p. 1). The control room thus had the appearance of a smooth operation space from which experts seemed capable of making live adjustments to production, thereby navigating the country through its economic crisis.

In Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue for a post-capitalist futu- re realized through full automation. Their thesis is that instead of fighting against neo-liberal forces integral to modern technologies, they should be accelerated in order to create a fully automated world in which all boring and difficult work will be carried out by compu- ter-controlled machines. The authors point to Cybersyn as a histo- rical example of an efficient, automated system that placed modern technology in a socialist context (Srnicek and Williams 2015, pp. 148–150). From Srnicek and Williams’ point of view, the automa- tion of logistics is “a prime example of what a post-capitalist world might look like: machines humming along and handling the difficult labor that humans would otherwise be forced to do.” (Srnicek and Williams 2015, p. 151)

The war room of Cybersyn, the Opsroom, did indeed, as indicated by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams appear as a smooth space, in which it was possible to overview and tune very complicated eco- nomic processes. Nevertheless, the reduction of complexity required massive effort. The seven managers’ seats were designed in such a way that the operators wouldn’t need to type to appease Beer’s disin- clination “to insinuate a girl between themselves [the managers] and the machinery” (Beer 1994, p. 449). Typing was the job of women

113 and in order to prevent anything coming between the managers and their decisions and feedback to the national production, a deliberate design choice was made by installing large simple knobs in different shapes, thus allowing the managers to access and browse through the data without the need of typing skills (Medina 2011, p. 127). Ironically, however, at the same time the information flow required designers to manually draw the multiple visuals being displayed on the screens. This job was carried out by a team of women designers and happened behind the scenes of the flashy control room (Medina 2011, pp. 124–125).

Cybersyn was presented as a participatory management system, de- signed on the basis of “factual” and supposedly neutral scientific principles, however on closer inspection, it becomes clear that behind the smooth surfaces of the chic control room, a less neutral space was taking shape. The space clearly favored male managers being placed in the comfortable control seats. Meanwhile the frictionless “flow” of data only appeared due to the continuous updating and maintenance carried out by the team of women designers behind the screens. The Y2K war room in India points to a similar back-side of automation.

In the back offices of large corporations, computerized information processing has been transforming office work since the 1960s. CO- BOL has played a crucial role due to being the first business pro- gramming language. COBOL applications have been executing the batch processing of data within very large corporate run on mainframe computers since the sixties. Such automated execution processes led to a transformation of the ontological understanding of certain job tasks or as Paul Adler frames it through his study of the computerization of the bank sector at the end of the 1980s:

A series of tasks formerly considered the very essence of bank work has been eliminated, including accounting imputation and adjustment, classification of documents, multiple entri- es of data, manual data search, and supervision by signature. A new range of tasks has been introduced. Accountants now diagnose and rectify anomalies listed by the computer system. New types of errors—and fraud—appear. (Adler 1988, p. 8)

114 In other words, the labor tasks in back-offices transformed from the execution of tasks, to the monitoring of the execution proces- ses of tasks (making sure nothing goes wrong when machines keep “humming along”). In this context the Y2K war room in India may be understood as a back office to the back office—or the back-back office. This should not be mistaken for a super elite, executive, back office, but on the contrary, the one thing that everyone pretends is not there (like a scruffy truth). Furthermore, the function of this back-back-end office is not to detect anomalies directly within the executed data, but rather within the overall system of execution.

In 1998, there were 350,000 open job positions for programmers to complete Y2K compliance efforts in the United States according to a survey by the Gartner Group (Coughlin 1999). It was well-paid, though monotonous work. A large number of the affected applica- tions were written in COBOL. Nonetheless, at that time the pro- gramming language had predominantly been removed from the com- puter science curricula of Western universities, since it was regarded obsolete (Scribner, 1999). At the same time, many of the initial CO- BOL programmers had already retired (Coughlin 1999). Consequ- ently, due to a skill-gap, not even half of the 350,000 open Y2K compliance positions could be filled (Coughlin 1999).

The standard of computer science education in India was highly ad- vanced. Beginning in the 1950’s, the republic’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, invested intensively in technology and education, but from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s the country was closed to foreign investment. During that period, severe import restrictions made it incredibly expensive and very hard to get up-to-date computer equipment—because the duties on such goods were extremely high and it could take years just to import a single machine.62 For that reason, during the 1980s, much of the teaching of computer sciences was dependent on very old machines and pro- gramming was taught in theory, rather than in hands on lab classes. COBOL, however, remained one of the most important languages and one of the few languages which was taught in lab classes.63

62 Prior to India’s closure and IBM’s exit in 1978, there were around three hundred IBM main- frames set up in the country. When IBM returned in 1992, there were only two or three left. Source: Interview with senior engineer at IBM, November 2014. 63 A computer scientist tells me that during his studies in India in the 1980s the programming lan-

115 In 1991, economic reforms started to be introduced in India. The Export-Import Policy of 1992–97 aimed to dismantle the protecti- onist policies for the first time since the 1970s. The American Y2K deadlock coincided with India’s increased opening up and hence the discovery of an immense body of English speaking, highly educated, and affordable, COBOL experts proved to be a welcome solution to the dilemma of the West. By 1998, around 120 Indian companies were working on Y2K compliance.64 The senior engineer estimates that by the end of the 1990s there were continuously a minimum of two thousand and a maximum of four thousand engineers working on Y2K compliance at her company.

During a visit to another software consultancy company, two employees tell me that in the years prior to the millennium they had constantly between five and ten thousand employees working with Y2K compliance. But, they also emphasize that the work didn’t finish after the turn of the millennium. On the contrary, today their compa- ny has even more employees working with mainframe maintenance than during the end of the 1990s. They estimate that at present it is somewhere between thirty and forty thousand.

The senior engineer nods. It is the same situation at her company. All this Y2K compatibility was carried out in parallel to the European Union’s introduction of the Euro, which also required an immense programming effort in updating old applications to include the new currency. “Thereafter,” she says, “there were legacy modernization, consolidation, migration, data center consolidation, application con- vergence, mergence, acquisitions, and so forth.” Today, they also have around thirty or forty thousand people constantly working with the maintenance of systems involving COBOL applications. They work across twelve domains: banking, financial services, transportation, health care, life sciences, manufacturing, telecom, utilities, insuran- ces and retail. In other words, they are the concealed back-back-offi- ces of our global flows. guages C, LISP, PROLOG, and Assembly were all taught as theoretical subjects only. Only COBOL, Basic, Fortran, and Pascal were taught as lab classes. When he himself started teaching in 1988, CO- BOL was still an important language. It continued to be like that until 2003, when it was removed from his college’s curriculum in computer sciences. Interview, Bangalore, November 2014. 64 “Y2K—INDIA HAS LITTLE TO LOSE AND MUCH TO GAIN (International Y2K market estimated to be $600 billion).” India Business Insight (India), March 21, 1998. NewsBank: Access World News. Available online: https://infoweb-newsbank-com.proxy.mau.se/apps/news/docu- ment-view?p=AWNB&docref=news/148F224CF6061018 (accessed July 1, 2020).

116 The world’s current optimism related to automation and labor con- ditions is not new. As early as 1930, John Maynard Keynes wro- te the short essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” predicting a work week of fifteen hours in the year 2030 thanks to automation.65 But as my analysis has shown, machines are only “humming along” when they are also being meticulously cared for. Consequently, the argument for full-automation as a way to realize a post-capitalist society, put forward by Srnicek and Williams, seems a naive, Western-centered perspective, not acknowledging the immense amount of tedious maintenance work that is needed in order to actu- ally execute automation (please see the CRISIS COMPUTING chap- ter for a detailed discussion of this issue). It is not as if developing countries can simply catch up, since the Y2K and COBOL examples shows that this view ignores the real power relations at play in the interdependence of the East-West construction.

Anxious Flows

The relocation process of COBOL jobs to the East was accompanied by apocalyptic reverberations in the West. A letter to the editor of the Conservative Christian American magazine, Endtime in March/ April 1999 read:

If we let A=6, B=12, C=18, etc. all the way through Z=156. If you take the word COMPUTER and apply these values to the letters, you will find that they add up to 666. In Revelation 13:18 “...Let him that hath understanding count the number of ; for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.” I do not believe that this is a coincidence. We have specula- ted that the computer chip will be “the Mark” now we have proof! (Briant 1999, p. 7 as quoted in Tapia 2003, p. 493)

The emergence of a global capitalism based on interconnected computers allowing for immediate interchange of information, the

65 I should note that this essay was a statement made during the Great Depression and conse- quently a comment on the high unemployment that dominated the 1930s.

117 “network society,” has, according to Manuel Castells, affected tradi- tional notions of place and time (1996). As a consequence of compu- ter networks, time could be shared across multiple places, but com- puters also allowed for execution processes to be sped up or delayed, which according to Castells resulted in the substitution of dominant temporality by a sense of “timeless time”66 (Castells 2010, p. 495). Moreover, Castells dubbed the new form of micro-temporal place- lessness emerging through information architectures “the space of flows” (1989 p. 128-171 and 1996, pp. 407-459). In contradiction to the optimism of earlier visions of interlinked global media-networks such as Marshall MacLuhan’s Global Village, Castells was careful to stress that while the interlinked network would affect everyone, not everyone would be connected. Networks, Castells argued, disconnect at the same time as they connect. He emphasized that what is valu- able according to the logic of the network would be connected, and that the rest would remain outside those connections (Castells 2008, p. 81). Castells’ analysis pointed to a darker side of an interconnec- ted global world where a disconnected fringe would exist parallel to an exclusive elite connected through “spaces of flows.”

Other dark sides of joined networks included possible risks and di- sasters rooted in the very circuitries (for example Y2K), the aware- ness of which started to bubble up throughout the 1990s. In Digi- tal Contagions, Jussi Parikka notes that, “The utopia of the global village and the vast numbers of accounts celebrating networks and cyberspaces as the key utopian (non)places of recent decades showed their flipsides to be a dystopia of global risks and accidents” (Parikka 2016, p. xv). Parikka’s media archaeological analysis of the compu- ter virus is an example of this darker side of an interconnected global world. He states:

Viruses work through contagion of paranoia, the expected in- fection that creates an “aura of fear.” The virus is transformed from microorganisms into an infection on the macroscopic level of society, where the disease is fought via isolation, splintering and blaming. (Parikka 2016, p. 102)

66 This is usually just referred to as the possibilities of asynchronous communication, think e-mail.

118 Parikka thereby depicts how the risk of infection dismantles a pre- sumable universal (and thus indestructible), global frictionless flow from within.

Technically speaking, the Y2K bug in itself was not contagious the way a self-replicating computer virus would be. It was instead the case of a simple problem that was built into common information processing applications that would be “executed” through the date change from 31-12-1999 to 01-01-2001. Nevertheless, due to the interconnectedness of applications and networks, when the execu- tion process of a given application was interrupted, it would pre- sumably affect other applications, which again would affect others and so forth, eventually leading to massive breakdowns. Thus the “aura of fear” affected not just -prophesizing Christians, but the Western business world as well, which reacted strongly to the “threat” of the bug, especially to the potential economic los- ses related to it. As stated in the April 1999 issue of The Futurist Magazine:

If you think your company will be okay because all your sys- tems are Y2K compliant, guess again... Just because you’ve worked out your Y2K bugs does not mean your suppliers have. If 5% of your suppliers go out on you, can your compa- ny survive? (Minerd as quoted in Fishman and Fosket 1999)

In “Revisiting the Y2K Bug: Language Wars over Networking the Global Order,” Kirsty Best points out how the Y2K bug “illustrated the way in which the primacy of the individual within a global order is under threat from the contamination of others, the inability to seal one’s borders” (Best 2003, p. 301). Such presumed omnipre- sence corresponds to Ulrich Beck’s notion of the boomerang effect within what he calls the “Risk Society,” writing, “The multiplication of risks causes world society to contract into a community of dang- er” (Beck 1992, p. 44—my emphasis). However, in March 1999, The Financial Times reported:

Federal officials have said that if they are not satisfied with other countries’ plans for air traffic control, the Department of Trans-

119 portation could ban flights between specified airports and the US or prevent US airlines and code sharers from flying over cer- tain countries (Malkani 1999 as quoted in Fishman and Fosket 1998).

In November of the same year, the semi-official private sector body of the UK, the so-called Taskforce 2000, “advised travelers to av- oid Germany, Switzerland and a number of other countries for a fi- ve-week period around 1 January 2000”67 (Quiggin 2005, p. 49). Meanwhile “[f]ears of severe disruptions in Russia, Ukraine and Be- larus were so high that the U.S. embassies sent hundreds of workers and dependents out of the countries” (Noblet 2000). Such divisions between “us” and “them” played out on micro as well as macro levels.

Some developing countries spent enormous resources to become Y2K compliant to avoid exclusion on a macro level. Later however, it was revealed that the “speculation that computers in developing countries would fail was generally based on anecdotal information” (Gartner Group’s sector chief of research for the infrastructure, ar- chitecture and development groups, Matt Hotle, as quoted by Shukla 2000). Nevertheless, the enormous spending was not scrutinized, but justified as a way to accelerate development. In Mexico, for instance, the technical secretary of the National Commission for Y2K Infor- mation Conversion stated, “We’ve come out on top... the quality of equipment and infrastructure has improved, and more companies are now using computers as a result of this experience” (Faiola 2000 as quoted in Best 2003, p. 303). Or take Stephen Mutula, who in his analysis of the impact of the Y2K problem in a southern African context concludes by highlighting the benefits of the preparations for the Y2K bug:

The bug brought into focus the importance for organizations to continually upgrade and modernize their computer systems to take advantage of development in technology. The critical role played by IT and its pervasiveness in organizations and every sector of national life was emphasized. The need for computer

67 The full list of countries included: Czech Republic, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, and Switzerland.

120 awareness to enhance staff competence in using the technology was considered vital. The importance of information networking between organizations, individuals and different sectors within and outside countries was underlined as different professionals came together through conferences to exchange ideas and share experiences. Lastly, the over dependency on computers for the day to day operations of organizations, and the need for back- ups, were considered critical. (Mutula 2001, p. 26)

The tendency to divide between “us” and “them” was similarly play- ed out on micro levels within Western governments, corporations, and institutions. Kevin Quigley quotes a civil servant remarking on the process of correcting the Y2K bug within the British Governme- nt, who said that, “Given the consensus that ‘it had to be done,’ any opposition from within would have been the work of a troublema- ker, not a team player... becoming ‘Y2K-compliant’ was a badge of honour; it meant good corporate citizenship” (Quigley 2004, pp. 817–818). This led to a gap between those who were doing their duty, being “good citizens” and not asking any questions, and tho- se opposing, who were depicted as a “few ‘cynical’ civil servants” reflecting critically on how Y2K-compliancy was being carried out (Quigley 2004, p. 818). Hence the “us” would by all means attempt to continue the execution, whereas the “they” may not have cared about, were critical towards, or were unable to correct the Y2K bug, and thus had to be controlled by different means or be literally exclu- ded from the network as a symbolic act.

The “risk” surrounding the Y2K bug took form as a discourse of the construction of the “other” (Best 2003, p. 302; Fishman and Fosket 1998) as well as anxious attempts of escaping such categorization, rather than a “community of danger” as envisioned by Beck. Ac- cordingly, the apocalyptic, “” letter to Endtime written in spring 1999 could be read as a manifestation of such an- xiousness, where the problem of dealing with the contingency of the system transverses into a “Paranoid Cybernetics” (Cramer 2016). An absurd arbitrary system is created in order to maintain the otherwise sliding grip of control, thus allowing the letter writer to announce,

121 “Now we have proof!” on the basis of a numerological system in which letters of the word “computer” add up to 666. Despite the fact that this numerological system of course appears entirely arbitrary.

Crisis in Progress

The Y2K bug can be understood as a crisis of the understanding of development. The Western world was faced with a situation as a result of its technological advancement in which problems related to obsolete programming languages could not be solved due to skill gaps. Thus leading to presumed breakdowns of the advancements themselves, i.e., telecommunications, power systems, financial insti- tutions, etc. (Koskinen 2000)—in other words, the Western model of civilization. Subsequently, nations usually depicted as “developing” or “backwards” (among other descriptors based on their technologi- cal advancements being out of tune with the latest technological de- velopments displayed by the “developed” nations), now found that being a step behind turned out to be an advantage since they actually still had the skills needed to unravel an emergent problem (Fischman and Fosket, 1999).

In this way, the intentional aspects of development were overturned, understood as the goal to reach a status of “developed.” This status was suddenly afflicted with a certain sense of reversal where the sup- posedly developed countries lacked the skills to cope with this crisis. Following this puncturing of the linear logic of development, “the aura of fear” with its discourse of exclusion and the constructing of “the other” may be understood as attempts of assuring stability within the crisis-inflicted notion of development. The fall back on, and amplification of, stereotypical roles of “them” and “us” helped to clear the blurring lines. Eventually the act of being Y2K compati- ble became an indication of being developed. Paradoxically this led some developing countries to go out of their way in order to also become Y2K compatible, although it later was confirmed that the assumptions that they would be hit by the same problems were fig- ments of imagination—a kind of tragic colonial consciousness igno- ring that nations like, for instance, India were already among the best

122 equipped to deal with the Y2K problem (and were indeed providing services of maintenance to the rest of the world).

However, rather than scrutinize the excessive financial investments related to the Y2K bug and use it as an opportunity to contest pre- dominating notions of development as being linear and evolutionary, the expenditures were legitimized through a rhetoric of advancement through bug fixing. In this relation “Paranoid Cybernetics” might be understood as a counter-reaction where instead of modifying the premises of a given system in crisis, the paranoid cybernetics sustain the system through the introduction of new “variables.” Which, al- though being preposterous, nevertheless support the validity of the existing system, which otherwise presumably would fall apart. Like the “Now we have proof!” in the letter to the editor of Endtime. In a similar manner, the existing discourse of a binary divide between developed and developing was sustained. Even though the obvious flaws of evolutionary development were exposed.

123 Economies and/of Execution

Sunrise 01-01-00:

The photographer said: “Somehow I managed to be at the right place at the right time to watch the sun rise behind May Island on the first of January, 2000—It was perfect!”68

The Western Y2K expert had said: “I am not worried about New Zealand or Australia, I am a bit more worried about Japan, but I am more concerned about the rest of the far East. The worst prepared come first. I wish that for one evening the world would rotate the other way.” (Peter de Jager aka Mr. Millennium as quoted in Bhatti et al. 1999)

Back in the office in Chennai, the senior engineer ends her ac- count: “We had to manage the entire 24 hours. Just follow the sun on that day [...] Very few critical problems were there. It had nothing to do with the date—the usual production support problems.”

There is a tendency to think of execution as an ongoing flow of run- ning processes. But as the senior engineer notes: “Very few critical problems were there. It had nothing to do with the date—the usual production support problems.”69 Historian of computing, Nathan Ensmenger, highlights how software is not to be understood as a finished product, but on the contrary, as a “heterogeneous system” comprised of social as well as technological elements (Ensmenger 2009, p. 88). This means that since the world around the executed

68 Flickr user Dan Young’s caption for his picture, “Millennium Sunrise,” taken on January 1, 2000. 69 According to Richard Canning, there are four primary categories of usual production support problems: 1) The program refuses to execute—this form of failure requires immediate action and fixing; 2) The program is running, but the output it produces is wrong—here an immediate fix is also crucial, but the problem is likely to be rooted in an initial design flaw; 3) Maintenance needed in re- lation to changings and alterations happening within the business environment, this can for example be restructuring of the overall business or changes of business policies etc.; 4) Maintenance needed in order to optimize the performativity of the programs. (Canning 1972, p. 6)

124 Excerpt from Just follow the sun on that day, 66 observations of the sun, 01-01-00 Photo: Anders Sune Berg.

125 code is continuously being altered, the software itself has to be main- tained and updated in order to be kept alive, that is, to be executable at all. Thus, the war room of the Y2K bug was not just a one-off happening, conversely it is taking place all the time. In the senior engineer’s company, she and her thirty to forty thousand colleagues are steadily making sure that the bugs in the war rooms—the usual production support problems—are found, corrected, and enhanced in order for the networked global economy to continue executing.

Manuel Castells’ concept of spaces of flows within the global eco- nomy calls for closer examination. Castells’ assumption regarding a connected elite versus a disconnected margin implies that the “spa- ces of flows” connecting this elite are constantly flowing. Thus sup- porting an understanding of technology and execution as a friction- less continuity. However, as the Y2K bug indicates, flows actually need to be made flowing in order to flow. Thus, the divide between the connected elite and the disconnected lacking value is less bina- ry. Those that maintained the flows were also inhabiting them: the engineers of the Y2K room were maintaining the, otherwise incom- plete, flow of our information architectures. So the Y2K war room turns out to be a crucial site for the understanding of execution’s entanglement with global economy: not because the Y2K war room is a focused center of power and command, but, on the contrary, because it is the site, or the back-back office, from which informa- tion is made to flow, through a continuous maintenance of back end structures—“the usual production support problems.”

Maintenance is about efficiency—thus a matter of economy and eco- nomizing and the Y2K problem could be said to manifest this as a problem of execution. Not as a relation between source code and executed object code, but in this case of execution as a matter of an economy of the hardware. Meanwhile the mere scare of the poten- tial breakdown can be said to have, for a brief moment, surfaced our global networked information architectures, thus opening up a comprehension of the complex internal relations between hardware, execution, and the maintenance needed in order to make algorithms execute at all. But also, importantly, disclosing the role of maintenan-

126 ce as the main force upholding a networked global economy. This is something, I will examine more closely in the next lesson on main- tenance.

127 128 LESSON III: Maintenance

129 130 131 MAINTAINING EXECUTION THROUGH ITERATION

Now We Have Proof! Solo exhibition, The Win- chester Gallery, Winchester, United Kingdom, 12 October–13 November, 2018.

The Now We Have Proof! exhibition was the third installment of my ongoing Endless Endtime project series on paranoia and information architectures. Here, the re-turn to the original code from the letter to the editor exhibits the arbitrary way a system can be set up to collect, compute, and output informa- tion. This points to the current tendency to take algo- rithms, data, and their validity for granted. By feeding the algorithm with enough data, the rationale goes, it will eventually make the right decision, better than humans could themselves. Now We Have Proof! presented 666 new letters to the editor generated by monitoring the continuous flow of news feeds. New satanic terms included, among others “Bolsonaro,” “The Brexit,” and “Corbynite”.

Page right: Photos by Olle Essvik.

132 133 134 3.1 PROLOGUE: HUMAN FACTOR

A film starts: Giraffes slowly move in a row through a heavily CCTV-surveilled environment that looks like a strange mixtu- re of a slaughterhouse, a multi-story car park and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim building. All walls are covered in standard square tiles, white. The giraffes seem to be prisoners of some kind. One of them stretches its long neck and sniffs in the direc- tion of a surveillance camera. This act is depicted through the CCTV’s point of view, as though someone is monitoring the ani- mals. The atmosphere is creepy—where are they going? What are they waiting for? Cut. Doors open and the giraffes spill onto what turns out to be a gigantic diving tower in a swimming hall. Gracefully, the long-necked animals are throwing themselves off a ten or maybe even fifteen-meter-high diving platform, making classy, acrobatic turns before they swoop majestically into the water.

Conflations

It is June 30, 2016, and I find myself at the opening of the sum- mer offshoot of Austrian art, science, and technology festival, Ars Electronica. The exhibition is called Human Factor—Endless Proto- typing and takes place at the Volkswagen center in Friedrichstrasse, Berlin. The giraffe film described above opens the show. I know the film and am happily surprised that Ars Electronica has chosen it as their opening event for the Human Factor show. I am surprised be- cause I initially stumbled on the animated film in the first year of my doctoral studies and up until now knew it only as a commercial for British software consultancy company Micro Focus, specialists in the support and maintenance of legacy systems relating to COBOL.70

70 On the day of the film’s screening at the Volkswagen Center, I make the assumption that Ars Electronica has some sort of collaborative arrangement with Micro Focus. It makes perfect sense to me, given that their exhibition is about the human factor in technology. After all, Micro Focus’s products and services support the maintenance processes of legacy COBOL systems. The event is tak-

135 And I am happy because I really like that Ars Electronica is taking this unusual approach, aptly focusing on maintenance as the main human factor within technological development (or so I thought).

I am surprised, again, when the film is stopped in the middle of the credits, cut off abruptly before the Micro Focus tagline, “a future for the present” is supposed to appear. A woman walks on stage to give a presentation and welcomes the audience. She begins her talk by referring to the amazing things that animals are capable of doing with the unlimited possibilities of photo-realistic 3D animation (in which only human fantasy sets the limit). Is the screening of the film merely a coincidence? Where did the Micro Focus “a future for the present” slogan go?71 Why has the film been stripped of its original context and now shown as a funny intro on animals to an exhibition entitled Human Factor? I am baffled. In a later speech, the director of Ars Electronica, Gerfried Stocker, stresses the importance of acknow- ledging the human factor in the development of technology, empha- sizing that any algorithm, no matter how complex and impossible to understand it may appear, was always created by humans. The statement is echoed in the exhibition press materials, which decla- re that “we have come to be so successful in modifying everything around us—even the essence of life itself—to such an extent and con- figuring it so complexly that we now find ourselves in the paradox- ical situation of no longer being able to comprehend this world we have made” (Ars Electronica 2016b, p. 1). Hence the Human Factor exhibition highlights the fact that humans, despite the current state of being overwhelmed by life’s complexity, originated and developed the algorithms and other technologies, at least initially. The exhibi- tion also implies that humans are able to take back control of this complexity.

I later find the director of the giraffe film, French filmmaker, Nicolas Deveaux, and learn that it is called 5 Mètres 80, and won numerous awards including the Best of Show at Siggraph 2013 in Hong Kong, a Mention d’Honneur at Prix Ars in 2014 and the public prize at ing place in a car showroom with shiny new VWs on display alongside the art and I don’t perceive any friction between an advertisement from a British company and the environment. It is already hard to decipher what is part of the exhibition and what is business in the Volkswagen Center. 71 A slogan which has amused me a bit as one may ask if it should not have been “a future for the past” instead of “a future for the present,” given that COBOL is a legacy programming language.

136 New York’s International Children’s Film Festival in 2015. Deveaux denies any knowledge of it being used by either Micro Focus or Ars Electronica’s Human Factor exhibition and their context of legacy systems or the human factor in technology (Deveaux 2017). Maybe I inadvertently make him aware of these uses, prompting him to act on them, as my later attempts to re-access the film clip on the Micro Fo- cus website are in vain. Nevertheless, after meticulous scrutiny of the Micro Focus web presence, including forums and training-sections, I stumble on a little thumbnail on one of their blogs: a screen shot from the film, in which a giraffe is stretching its long neck and snif- fing in the direction of the CCTV camera, seen through what appears to be the camera POV.72 It is the only evidence that still indicates any relation between Micro Focus and the short film.

72 The thumbnail was embedded in a blog post by Derek Britton titled “COBOL and Micro Focus—investment that pays dividends” from September 18, 2014. Available online: https://blog. microfocus.com/investment/ (accessed on July 23, 2020).

137 Human Factor versus Human Factor

Research has proven that giraffes, although capable of swimming, are very poor swimmers (Henderson and Naish, 2010). So, it is fair to assume that giraffes in a swimming hall is an impossibility.73 On the one hand then, 5 Mètres 80 functions as the opening event at Ars Electronica’s Human Factor—Endless Prototyping exhibition, whe- re it exemplifies human capabilities of imagining the impossible, of manipulating nature beyond the bounds of possibility through tech- nological means. On the other hand, the film equally functions as a humorous promotional film for a business offering services and software environments to ease tedious maintenance work on legacy software applications. In this context, 5 Mètres 80 offers a tongue- in-cheek parody of legacy and its environ- ment. Micro Focus’s use of this advertisement may be understood as an ironic self-reflection on the predicament of system maintainers, portraying how the maintenance workers are trapped within rigid systems, but with the help of Micro Focus’s platforms suddenly be- come capable of making the legacy systems perform to an extent no one would have thought possible. The engineers are depicted as tired giraffes, working in endless rows within very rigid, restricted, and clinical working domains. The spatial layout of the setting, the en- vironment an eerie cross between a prison and a high-tech slaughter- house—manifests the system as being both rigid and having a critical top-priority status, and thus also being highly secured. The giraffes then, resemble prisoners or maintainers as actually maintained: con- fined to a static, high-priority system.

In the Ars Electronica screening and Micro Focus’s use of the film, the giraffes are indeed tamed, instructed, and animated by human factors, but these factors lead to radically different interpretations. At the Ars Electronica exhibition opening, the “human factor” is one of innovation in human imagination as an element of unlimited technological development, highlighted by the show’s subtitle “end- less prototyping.” The advertisement for Micro Focus depicts the working environment of legacy software maintenance as mind-num- bing and tedious, but due to Micro Focus’s tools these restrictions

73 The giraffes are depicted as not just dignified swimmers, but as eminent acrobats.

138 are overcome, and the maintainers turned into graceful, acrobatic magicians, the maintenance working environment transformed into an exciting diving tower.

On the Ars Electronica website, we learn that the influential organi- zation functions as an “international trend barometer, constantly on the lookout for what’s new and exciting, what’s radically different, what’s making an impact right now” (Ars Electronica 2018). In con- trast, maintenance is far from new and as we will see when scruti- nizing its cultural domain in the coming chapters, it is definitely not viewed as exciting and not treated as if it is making any great cultural impact. As Hannah Arendt could have formulated it, maintenance can be seen as a less “worldly” human occupation, merely sustaining what already exists (Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 96).

Furthermore, it may not be entirely obvious what exactly is in need of maintenance when talking about software (Ensmenger 2016). After all, a crucial difference in awareness of products and of software is that, whereas products are known to wear out and decay over time, software is commonly perceived as immaterial, intangible, enduring and otherwise relieved from any of the annoying material conditions which make up the analog (Ensmenger 2016, p. 2).

No matter how many times you execute a program, it will not wear out, in fact it is the opposite since, as Wendy Chun has pointed out, every time digital data is read it is also written (Chun 2011, p. 133).

As discussed in greater details in the EXECUTION lesson of this the- sis, the concept of software is part of an ideology of the digital which seems to promise intangibility and disembodiment (Ensmenger 2016, p. 2). This understanding of software grew from the development of compilers and high-level programming languages, where software went from being locally embodied, machine-specific code, to global/ universal programs capable of being moved, copied and compiled endlessly. Such an approach is evident in the way that programming is often taken as an abstract and limitless tool, reflected for instance in the well-known quote by Fred Brooks from his influential 1975 work on and project management, The Mythi- cal Man-Month, comparing a programmer to a poet, and where the former “works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He

139 builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the ima- gination” (Brooks 1975, p. 7).74

Brooks, a software engineer himself, was, however, aware of a flip- side of his “castles” in the sky,75 noting:

The dependence upon others has a particular case that is espe- cially painful for the system programmer. He depends upon other people’s programs. These are often maldesigned, poorly imple- mented, incompletely delivered... So he must spend hours stu- dying and fixing things that in an ideal world would be comple- te, available, and usable. The next woe is that designing grand concepts is fun; finding nitty little bugs is just work. With any creative activity come dreary hours of tedious, painstaking la- bor, and programming is no exception. (Brooks 1994, pp. 8–9)

That a program should be dependent on other programs, and that programming activity should be such hard, painstaking work chal- lenges the perception of software as disembodied and unbound.

Furthermore, software is not only dependent on other programs, as noted by Brooks, but also on hardware (for example, limits in perfor- mance such as memory, processing power, etc.), network speed (ca- bles, wifi strength, positions of antennas, built environment affecting signals, etc.), user demands and the social context of the use in the form of laws, regulations, and so forth, the list could go on. As Ens- menger rightly points out, the turn towards software maintenance is contesting the metaphysical understanding of software as intangible (Ensmenger 2016, p. 2). Digital code may seem immaterial at first glance but it is embedded in and completely dependent on things that can indeed break down or wear out, and what then breaks are

74 Such a stance is further reflected in ideologies of the notion of cyberspace, where the digital is assumed as constituted beyond material conditions or bodily restrictions such as place, gender or race as expressed in John Perry Barlow’s “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (1996). Moreover, (and as discussed in the concluding chapter, CRISIS COMPUTING), it is believed that digital media, with its programmability and execution allowing for automated management, will eventually emancipate humans from labor, which is quite opposite to maintenance. 75 In The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks reflects on the process of his work as project manager in the development of IBM’s System/360, which fell far behind schedule. Brooks added more engineers to the project, but that delayed the project even further. Subsequently, he extracted what was later dubbed Brooks’ Law of Regenerative Schedule Disaster: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” (1995, p. 25).

140 the contexts, demands or needs in which the software or system is applied and which is always subject to change.

This precarious situation of digital culture’s material conditions is investigated by Wendy Chun, who in her article “The Enduring Ephemeral,” punctures the myth of digital media as more stable and enduring than previous analog media forms (Chun, 2008b). Chun reminds us of the short lifespan of digital storage media, where files can be expected to last barely five years, in contrast to a medium such as microfilm, where data could last up to five hundred years if stored under the right conditions. The paradoxical aspect of this is that the fundamental ephemerality of digital media is simultaneously the rea- son for its persistence. Due to its short-lived nature, our information processing is sped up, and since every time digital data is read it is also written, this directly links its degeneration to its regeneration.76 Chun concludes:

Rather than getting caught up in speed, then, we must ana- lyze, as we try to grasp a present that is always degene- rating, the ways in which ephemerality is made to endu- re. What is surprising is not that digital media fades but rather that it stays at all and that we stay transfixed by our screens as its ephemerality endures. (Chun 2008b, p. 171)

One of the elements which allows the ephemeral to endure is softwa- re maintenance. Initially, though, there was no difference between those developing new programs and those revising existing pro- grams. Changes emerged only at the beginning of the 1970s when IBM, due to economic reasons, started to partly free their software engineers from tasks involved with support by splitting them into two groups, developers and maintainers (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 25). That entailed a split between the engineers who are dedicated to the development of new systems and those who are instead mo- difying programs and applications after they have been launched. From then on, only little or marginal attention has been paid to the

76 This is the reason why the Internet, according to Chun, does not seem to age, even though the digital actually ages comparably faster than the analog. But despite this state of non-degeneration in a conventional sense, Chun warns us of the dangers of conflating memory with digital storage and a “blinding belief in digital media as cultural memory” (2011, p. 171). Chun continues: “This belief, paradoxically, threatens to spread this lack of memory everywhere and plunge us negatively into a way-wayback- machine: the so-called ’digital-dark-age.’” (Ibid.)

141 field of maintenance within computer sciences. Despite the fact that fifty to seventy-five percent of total software production costs are spent on maintenance (Shukla and Misra 2008, p. 107), there has been a tendency to ignore these processes. Given this bias, it is no coincidence that the Human Factor in technology is being interpreted by Ars Electronica as purely a source of invention and development. The Human Factor is nothing but an unreflected reproduction of the myth of technological development, which we are constantly expo- sed to, in which technology is depicted as post-human production (exemplified by intense discussion in recent years of a near future in which AI and robotics take over labor). Such visions have been contested by studies such as Lilly Irani’s work on how micro-labor sustains the algorithms of online services,77 or more recently Tubaro and Casilli’s research on the human factor in the “back-office” of (2019; 2020). Such studies are only beginning to shed light on the fact that the post-occupancy tasks of software maintainers turn out to be the hidden, but primary human factor in automation technologies.

77 See for instance “The Hidden Faces of Automation” (2016) and “Justice for ‘Data Janitors’” (2015). Irani foregrounds the human labor needed to uphold automation.

142 143 144 145 MAINTAINING EXECUTION THROUGH AUTOMATION

Endless Endtime, fax machine

In a perpetual loop, the Endless Endtime algorithm was monitoring online news streams with a daily reading of more than five hundred newspapers in order to detect new potentially “satanic” elements. Each time this occurred, a new letter was generated and emailed to the editor of the Endtime Magazine, and a copy of the letter was concurrently faxed to the facsimile machine placed in the gallery space. During the exhibition period, these new letters spilled onto the floor, where the growing pile manifested the on- going computation.

Materials: Vintage fax machine, 200 meters of ther- mal paper, analogue telephone connection.

146 147 148 3.2 A DRAB; A DRIVE: RE-VISITING STUDIES ON MAINTENANCE

“Maintenance is the place to dump your trainees, your burno- uts and Joe, the boss’ nephew, who thinks that hexadecimal is a trendy new disco. How can they hurt anything there?” B. Schwartz, 1982.78

That Which Sustains

In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt discusses differences between labor and work, describing how antiquity distinguished between work as the labor necessary to sustain human life (like clea- ning, cooking, etc.), only producing ephemeral effects, and the work which was beyond such everyday necessities and which instead left an object that endured ([1958] 2018). Arendt describes how the An- cient Greeks despised the former, everyday ephemeral type of work to such a degree that they used their disgust of it as an argument to keep slaves, who would do the labor for them, leaving the masters free to live a human life beyond the necessities (Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 84). Arendt points to similar distinctions and approaches to so-called productive versus unproductive labor, skilled versus unskilled or in later terms: manual versus intellectual work (Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 85). In Adam Smith’s distinction between productive and unproduc- tive labor in The Wealth of Nations, he described productive labor as work that creates something, that actually produces things, like, the work done in a factory, in opposition to unproductive labor, which is work that is immediately consumed, the tasks of a waiter or a cleaner for example (Smith 1776, p. 302 in Arendt [1958], pp. 85–86). Ac- cording to Arendt, Smith despised unproductive labor and she descri- bes his understanding of this labor as “a kind of perversion of labor,

78 B. Schwartz, “Eight Myths about Software Maintenance,” Datamation 28.9 (1982), pp. 125–28.: as quoted in Ensmenger 2014, p. 9.

149 as though nothing were worthy of this name which did not enrich the world.” (Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 86). Arendt goes on to note:

Yet it was precisely these menial servants, these household in- mates, oiketai or jamiliares, laboring for sheer subsistence and needed for effortless consumption rather than for production, whom all ages prior to the modern had in mind when they iden- tified the laboring condition with slavery. What they left behind them in return for their consumption was nothing more or less than their masters’ freedom or, in modern language, their mas- ters’ potential productivity. (Arendt [1958] 2018, pp. 86–87).

In other words, the ill-perceived unproductive work sustained the “freedom” of their masters to invent and create and develop.

Consequently, Arendt defines labor as being the activity which susta- ins human life and provides for life’s necessities, but which does not leave any trace, since it is consumed right away. In contrast she defi- nes work, as an activity that works upon the world, changes it, and thereby produces enduring outcomes, as for example a craftsman “forcing raw material to conform to his model” (Canovan in Arendt [1958] 2018, p. xxiii). Arendt proposes that work and labor together with political action are the threefold activities which make up the foundation of the conditions of human existence:

Labor assures not only individual survival, but the life of the speci- es. Work and its product, the human artifact, bestow a measure of permanence and durability upon the futility of mortal life and the fleeting character of human time. Action, in so far as it engages in founding and preserving political bodies, creates the condition for remembrance, that is, for history. (Arendt [1958] 2018, pp. 8–9)

The human factor, understood as design, prototyping, and invention, as it was represented in Ars Electronica’s exhibition, and also as it is dealt with within the field of computer sciences and interaction design, as well as most other design fields, falls under Arendt’s work category.79 Human factor would fall under the activity Arendt defines

79 Except for maybe niches like conservation and architectural restoration, sustainable design or

150 as labor, if applied to the understanding of software maintenance advanced here, with its circular repetitions of tasks, bug fixing and perhaps, most importantly, endless revisions in order to adapt to the changes and requirements of the external environment, whether that is other software, hardware conditions, user requirements, laws, or regulations.

Arendt’s definition of labor, however, may be criticized for stopping at the tedious and neglecting the variety, creativity, and improvi- sation which are part of tasks80—even when they appear repetitive and cyclic.

In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze advances such an idea of repetition, infused by difference ([1968] 1994, p. 76). He descri- bes how difference is inhabiting repetition, by being the in between of two stages of repetition, this in turn, he notes, means that “repe- tition lies between two differences” (1994, p. 76). I will now turn to examples of research in different fields, where researchers have paid attention to maintenance and repair work, offering close analysis of elements of creativity and improvisation within that which is consi- dered menial humdrum.

Improvisation, Creativity, and Complexity

A pioneering study with a nuanced approach to creative aspects of maintenance work is Lucy Suchman’s 1985 work on Xerox machine interfaces. Suchman points to how spoken language is constantly re- pairing and maintaining human communication and interaction by, for example, adding small breaks, pauses or repetitions. Building on Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodology, which was related to lang- uage, Suchman turned to copy machine interfaces, where she exa- mined the relation between “interaction” and “repair” in commu- nication. Her work was a move away from top-down design and focused instead on “situated action”—the in between breakdown or “ready-to-hand,” namely, what makes the action “get going again” interventions. 80 Arendt’s notion of “Arbeitsgesellschaft” [labor society] for example describes the entire society as a society of labor, in which, no matter what we are doing, we are just fulfilling functions (Arendt [1958] 2018). Which in turn neglects the creative aspect of labor.

151 (Suchman 1985, p. 37). Suchman’s study shows how this in between is a constant state of conversational repair, where repair and com- munication possibilities in a conversation are built in through, for example, tokens or repetition in order to avoid misunderstandings (Suchman 1985, p. 57). Subsequently, Suchman’s work highlighted the processes of creativity and improvisation as fundamental parts of maintenance practices.

In line with Suchman, Julian E. Orr’s research from the mid-1990s also emphasizes creativity and skills in what is considered low-status, unskilled repair work. Orr’s Talking About Machines: An Ethnogra- phy of a Modern Job from 1996 aims at challenging notions of un- skilled work and automation within postindustrial service economies and contests a tendency to focus on employment and labor instead of work in itself. Elaborating on Daniel Bell’s influential concept of the service sector, Orr argues that its focus on the four main sectors: health, education, research, and government, overlooks crucial ques- tions of where the machines come from and who fixes them.81 Accor- ding to Orr, Bell dismisses this maintenance-related work as part of the old-fashioned manufacturing economy (Orr 1996, p. 151). On the contrary, Orr stresses that nobody actually knows what the wor- kers are doing and criticizes this as “black box treatment of modern occupations [which] denies that there is anything interesting or pro- blematic about the work itself” (Orr 1996, p. 152). This drives Orr to engage in ethnographic field work consisting of participatory ob- servations of copy repair workers at work in large US corporations. Orr follows and assists the repairmen in their daily job routines in order to understand what they are actually doing. Through extensive field work, Orr discovers that these technicians do the work very dif- ferently from how it is prescribed by the employers and managers— they see the goal of solving the problems as more important than fol- lowing management’s prescriptions. This is akin to Lucy Suchman’s notion of “situated action” (Suchman 1985, Suchman 2007). Orr highlights the advanced levels of improvisation that are integral to these supposedly menial job tasks.

81 The same can be said for Arendt’s response to the potential of emancipating labor through technology, which she sees as a possibility for ‘a life without labor,’ while at the same time pointing to the dilemma of “productive slavery” vs. “unproductive freedom” created when labor is central to life values [Arendt [1958] 2018, p. 105]. Arendt accepts the promises of technology at face value and develops her argument from there, without contesting the utopian possibilities it claims to offer.

152 Orr describes the maintenance work of copy repair technicians as somewhere between a blue and a white-collar job. The technicians wear ties and white shirts similar to the other office workers, but still they do not entirely fit in. Their bags are a bit too big, too clumsy, and too heavy and their tasks are too dirty to be considered real office work (Orr 1996, p.5). They are oddly out of place in the offi- ce. Consequently, the work of maintaining the white-collar workers’ environment is neither a white collar nor a blue-collar practice, but in between factory and office work. It is commonly perceived as un- skilled routines, but as Orr’s studies highlight, it is based on a high degree of improvisation and creativity. Orr points to an existential dilemma: “the technicians are responsible in a world in which they have very little control” (Orr 1996, p. 158). He concludes his study with an emphasis on knowledge sharing, creativity, and improvisa- tion. While sympathetic in its attempt to elevate the efforts of the in- visible workforce, this turn is also unfortunate because it actually le- ads to a neglect of questions of class. The study misses engaging with the deeper, underlying politics behind perceptions of the blackboxing of repair and maintenance work as humdrum routines, which may or may not be class related. It would have been interesting to have greater detail in the accounts of the repair technician’s backgrounds, their expectations for their jobs, and their hopes and dreams for their future careers, in order to get a better sense of the in-betweenness of factory and office.

Other workplace studies have taken intersectional frameworks and thereby yielded more illuminating insights into the complex entang- lement of class power. Beverly Skeggs, for example, studied inter- secting power structures that ensnare working-class women in the UK who train as nurses in hopes of “becoming respectable” and the- reby escape their class (1997). The women are still perceived as wor- king class from the perspective of middle-class women. Lack of detail notwithstanding, the work of Orr is an important voice, not only in contesting the idea of labor and unproductive work as merely consis- ting of routine tasks (as proposed by, for example, Arendt) but also by engaging with the actual machines of our postindustrial society and examining the labor that keep them running.

153 Beyond Debugging

Within the field of computer science, studies have emphasized not creativity, but complexity and thus the skills needed for carrying out maintenance processes within system architecture and applications.82 In 1972, Richard Canning used the metaphor of an “iceberg” to point out that it is a misunderstanding to conflate maintenance tasks with debugging. He argued that, on the contrary, the maintenance process is much more than fixing bugs and errors (those are only the tip of the iceberg). Instead, Canning foregrounds how the process of enhancing and adapting software to new conditions, needs, and demands, serving the needs of the software’s external contexts, is the main part of the maintenance process (Canning 1972, p. 6). In 1976, E. Burton Swanson constructed a typology of maintenance tasks through a thorough methodological indexing. Swanson mapped out the usually invisible or inaccessible (the part of the iceberg below the water) as the “dimensionality” of maintenance and created ter- minology for a more nuanced description and articulation of what maintenance actually requires (Swanson 1976, p. 492). Swanson’s motivation was a reduction in the huge costs of maintenance.83 He wanted, through a richer understanding of the maintenance tasks, to effectivize the maintenance processes, and thereby eventually be able to manage personnel more efficiently and/or free up time and budgets for development (Swanson 1976, p. 492).

Swanson indexed the maintenance processes into three major cate- gories: corrective, adaptive, and perfective (Swanson 1976, p. 493). The category of corrective maintenance consists of retro-active tasks following failures, better known as debugging or bug-fixing. Here, Swanson outlines three main types of failures: Processing failure (bugs), performance failure (not necessarily bugs—but processes that do not comply with expectations, transaction time, etc.), and finally implementation failures (Swanson 1976, pp. 492–493).

82 In fact, as highlighted by Nathan Ensmenger, the field of computer science aspired to distance itself from computer engineering, which was seen as an “artistic practice”. Art was understood as being in opposition to proper scientific approaches as it “suggested an undesirable lack of theoretical or mathematical rigor.” (Ensmenger 2010, p. 49) 83 In 1973, the cost of maintenance was considered to be forty percent of total production costs (Swanson 1976, p. 492). Today, it is regarded as between fifty and seventy-five percent of total production costs, where the most expensive form of maintenance is regarding legacy systems (Shukla and Misra 2008, p. 107).

154 However, some failures may be anticipated before a system actually breaks down. This could be due to changes within the environment in which the system is applied or changes in user demands. Swan- son dubs this activity adaptive maintenance, consisting of pro-active enhancements of the applications (Swanson 1976, p. 493), where changes are made prior to the actual break down, in order to avoid them. Correcting the Y2K bug is an example of adaptive maintenan- ce. Applications were pro-actively enhanced in order to comply with the new date syntax when entering the new millennium.

Both “corrective” and “adaptive” forms of maintenance ensure that applications are working and actually can execute. The third and last category in Swanson’s typology is called “perfective maintenance,” which denotes a sort of maintenance that enhances performance by eliminating inefficiency or improving the maintainability of applica- tions (Swanson 1976, pp. 493–494).

We can understand Swanson’s typologies as a first, early foundation of traditional scientific terms to describe practices of software ma- intenance beyond stereotypical depictions (e.g., that is only tedio- us bug-fixing). Later approaches have built on these typologies. For example, they are implemented as the foundation for ISO as well as IEEE standards of maintenance.84 The typologies have also been expanded from their initial intention-based focus (Swanson’s typolo- gies are based on the intention of the maintainer) into activity based typologies, where the focus is on the activities done by the maintainer in order to maintain, rather than the result. This results in a mo- del consisting of only two categories: corrections and enhancements. Corrective activities modify failures in a system, and enhancing acti- vities are done in order to comply with new requirements (Kitchen- ham et al. 1999, pp. 373–374). In a later form of typology proposed by Ned Chapin et al., maintenance is not classified in accordance with intentions or activities, but rather “upon objective evidence of maintainers’ activities” (Chapin et al. 2001, p. 3). Those are, accor- ding to Chapin and his co-authors, “ascertainable from observation of activities and artifacts, and/or a before and after comparison of the software documentation” (Chapin et al. 2001, p. 3). This syste- matic approach had the goal of predicting and thereby pre-emptive-

84 IEEE introduced a fourth category: preventive maintenance.

155 ly containing maintenance and led to the development of extensive taxonomies, including up to twelve categories for different forms of maintenance: enhancive, corrective, reductive, adaptive, performan- ce, preventive, groomative, updative, reformative, evaluative, consul- tive, and training maintenance (Chapin et al. 2001, p. 10). The re- ason for such exhaustive indexing is that the existing categories are considered too general and, according to Chapin et al., instead of supporting, they are obscuring the actual maintenance process by being “broadly inclusive” (Chapin et al. 2001, p. 4).

Subsequently, there appears to be a tendency within computer sci- ences to create more and more exhaustive mappings of maintenance processes in an attempt to get a better overview of maintenance’s ef- fect on software as well as the business. Maintenance processes may not be eliminated but by mapping them in ever greater detail, it is hoped there will be fewer unexpected occurrences of failure through eventually being able to predict and minimize the actual maintenance process. This approach could also be formulated according to Orr’s research as a way of opening the black box of software maintenance and to systematically map out what the box contains in greater and greater detail.

Eternal Revisions

Another approach within computer science has been to criticize the term “maintenance” itself, as an attempt to change stereotypical perceptions of the work as menial and tedious through renaming. According to Don McNeil “Software is not maintained—it is revi- sed to correct or enhance an existing specification, design, program, document, standard or plan” (McNeil 1981, p. 67).85 In 1984, Girish Parikh suggested the term “continuation engineering” (Parikh 1984; Parikh 1986). “Refactoring” is a term used to depict the means of improving a design through the restructuring of existing code (Fowler 1999 and 2018; Griswold 1991). Moreover, the term “software evo- lution,” which was introduced by Mark Halpern in 1965, is still wi-

85 Don McNeil stated in a letter to the editor of Computer World titled “The Myth Persists,” May 4, 1981, that when the wrong terms are applied and used it “retards the development of professional software engineering.”

156 dely used. There have also been approaches that attempt to change work structures and intervene in the job task level by addressing the maintenance process far earlier in the design process: Norman Schneidewind suggested incorporating the maintenance process by rotating “personnel between design and maintenance” as well as ha- ving the maintainers involved in design as well as testing processes (1987, p. 305).

All these attempts point to the cultural construction of the notion of maintenance and attempts to challenge the binary dichotomy between perceptions of software maintenance as tedious labor and perceptions of as creative work. The attempts have had little effect, as maintenance is today still largely considered either a task for newly recruited programmers or, as later examined in this thesis, outsourced and thus completely eliminated from deve- lopment processes as well as daily uses.

Enacting Ontological Order and Stability

One of the main differences between labor and work according to Arendt is that labor is ephemeral, quickly consumed, and makes few or no changes to the world, whereas work transforms a part of the world, changes it, and endures. Nevertheless, when examining the relationship between labor and work closely, there seems to be a pro- blem with this understanding of work vs labor as a two-fold dicho- tomy—that which endures and that which maintains and sustains. Because work, that which supposedly endures, cannot last unless it is being sustained through labor. In other words: everything eventu- ally decays if it is not maintained. According to Hillary Sample, this places maintenance labor in between labor and work (Sample 2016, p. 2). Maintenance, although not an act of production, transforma- tion or that of “forcing raw materials” into ideas, is involved in en- durance after all. It may seem as if the act of maintenance “only” maintains and sustains, and perhaps adapts, something already ex- isting. However, this is exactly the reason why what seems at first to endure is capable of enduring because it is maintained. So, rather than a binary dichotomy between the enduring product of work and

157 the ephemeral product of labor, maintenance, the two activities are tightly interwoven.86

In his 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman examined how interaction between people is based on roles with front and back stages constructed in different situations. Part of the work examined how front stages were maintained and kept up by invisible back stages with a similar principle to theater (Goff- man 1956, p. 97). As part of his studies, Goffman turned to physical manifestations of front and back stages outside of the theater and examined how everyday spatiality is structured on similar principals with back ends sustaining and maintaining the front ends. Goffman looked at spatial layouts of hotels, and guest versus staff and supplier access. Service entrances and alleys at the rear ensure the main en- trance and facade is kept tidy and orderly, while providing the buil- ding with necessities (Goffman 1956, p. 75). Such divisions of front and back entrances performs, or we could even say executes, the hierarchy of the household: defining those who are allowed access through the front door (i.e., guest or owner) in opposition to those leaving or arriving via the back alley (kids, waiters, delivery, and so forth). In other words, without the back end, the front end would be a mess, and thus the back end maintains the order and social hierar- chies manifested at the front end.

These elementary observations are taken to a new level in Chris- topher Henke’s 1999 study The Mechanics of Workplace Order: Towards a Sociology of Repair. Henke turns to the concept of repair and maintenance in order to map out the relation between material and social forms of order within workplace settings. His findings show that the repair people are not only engaged in repairing broken machines, but rather engage with the “practice of mending social order” of the workplace itself (Henke 1999, p. 55). Henke emphasi- zes that the back end is supposed to “keep up” the front end, which is a way to stabilize the social in such a way that the main entrance and the back door are not to be confused, as was already evident in Goffman’s observations in the 1950s. The norm being that it only

86 Arendt actually points to this entanglement in her critique of Smith’s view of unproductive labor, that if it wasn’t for “these menial servants” the masters would not be free to engage with productive work (Arendt [1958] 2018, pp. 86–87).

158 becomes visible at the moment the backstage breaks down or stops working. Henke highlights the paradox that:

…if a workplace is normal, it shouldn’t need repair. But repair is not at the margins of order, waiting to be deployed if something goes wrong. Instead, it is a practice at the center of social or- der: repair work makes workplaces normal. (Henke 1999, p. 57)

Henke thus understands repair as maintaining or sustaining order and the norm. His point of departure is that everything constantly moves towards entropy, but is sustained through repair and mainte- nance work.87

Such an approach displays similar properties to what Jackson et al. have dubbed “broken world thinking” (Jackson et al 2012, p. 107; Jackson 2014, p. 222), an understanding in which “erosion, break- down, and decay” rather than technological innovation are taken as the starting point, and where infrastructures and systems are viewed as inherently unstable (Jackson 2014, p. 222). However, as I argue in chapter 3.3, the concept of “broken world thinking,” departs from a particular Western-centered perspective, rather than that from an inclusive idea of the “world.”

A more refined variation of the perspective of the “broken world thinking” has been made by Lara Houston in her idea of the process of enacted “ontological stability” (Houston 2017, p. 51). Houston’s notion highlights how the invisibility of maintenance labor “sus- tain(s) the (illusion of) the basic stability of objects or systems” i.e., breakdown appears as an exception due to the invisibility of those maintaining the systems (Houston 2017, p.51).

An Inherent Paradox

The complex entanglements of maintenance labor have also been ob- jects of study within computer science approaches to software main- tenance. Since 1974, Lehman and Co. has been developing “the laws of software evolution,” which—through simple principles, taking

87 Henke’s argument is central to closed system theory’s notion of entropy, which describes the alterations of a given system’s status quo and its continuous trend towards disorder.

159 the shape of self-regulating “laws of nature” as the starting point (a bit like the law of thermodynamics)—depict the destiny of software in relation to its use and maintenance. Throughout the 1980s and up until 1996, Lehman’s Laws underwent several changes and revi- sions.88 The articulation of the first three laws subsequently chang- ed over time. The initial meaning, however, has remained the same (Herraiz 2013, p. 4):

1: The law of continuing change: A program that is used and that as an implementation of its specification reflects some other reality, undergoes continual change or becomes progressively less useful. The change or decay process continues until it is judged more cost effective to replace the system with a recreated version. 2: The law of increasing complexity: As an evolving program is continually changed, its complexity, reflecting deteriorating structure, increases unless work is done to maintain or reduce it. 3: The Fundamental law of Program Evolution: Program evolution is subject to a dynamic that makes the program- ming process, and hence measures of global project and sys- tem attributes, self-regulating with statistically determina- ble trends and invariances. (Lehman et al. 1980, p. 1068)

The laws describe software as becoming more and more useless over time unless it is constantly cared for, modified, and adapted to the needs of its users. At the same time, and this is a paradox embed- ded in the laws themselves, due to alterations, adaptations, revisions, and modifications carried out through the maintenance processes, the system will also become increasingly complex, and thereby also eventually useless (unless one is actively trying to avoid that).89

Lehman’s laws address software maintenance in a manner that can be read as the antithesis of another law which similarly treats the evolution of technology as a force of nature, the well-known Moore’s

88 Today there are eight laws in total: I. Continuing Change; II. Increasing Complexity; III. Self-Regulation; IV. Conservation of Organizational Stability (invariant work rate); V. Conservation of Familiarity; VI. Continuing Growth; VII. Declining Quality; VIII. Feedback System (first stated in 1974, formalized as law 1996). (Lehman et al. 1997, p. 21) 89 Which again resembles system theory within closed systems.

160 Law, which projects trends of technological development as func- tions of time and semiconductor capacity. Moore’s Law was initially articulated in 1965, but revised a year after Lehman’s first three laws, in 1975. Whereas Moore’s Law depicts the capacity of semicondu- ctors as ever increasing progression, which supports the idea of linear technological development, Lehman and Co’s laws, on the contrary, emphasize software’s unavoidable path towards uselessness and de- cay, which, due to software’s entanglement with an ever changing world, will always increase no matter what precautions are taken to avoid it. Ensmenger stresses that Lehman’s approach highlights the importance of an approach to software as something unfinished, and something which has to be developed continuously, since its im- plementation context and use changes constantly. Ensmenger writes:

The idea that software technology had no fixed limits, no fi- nal end-state that could be unambiguously defined as suc- cess—in other words, that the work of software deve- lopment was never done—was a real problem for project managers responsible for meeting deadlines, maintaining budgets, and satisfying requirements. (Ensmenger 2016, p. 5)

Tripathy and Naik remark that Lehman’s use of the term “laws” to describe software decay was intended “to capture stable, long-term knowledge about the common features of changing software sys- tems, in the same sense social scientists use laws to characterize gene- ral principles applying to some classes of social situations” (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 51). In other words, advancing the assumption that software evolution lies “beyond the influence of managers and developers” and instead is to be seen as a force of nature (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 51).

But the rather strict and rigid format of the laws also emphasizes a paradoxical aspect of maintenance and evolution processes, spe- cifically in the context of software maintenance. A given piece of software will, over time, function less well if it is not maintained. But then again, the maintaining process itself also triggers decay (the fact that the application will eventually become too complex), which le- ads to its obsolescence (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 54). That means that in the context of software, decay comes from use, as well as

161 the maintenance in itself (in contrast to the maintenance of work environments, which mainly sustains those environments). Accor- dingly, Lehman’s laws are extraordinary examples of descriptions of digital software beyond the “always thereness” as also contested in Chun’s studies. Furthermore, the focus on software’s entanglement with its context (the environment where it is put to use), as well as the interrogation of how the environment is affecting the software’s functionality, points to software’s unavoidable embodiment and that software, with or without maintenance, is always bound to decay.

Maintaining Networks and Data

Our current social network culture has made maintenance proces- ses integral to social life through social media and other networked platforms that generate revenue from user contributed data. Wendy Chun, in her studies of social networks, points out how everyone has now become a maintainer through their continuous updating activi- ties, in which they are constantly updating—“to remain the same” (Chun 2016). Subsequently, now it is not just the maintainers that are being maintained by the machines, but even social life. Chun wri- tes: “In order to remain, nothing remains, so now nothing remains even as everything does” (Chun 2016, p. 52). The ongoing hidden human maintenance labor carried out on the COBOL systems at the back-back-end-levels of our information architectures may, as a vari- ation of Chun, be articulated as an updating not of the psychological, but of the economic self.

Where Chun turns to the update and maintenance integral to human social life within digital networks, Lilly Irani turns to the maintenan- ce work that is integral to computational execution. Put different- ly, that which makes the automated flow, flow. Irani states, “As we dream of automation, we always need people to calibrate and train what we automate. Automation has hidden human faces” (Irani 2016, p. 34). She addresses the far too often concealed aspect of automation, namely the microworkers or dataworkers, who are li- terally the human factor stepping in and assisting the digital flow in events where algorithmic procedures are failing. These “failures”

162 escape Swanson’s notions of processing, implementation or perfor- mance failures. Actually, they are not failures per se, but occur in the moment when algorithmic tasks surpass the limits of algorith- mic execution and processing and when the work needed to be done exceeds the capacity of the machine. This is where human labor is needed in order for the execution to keep executing.

Through the studies of microworkers, Irani reveals how “pure” au- tomated management or frictionless execution is a myth. The human factor is needed in order to assist the algorithms. Nevertheless, as she notes, “Computer scientists sometimes treat the people who help their systems along—data workers who spoon-feed their machines, or tech support workers, for example—as a temporary form of hu- man support they just need to get over” (Irani 2016, p. 37). Irani thereby, highlights the exploitative working conditions of the mi- croworkers, exemplified through her case study of AMT—Amazon Mechanical Turk—and asks:

What would computer science look like if it did not see hu- man-algorithmic partnerships as an embarrassment but rather as an ethical project where the humans were as, or even more, important than the algorithms? What would it look like if artificial intelligence and human-computer interac- tion put the human care and feeding of computing at the cen- ter rather than hiding it in the shadows? (Irani 2016, p. 37)

Irani’s study is a call to computer scientists and engineers to let go of the cybernetic fantasy of computation as a disembodied and intan- gible self-executing process, and to instead acknowledge the bounda- ries of computation and respect human labor as an important part of it. It is here no longer a question of whether systems have limitations. They do. And thus Irani addresses the urgent need to recognize the human factors in order to overcome their continuous exploitation.

In the next chapter, I examine studies dealing with the “surfacing” of maintenance work. But also make an attempt to critically scrutinize intersecting power structures at play when we as researchers are tur- ning to that which is hidden.

163 MAINTAINING EXECUTION THROUGH PARTICIPATION #1

Endless Endtime, poster

A stack of take-away A1 double-sided posters gre- eted gallery visitors, showing the original Letter to the Editor on one side and the Endless Endtime algo- rithm as a handwritten COBOL script on the other. The script showed the procedure used to generate the new letters as displayed in the exhibition.

Materials: A1 paper, double-sided print.

164 165 166 3.3 BROKEN / UNBROKEN

Surfacing Maintenance Work

In the article “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenan- ce” from 2007, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift are concerned with “surfacing maintenance” (p. 17). Graham and Thrift accentuate that infrastructures are generally conceived as immanent, embedded, and transparent black boxes, and part of an evolutionary technological development where new inventions displace earlier ones, and the new will “function automatically, and purely, until they are replaced as a whole by some new technoscientific order” (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11). Such understanding is grounded in myths of order, and far from the reality of the heterogeneous systems that make up city infrastructures, in which old and new are tightly intertwined and constantly maintained and repaired in order to function (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 10). The authors observe the tendency to focus on sensational “break-downs”—disasters and catastrophes, in which infrastructures are completely destroyed, instead of paying attention to the more mundane and continuous repair—the everyday main- tenance—that is required just to keep our cities running on a daily basis (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 9).

In their article, Graham and Thrift turn to developing countries and contrast the focus of Western countries on disaster and catastrophe rather than mundane everyday maintenance, with so called “Glo- bal South urbanism,” where it is not possible, they point out, to be unaware of temporary breakdowns (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11). The authors exemplify the omnipresence of formal as well as informal economies of the Global South that have been created in order to deal with continuous collapses within the mainstream sys- tems. They cite the “personalized boreholes, generators, ‘illegal’ taps of power and water flow, satellite access points” and emphasize the “endless improvisation” used to solve problems of scarcity of distri- bution infrastructures, meaning “water, sanitation, communications,

167 Internet, energy and transport services” (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11). The authors foreground how businesses are trying to cope with problems of unreliable and interrupted infrastructures (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11) and note that, “In global South cities, in short, it is often impossible to ignore that the very technosocial architectures of urban life are heavily dominated by, and constituted through, a giant system of repair and improvisation” (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11).

Graham and Thrift suggest that the Global North should turn to the Global South for inspiration by starting to pay attention to and high- light processes of maintenance and repair. Accentuating how these processes are an integrated part of city life à la “Global South urba- nism” will, according to Graham and Thrift, be beneficial on several levels.

Firstly, the authors foreground the evolutionary aspects inherent to maintenance. They note that:

when things break down, new solutions may be invented. In- deed, there is some evidence to suggest that this kind of pie- ce-by-piece adaptation is a leading cause of innovation, ac- ting as a continuous feedback loop of experimentation which, through many small increments in practical knowledge, can produce large changes. (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 5)

Graham and Thrift point to Stewart Brand’s 1994 study How Buil- dings Learn, and stress the way Brand approaches maintenance as part of a learning process (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 5). According to Brand, “maintenance is learning” (Brand 1994, p. 127).

Secondly, Graham and Thrift emphasize the importance of the eco- nomic aspects of maintenance and repair work. In 2000, four per- cent of all jobs in the USA were related to maintenance (DPE, 2003 as quoted in Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 7), which means that the sector was “one of the six most important service industry occupa- tional groups” (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 7). Additionally, the authors note that:

168 Software support and call centre help-lines, spread right across the world to service the major markets of Northern metropolitan areas, constitutes one of the world’s fastest-growing industries. (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 12)

In short, a focus on maintenance might even result in an economic benefit, which the Global North would otherwise miss out on if it is not “surfaced.”

A study made by Steven J. Jackson, Alex Pompe, and Gabriel Kries- hok in 2012, “Repair Worlds: Maintenance, Repair, and ICT for De- velopment in Rural Namibia,” similarly aims at highlighting proces- ses of innovation and improvisation in the research of “the distinctive opportunities for learning that breakdown, maintenance, and repair provide—within but also well beyond the international development context” (Jackson et al. 2012, p. 115 [my emphasis]). The resear- chers encounter what they state is their “favorite example” of this during field work in Madagascar (Jackson et al. 2012, p. 115). An electrician who owns a computing and phone repair shop told them how, when mobile phones first arrived in Madagascar, he bought one and threw it in the river in order to examine how it would get destroyed by the water. The researchers note:

This represents, we think, a strikingly different way of app- roaching the problem of maintenance and repair than the one dominating northern imaginations of IT design and sustaina- bility, in international development and possibly other CSCW [Computer-Supported Cooperative Work] contexts… a local version of what we’d like to call ‘broken-world thinking’: a ge- stalt shift in our ways of thinking about sociotechnical system development that moves moments of maintenance and repair, rather than just moments of design and adoption, to the heart of CSCW thinking and practice. (Jackson et al. 2012, p. 115)

This study, in line with the study by Thrift and Graham, forefronts innovative aspects of maintenance and repair practices within deve-

169 loping countries in comparison to those of the Global North/Wes- tern countries, in which such practices remain invisible. Both studies point to developing countries as sources of inspiration for the West. This appears to be a positive attempt to change hegemonic world or- ders, in which the center, the West, is criticized and advised to turn to the margins in order to learn from them. These perspectives, in spite of good intentions, run the risk of exoticizing their subjects by way of idealizing otherness, something I will examine more closely in the following sections.

On Being a Favorite Example

Postcolonial feminist film maker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha has scrutinized the discursive construction of “difference” (Minh-ha 1986). Minh-ha deconstructs essentialism as it is formulated through stances of “difference” and stresses how essentialism makes it pos- sible to distance oneself from the other. This differencing is, accor- ding to Minh-ha, a dangerous path, since, through simplified repre- sentation, it is open to sexism, racism, and neo-colonialism (Minh-ha 1986, pp. 18–20). Minh-ha points out how “specialness” or “diffe- rence” orients those subjugated by it. The examples she uses include a daughter writing in order to fulfill her father’s expectations of spe- cialness (referring to autobiographical statements made by American writer Adrienne Rich) (Minh-ha 1986, p. 21), and an Asian-Ameri- can academic who assumes she has escaped the stereotypical image of the subjugated Asian woman, and therefore does not make a big fuss about it, which in turn puts her at risk of being perceived as a passive Asian-American woman (here Minh-ha quotes Japanese fe- minist Mitsuye Yamada) (Minh-ha 1986, p. 21).

In The Postcolonial Exotic, Graham Huggan defines “the exotic” as “a particular mode of aesthetic perception—one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surren- der to its immanent mystery” (Huggan 2001, p. 13). Huggan refers to Edward Said’s understanding of exoticism as the replacement of “the impress of power with the blandishments of curiosity” (Said

170 1994, p. 132 as quoted in Huggan 2001, p. 14). However, Huggan underlines that exoticism, far from replacing power, instead conceals it (Huggan 2001, p. 14).

Postcolonial theory, with its turn to material conditions and aim of unearthing the politics of representation and discourses of power, could be seen as in direct opposition to exoticism. Huggan notes that “the postcolonial imperative [is] to demystify ‘foreign’ cultures and, ultimately, to show the constructed nature of discourses about cultu- re itself” (Huggan 2001, p. 19).

When Thrift and Graham depict maintenance culture in the Glo- bal South as “the good example”—in opposition to the North— (the messy South with temporary everyday breakdowns versus the orderly North with fatal disasters), they avoid examining the deep inter-dependency between the Global North and Global South. In- deed, it sounds marvelous to imagine maintenance as a “continuous feedback loop of experimentation” as expressed by Stewart Brand, and undeniably, maintenance does have learning as well as economic potential.90 But it is neither for the sole sake of learning nor experi- mentation that a programmer in India is fixing bugs while Ameri- cans sleep, or the electrician in Africa is throwing functioning mobile phones into the river. In order not to reduce acts of maintenance and repair within the Global South (whether successful outsourcing com- panies or local repair processes) to exoticized acts of innovation and creative out-of-the-box-thinking, it is important to analyze these acts in relation to a greater global context.

Which Broken World?

I can’t help but ask myself what exactly makes the example of the mobile phone being thrown in the river so significant that it would be emphasized by a Western researcher as their favorite example of “broken world thinking”? Or for that matter, why it embodies “a gestalt shift in our ways of thinking about sociotechnical system development,” an example which is supposed to move “moments of maintenance and repair, rather than just moments of design and

90 India’s IT boom is partly based on the learning and economic potential of maintenance.

171 adoption, to the heart of CSCW thinking and practice”? Furthermo- re, within this lies another more profound question, namely what kind of “world” is broken in “broken-world thinking”?

The act of subjecting a well-functioning device to a situation which will definitely break it is perfectly normal from a so-called Western point of view as well, but only if it is undertaken as part of a profes- sional test environment in an experimental research lab setting. It is part of normal error deduction research processes based on highly rational and logical iteration cycles. If, however, it is done outside a lab setting, such an act looks totally irrational and might even be re- garded, to put it frankly, as plain stupid. In other words, the context of the act determines how the act is perceived. But that still does not explain why the act in this context is perceived as highly innovati- ve by the researchers. After all, it is a commonly known research method. Obviously, the electrician’s repair shop does not constitute a traditional, institutional lab setting where such experiments would usually be carried out from a Western perspective.91 Western resear- chers generally do not expect such well-established lab methods of error deduction to be combined with a local river and carried out by a repair shop owner. Is that what made them favor this example? Does an act seem innovative when the context, logic, and perception do not match what usually is expected?

If the electrician’s act was thoroughly elucidated, meaning unearthed as a way to develop new skills in a specific socio-economic context, it would not be as surprising and would probably never be recounted as a researcher’s favorite example. After all, things are destroyed in order to be improved all the time. The only difference here is that the electrician is not seeking improvement because he is not employed in the Western design and development business and so has no opportu- nity to implement design improvements, but instead has to make do with capitalizing on that business through his repair shop.

If the phone in the river had been asked to talk, it might have told us about its life and place in a socio-economic global network in which the act of being thrown in the river is just another node. It might

91 The river for instance, might not be the best pick for an efficient lab test. It would of course be much quicker to simply throw the phone in a small bucket of water and safer too, since the phone might get lost in the river.

172 have told us that it wasn’t worth £15 and about how it was shipped to the African continent, not the world famous second-hand market in Hong Kong where fancier, more expensive, smarter phones end up (Houston 2017, p. 54). It might also have told us about its afterlife, when everything recyclable was ripped from it, and how its toxic battery parts and plastic will end up buried locally, directly in the ground, polluting it for years to come (cf., Houston 2017, p. 55). And if the owner of the repair shop had been asked to talk instead of simply made to pose as a favorite example, he might have explained the economic context of his act more in detail. He could have spoken about what he aimed to lose or gain by throwing the phone in the water or alternatively, by refraining from doing so.

As Huggan points out:

The exoticist rhetoric of fetishised otherness and sympathetic identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the discourse could not function (Huggan 2001, p. 14).

Thus, in order for the researchers to highlight this example as so- mething special, they have to reduce it to an act of creativity or in- novation—a lesson to be learned—rather than a node in a geopoliti- cal power play.

The researchers celebrate the example as a “local version” of “bro- ken-world thinking” (Jackson et al. 2012, p. 115). But the suppo- sedly universal world represented in “broken world” thinking, and in this case applied to an act of throwing a phone in the water in Madagascar, may not be that universal after all. If broken-world thinking is acknowledging that the systems we are surrounded by are not stable, and that they instead appear as ontologically stable due to a continuous enactment through invisible repair and maintenance, how then can the concept be applied in an alternate context in which systems do not appear stable, but where the repair and maintenance is never ending and “omnipresent”?

Isn’t the “world” of “broken-world thinking” tightly connected to a specifically Western understanding of “world” as un-broken, that is, a flow of flawlessly running systems and processes? Albeit one where

173 the one engaging in “broken-world thinking” realizes that this stabi- lity is not ontological to the systems, but rather continuously enacted through invisible repair and maintenance.

However, if everyday life does not consist of supposedly functioning systems, but rather “a giant system of repair and improvisation” (Graham and Thrift 2007, p. 11), then it follows that it cannot be broken. That which never comes together cannot fall apart. To quote pop-artist Andy Warhol: “I never fall apart, because I never fall to- gether” (1975, p. 81). Thus the “world” in broken world thinking is not universal, but a specifically Western world in which that which is perceived as ontological stability actually is an enacted ontologi- cal stability (Houston 2017, p. 51). Subsequently, by highlighting the electrician’s act of throwing the phone into the river as their favorite example of “broken-world thinking,” the researchers are subjugating the local context of Madagascar to a specific Western world perspective. At the same time, as they escape mapping out and explaining the conditions and motivations for the act, the phone repairman ends up being a caricature. Thereby the researchers are reproducing stereotypical and exotic images of the Global South as inventive and impulsive, though also somehow irrational (otherwise the experiment would have been carried out under more controlled conditions than a river).

As post-colonial and critical race scholars stress, the depictions of “others” made in an asymmetric power relationship, even with sup- posedly “good” or emancipatory intentions, often end up relegating the subjects to this very category of “the other” (see Mohanty 1984; Minh-ha 1986; hooks 1989; Spivak 1988; Crenshaw 1991).

In the main two works discussed above, the Global South is being relegated either to the category of chaotic other or inventive other, rather than any attempt being made to understand the interdepen- dency between the supposed Global North and Global South. In their studies neither Jackson, Pompe, and Krieshok, nor Thrift and Gra- ham intentionally depict the South as the underdog, on the contra- ry, the researchers aim to criticize the consumer culture of the West by highlighting improvisation and innovation through repair in the Global South. In spite of these good intentions, both studies depict the Global South as a counter image to the West which eventually

174 becomes a binary reduction where the Third World is categorized as “the other” in an us-and-them relationship. These studies pass on the chance of making an in-depth study of how the two different approaches are not just interwoven, but actually interdependent— one couldn’t exist without the other. The so-called improvising and innovative repair culture is dependent on the throw-away culture of the West, and the West is dependent on the East/Global South as a dumping ground and a resource for cheap offshore maintenance workers, who do maintenance to keep their so-called developed sys- tems running.

175 MAINTAINING EXECUTION THROUGH PARTICIPATION #2

Endless Endtime—Ongoing Acts of Analogue Computation

An Endless Endtime form for maintaining execution. A participatory element in the series of interventions Endless Endtime—Ongoing Acts of Analogue Computation.

176 177 178 3.4 MAINTAINING LEGACIES

Escaped Obsolescence

In an introductory class to Mainframe System Design on October 6, 2014 at a training campus at one of India’s largest Software Consul- tancy corporations in Chennai, students are taught how the back- back end of mobile applications may be running COBOL on main- frame servers. There are around thirty-four students in the class and they all seem very surprised. None of them were aware that, as the teacher explains, most of the Forbes Top 200 companies are running COBOL applications. The teacher emphasizes that this is why they should be motivated to go into this sector, “COBOL is an opportu- nity” he says.

At a first glance, however, it may be difficult to see why or even how COBOL could be an opportunity, as the teacher states. A quick Inter- net search reveals a vast array of jokes and merchandise with punch- lines referring to COBOL as an obsolete, dead, and extinct program- ming language. One key example that appears in different variations of prints on T-shirts is the image of a dinosaur bent over a laptop, its caption: “COBOL PROGRAMMER.” Or the more sophis- ticated meme variation with an image of a group of dinosaurs in an office with the caption, “The last existing team of COBOL develo- pers.” Yet another T-shirt-print spells out the acronym of COBOL as “Cumbersome Outdated Badly Organized Language” (my emp- hasis).

In 1923, Bernard London advocated for the introduction of artifici- al obsolescence through structural regulations, so objects and devi- ces could be officially declared “outdated.” His aim was to fuel the weak economy and bring an end to the depression through increased consumption. London wrote:

I would have the Government assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines, to all products of manufacture, mining and

179 agriculture, when they are first created, and they would be sold and used within the term of their existence definitely known by the consumer. After the allotted time had expired, these things would be legally “dead” and would be controlled by the duly appointed governmental agency and destroyed if there is wi- despread unemployment. New products would constantly be pouring forth from the factories and marketplaces, to take the place of the obsolete, and the wheels of industry would be kept going and employment regularized and assured for the masses. (London 1932, p. 2)

A decade later, Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter characteri- zed instability, ephemerality, and obsolescence not as something that needed to be centralized, regulated, planned, and officially declared “dead” on a governmental plane as London had demanded, but was to be understood as integral to capitalism itself (Schumpeter [1943] 2003, pp. 82–83). Schumpeter described economic structures as for- ces of nature that are continuously mutating, breaking down, and restructuring themselves, eventually becoming outmoded due to pro- cesses of “creative destruction,” which was the result of forms of radical innovation (Schumpeter 2003, p. 83). Schumpeter noted that:

In the case of retail trade the competition that matters arises not from additional shops of the same type, but from the department store, the chain store, the mail-order house and the supermar- ket which are bound to destroy those pyramids sooner or later. (Schumpeter 2003, p. 85)

It was the innovation and development of new modes of production or means of distribution which radically altered the existing systems leading the older models, no matter how well anchored and founded they seemed to be, to eventually becoming obsolete.

When I interview a PR manager at a UK-based software compa- ny specializing in COBOL, he is more than happy to describe the different areas of our information technologies which, despite the

180 fact that COBOL has long since been considered dying, are still very much dependent on the programming language.92

The PR manager mentions a wide range of sectors including insuran- ce, retail, the financial sector, health care, transportation and even mobile phone supply. He gives an example:

The perhaps most common implementation of COBOL is within banking. Every time one accesses a bank account whether online, through a mobile phone, an ATM-machi- ne or pay with a credit card in a shop the interfaces themsel- ves (for example, the online banking website, mobile-pay, the ATM screen or the credit-card swipe machine) are basically just front-ends connected to centralized mainframe computers, the back-end, on which the actual processes i.e. bank transac- tions are being executed by applications written in COBOL.

And he adds, “The same goes for payroll-systems, logistics, retail and so forth.”

Through my research, I come across an automated contracts-adminis- tration system known as the Mechanization of Contract Administra- tion Services System or MOCAS, which currently regulates complex contracts within the US Department of Defense. What is surprising is that the MOCAS system was launched back in 1958 and so by the year 2020 had been in service for more than sixty-two years. In 2017, the system was celebrated by MIT Technology Review as the oldest (known) software still in use (Fleishman 2015). Annually, the system manages about 334,000 contracts with a total value of app- roximately $1.2 trillion (McCaney 2016). MOCAS is used to mana- ge different forms of contracts, for instance, cost reimbursable, fixed price, and multi-year contracts as well as financing contracts and the management of funds (GovTribe 2014). The system represents, according to the Department of Defense, “a very large percentage of dollars paid to vendors by the Department of Defense” (GovTribe 2014). MOCAS is written in COBOL (although initially it is likely to have been written in FLOW-O-MATIC, since COBOL was not launched until 1960). Although preparations are being made for mo-

92 Telephone interview: September 4, 2014.

181 dernization of the system, MOCAS currently has around two million lines of code consisting of a combination of nine hundred batch pro- cessing programs written in COBOL and nine hundred interactive online programs written in the mainframe programming language MANTIS interfacing a Cincom Supra (GovTribe 2014). The system has a worldwide user base of more than ten thousand (GovTribe 2014).

The example of the longevity of MOCAS is surprising. The combi- nation of London’s idea of introducing obsolescence as an attribute of the design of digital systems and devices, along with Schumpe- ter’s characterization of instability, change, and evolutionary deve- lopment as a force of nature integral to capitalism leads to not only an understanding of technological development as an ever changing “socio-economic survival of the fittest” (Gansing 2013, p. 75), but a design paradigm in which this supposed “force of nature” is be- ing fostered. This, according to Gansing, is in contrast to Hegel’s understanding of development as a “spiritual teleological progress” in which an entire civilization is elevated to a higher state. Instead it leads to a series of processes fueled through technological innovation and change (Gansing 2013, p. 74). Gansing states that technology in this perspective is being framed as an “instrumental function within the capitalist system, and in turn economic growth is taken as a na- turalised state of development” (Gansing 2013, p. 75). And when this is being adapted as a design paradigm, Gansing notes that the economic evolutionary model becomes more than a theory, stating that “it is also inscribed into the material production of technologi- cal developments” (Gansing 2013, p. 76), meaning that it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Consequently, as technological de- velopment is conducted through this capitalist form of “the survival of the fittest” idea, technology becomes one of constant upgrades and updates which are understood as healthy, natural improvements. Updates and new versions are introduced with the unquestioned as- sumption that things are getting better. Thus, an operational system that is sixty-two years old seems to be not just a surprising impossi- bility, but perhaps an error or a mistake. At best, a unique anomaly. That one freak element.

182 Media Undead

The field of media archeology has been turning to instances of obso- lete, dead, and discarded media in different ways as a counterreaction to the understanding of technological development as a necessarily linear and/or evolutionary process embedded in a capitalist ideolo- gy. 93 For German media theorist Wolfgang Ernst, the field of media archeology is not so much referring to “dead media,” but rather to media being “undead.”94 Instead of understanding media archaeo- logy as creating counter stories to dominant histories of technology, Ernst applies media archaeology as a tool of analysis which is “about rereading and rewriting epistemological (rather than simply tempo- ral) momenta” (Ernst 2013, p. 57). When characterizing media as undead in this context, Ernst is pointing to the time-criticality of digital computational media, which turns it into “a complex time machine” (2016, p. 64). According to Ernst, digital computational media manifest as “equiprimordial” (temporally indistinguishable) (2016, p. 80). This, according to Ernst, means that media do not merely have a historical past, but when in operation, they exist out- side of historic time in a state of micro temporality, which may be understood as a synthesis of the past and the present in the now (Enns in Ernst 2016, p. xxii). This makes the concept of operationa- lity/execution key to Ernst’s theory. According to Ernst, technologies cannot be understood fully when on display, but need to execute or operate95 (Ernst 2013, pp. 57–58), which in turn, according to Ernst, deconstructs macro temporality, understood as the narrativity of his- toric time (Ernst 2016, p. 238).

Designer and artist Garnet Hertz and media theorist Jussi Parikka pick up on Ernst’s “operational media” and employ it within art and design in a way that is critical of planned obsolescence. In their joint paper “Zombie Media: Circuit Bending Media Archaeology into an Art Method” (2012), the authors encourage designers and artists to engage with the operationality of that which is considered out

93 Some approaches to media archaeology investigate media curiosities of the past to shed light on the dullness of our current media landscape. For example, according to German media theorist Siegfried Zielinski, media archeology is a turn to the past, not in order to find the old in the new, but to find the new in the old (Zielinski 2006). 94 Wolfgang Ernst in personal correspondence with Garnet Hertz, 20 October 2009 as quoted in Parikka and Hertz 2012, p. 429. 95 This, according to Ernst, distinguishes media archaeology from more traditional archeology (Ernst 2013, pp. 57–58). 183 of operation. Planned obsolescence is understood as design politics on a micro level where technological artifacts are blackboxed ex- pert territories, designed deliberately in order not to be fixable when out of order. However, according to Hertz and Parikka, designers/ artists may bend these rigid demarcations of dysfunctionality and functionality through media archaeological art and design practices such as circuit bending and hardware hacking that literally resurrect, reanimate, and reappropriate the discarded dead media thus turning it into new assemblies of what the authors dub “zombie media.” However, as we shall see further on in this part, I propose the practi- ce of software wrapping as a very different way to approach undead media, which, as illustrated by the case of COBOL, is paradoxically very much alive.

Undead Systems—A Majority of Silence

During the initial development of COBOL, the programming lang- uage received a lot of criticism. Its opponents showed their skep- ticism by declaring the new language doomed (Computer History Museum 2020), or even “dead” before it was actually born. In 1960, the chairman of CODASYL (the committee which was developing COBOL), Charlie Phillips, received an express collect package con- taining a white marble tombstone engraved with gold letters spelling out C O B O L. It turned out that the tombstone had been sent to Phillips by another member of the committee, Howard Bromberg, who was frustrated with the slow development of COBOL (The Computer Museum 1985, pp. 8–9). It was a tongue-in-cheek way of alerting the CODASYL committee to Bromberg’s concerns about the development and symbolically burying COBOL alive. The skepticism continued to cling to the language as discussed in more detail in the introduction and EXECUTION sections of this thesis. Although lar- gely neglected within Western curricula of computer sciences, getting rid of COBOL completely has proven to be very difficult. COBOL is very much still around. During a conversation, the PR manager of a UK-based software company specializing in COBOL stated:

184 An amazing array of very, very mundane, day-to-day IT acti- vity, happening in the world are all taking place with COBOL behind it … I like to think of it as the silent majority of glo- bal IT. It sort of rather quietly goes about with its business of just sort of keeping the world economy going ... everything it does, is not newsworthy. It is utterly boring. It is utterly drab. But if it wasn’t there, the entire thing would just collapse.96

Idioms such as “the silent ones” or “the majority” have been used since antiquity to mean the dead.97 In the nineteenth century, the combination of the two into “the silent majority” was a common euphemism for the dead—the majority of all humans being those al- ready dead (Greenough and Kittredge 1902, p. 302). Although CO- BOL was listed number one on Computerworld’s “The Top 10 List of Dead (or Dying) Computer Skills” in 2007 (Brandel 2007), the programming language is, as we today are writing 2020, more than a decade later, still ranked as number twenty-nine on TIOBE’s index of most popular programming languages in the month of June. There seems to be a contradiction within these findings.

A living language is foremost characterized by people being able to speak it (or in the case of a programming language, program in it). Other important aspects include teaching as well as continuous de- velopment of the language. There is ample evidence that COBOL is not going away anytime soon, with quotes regularly popping up that refer to its continued use. For example, in their student promotion material, the company Micro Focus states that seventy percent of all business transactions worldwide are still made through COBOL; 250 billion lines of active COBOL code are still in use and in a single year there are two hundred times more COBOL transactions than Google and YouTube searches put together (Micro Focus 2017). A ZDNet article commemorating COBOL’s sixtieth anniversary, notes similar numbers, and widespread use within the US administration including the Social Security Administration (Vaughan-Nichols 2019). Further

96 Source: Interview September 2014. 97 For example, Petronius, the Roman satirist, used the expression, “Abiit ad plures,” which means “he has gone to join the majority,” in order to imply that someone was dead (Oxford Dictio- nary of Idioms).

185 sources confirm a similar situation in European countries, where, for example, the German State Retirement system is dependent on CO- BOL.98

These COBOL applications are continuously read and executed by machines, said to on average interact with an American thirteen ti- mes a day (Handy 2009). Moreover, the number of active lines of code are increasing. According to a survey by Micro Focus (2020), the average amount of COBOL application code base has increased from 8.4 million lines in 2017 to 9.9 million lines in 2020, which would indicate that the language is active, i.e. living. However, the COBOL applications that are currently in use are so-called legacy or geriatric systems,99 which are characterized by being caught in a limbo between being phased out and closed down. They would be obsolete if corporations and institutions weren’t still heavily depen- dent on them; they are regarded as business-critical systems. (Khadka et al 2014, p. 38). Although there are much more efficient and newer technologies and ways of performing the same tasks, they are still being used. So, COBOL cannot be characterized as entirely alive, but caught in a limbo between being crucial to business and entirely outmoded.

Maintaining the Undead

A subsection of software maintenance called “legacy maintenance” is the maintenance work done on legacy systems. The continual in- crease in the amount of COBOL code is due to these maintenance processes (bugs are fixed, systems are enhanced and new features are added), and not because new applications are being written in COBOL.

In Michael Feathers’ Working Efficiently with Legacy Code (2004), a hands-on textbook on the handling of legacy systems, several ways of

98 Deutschlandfunk Nova, May 5, 2020. Source: https://www.deutschlandfunknova.de/beitrag/ programmiersprache--so-veraltet-wie-aktuell (accessed on July 7, 2020). 99 Legacy systems include applications written in other obsolete programming languages, for instance PL/1, Assembly etc.

186 maintaining legacy systems are described with rewriting, migration, in-house maintenance, and outsourcing among the examples. Migra- tion is the most costly and time-consuming way of handling legacy systems. Through the migration process, a legacy system is moved to a new platform of hardware and/or software (Tripathy and Naik 2015, pp. 106–108). One example is the case of Försäkringskassan, an agency managing social insurance in Sweden that underwent a migration process carried out by a company called Sogeti. The initial IT system, which was developed back in the 1970s and consisted of mainly COBOL applications running on a Bull mainframe, under- went a 1:1 migration process from Bull to UNIX in which the Bull COBOL code was converted to Unix-COBOL (Sogeti 2020). Subse- quently, due to the efforts and expenditures related to the migration process, Försäkringskassan will be continuing to run their COBOL applications for many years into the future, although within a new hardware environment. In this way, the language is being kept alive. Migration processes, however, are very complex and although the Forsäkringskassan project took more than two years (Sogeti 2020), an average migration project may take five to ten years (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 195). Sometimes projects need to be put on hold or even returned to the initial state of the legacy system.100 Thus, it is not only an expensive, but also highly risky process. Fortunately, there are simpler ways of dealing with aging systems as we will see in the practice of wrapping.

In Chennai, my introductory Mainframe System Design class on October 6, 2014 at the training campus continues with the teacher explaining that COBOL will not disappear: IBM invests a lot in the platform, he notes. He shows diagrams of mobile apps interfacing legacy applications on a mainframe server and adds: There is no need to delete or substitute applications completely, just call them through another program.

At Infosys’s headquarters in Bangalore, the head of mainframe ed- ucation tells me that when he decided to start learning COBOL in the 1990s, his idea was met with great skepticism. “People said, why engage with that language? It is already dead!” He laughs and continues: “Next year I will retire, but COBOL is still around.” We

100 Source: interview October 2014.

187 turn to the computer and he shows me a simple system called “Hap- py Shopping,” which is used to teach students the main principle of how an e-commerce web application can interface with a legacy system. The User Interface layer is written in JavaScript, a modern programing language, and interfaces with the business layer running the Customer Information Control System (CICS) along with a web application which is calling the server layer, running the file storage access method, VSAM and the mainframe database environment, DB2. This process makes it possible to call the data from the DB2 database and interface the database via the modern website interface. This method of handling legacy systems is called “legacy moderniza- tion” or simply “wrapping” and was introduced in the latter half of the 1980s as a way to prolong/extend the life(-cycle) of aging systems (Dietrich et al. 1989). In 1986, a system known as TGMS was im- plemented at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. TGMS consisted of a legacy system written in PL/1,101 which at that time was already fifteen years old. The legacy system was re-engineered by literally wrapping the existing application into AML/X classes,102 which called the subroutines of the legacy system and so hid the pro- cesses of the old system behind an interface of classes written in the more modern language AML/X.

Wrapping can be likened to an API (Application Programming Inter- face). A back-end system is encapsulated by reducing its complexity to an interface of in and outputs, through which the way it may connect and interact with other software components is defined. This procedure allows the legacy system to remain running as a black box below a new layer of code written in a more modern language. Since wrapping does not modify the existing code but simply encap- sulates the legacy system into a new layer of software, it can best be described as a form of black box re-engineering process in which the legacy interface is the only part of the system which is addressed and analyzed, while the internals of the system are ignored. Subsequently, the process of wrapping does not modify the source code, the ini- tial system architecture or the initial functionality. It only modifies

101 PL/1 is a programming language developed by IBM in the 1960s. It was tailored for science and engineering applications along with system development and business systems. 102 AML/X is a programming language tailored to the development of software systems in the field of design and manufacturing.

188 the software’s functionality through changed means of interfacing it (Tripathy and Naik 2015, p. 189).103

The act of wrapping may be understood as antithetical to Ernst’s as well as Parikka and Hertz’s approach to media archaeology as outlined previously: The media archaeologist turns to reverse engi- neering in order to open up the black boxes and expert mode of technologies, whether that is in the search of new epistemologies or as counter reactions to throw-away consumer culture. The COBOL systems are, through the act of wrapping, instead being re-engineered and thus closed down and black boxed in order to reduce the com- plexity of dealing with their legacy and obsolescence and to simply keep them running. This process turns the legacy system into an “im- mortal,” “un-dead,” or perhaps more precisely “living dead” system, so it presents itself as an example which differs radically from the predominant understanding of linear technological development as one of constant upgrade. Furthermore, this undead system points to the artificiality of the capitalist system in itself. One could argue that through this form of blackboxing, the legacy system is totally in line with how linear development is deeply inscribed on a material level, since it manages to hide this aspect away and keep upgrading. Conse- quently, the real undead here is the capitalist model of technological development (the embedding of obsolescence, or you could also say, the permanency of crisis or state of emergency as a distributed form of creative destruction) that is being kept alive by the act of black- boxing.

Legacy maintenance, however, is a detested field. In the foreword to the textbook Working Efficiently with Legacy Code (Feathers 2005), Robert C. Martin writes:

Legacy code. The phrase strikes disgust in the hearts of program- mers. It conjures images of slogging through a murky swamp of tangled undergrowth with leaches beneath and stinging flies above. It conjures odors of murk, slime, stagnancy, and offal. Although our first joy of programming may have been intense, the misery of dealing with legacy code is often sufficient to ext- inguish that flame. (Martin in Feathers 2005, p. xiv)

103 Note that the concept of wrapping is used all the time, also beyond legacy modernization: e.g. Quicktime is a wrapper for several codecs, HandBrake is a wrapper for ffmpeg and Microsoft’s web browser Microsoft Edge is a wrapper for Google’s Chromium engine. 189 In the preface to the book Feathers himself notes:

What do you think about when you hear the term legacy code? If you are at all like me, you think of tangled, unintelligible structure, code that you have to change but do not really un- derstand. You think of sleepless nights trying to add in features that should be easy to add, and you think of demoralization, the sense that everyone on the team is so sick of a code base that it seems beyond care, the sort of code that you just wish would die. Part of you feels bad for even thinking about making it bet- ter. It seems unworthy of your efforts. (Feathers 2005, p. xvi)

But what can be the reason for perceiving legacy systems as not only a programmer’s worst nightmare, but as a disgusting, rotten monster which contradicts everything that the programmer has so far enjoyed about programming?

In a call for papers for a special issue of Internet Histories: Digital Technology, Culture and Society focusing on “Legacy Systems” in spring 2019, editors Michael Stevenson and Anne Helmond wrote, “Legacy systems can be thought of as outdated technologies that im- pose artificial constraints on the future” (Helmond and Stevenson 2019—my emphasis). If, however, legacy systems, as suggested by the two editors, are imposing “artificial” constraints on our future, they are implying that evolutionary, linear development is in oppo- sition to the “artificial” and is thus “natural.” This again feeds back into the dominant discourse of capitalist evolutionary development as a force of nature, where the future is already known, at least in the sense that it will be an improvement and a better state than our cur- rent mode. The irony is that hidden legacy systems are in fact integral elements to keeping the system of evolutionary development alive.

Previously in this Maintenance lesson, we discussed Development versus Maintenance according to Hannah Arendt’s notions of Work (that which endures) and Labor (that which sustains) in relation to perceptions of development versus maintenance. Perhaps we need to understand the apathy towards legacy maintenance tasks in relation to the hegemonic understanding of evolutionary development as a force of nature. In this case, legacy maintenance is not only posing as a sustainment task in opposition to more creative and exciting deve-

190 lopment tasks, but as something which according to the hegemonic logic of evolutionary development would be even worse, since legacy maintenance is the sustainment process against all rationale of evo- lutionary development. This may be the reason why legacy mainte- nance tends to be perceived not only as dull and tedious, but is, as described above, depicted as an ugly monster, likened to a disgusting zombie, although what is actually at stake here is that legacy systems seem to impose alternatives to hegemonic understandings of linear development as inscribed in capitalist logic. For understanding this critical potential of the legacy system and its maintenance, it is worth taking a closer look at the role of the zombie as a cultural metaphor.

Zombies and the Silent Majority

The zombie figure is used by Hertz and Parikka as a metaphor for the reanimation of discarded electronics (2012). However, they tend to neglect the cultural domain of the zombie figure, which their theory, through the use of the zombie as a signifier, has become inscribed in.104 Within Haitian Vodoo practice, a newly deceased person may be resurrected by a witch doctor through sorcery and thus turned into a “zonbi.” The Haitian zonbi is used by the witch doctor as a source of free labor, representing a one-to-one relationship between witch doctor and zonbi as a free source of labor in a mimicry of colonial slavery (McAlister 2017, p. 64). Western popular culture’s adoption of the zombie figure as it developed since the end of the 1960s and 1970s in films such as George Romero’sLiving Dead tri- logy (Romero 1968; 1978; 1985), however, points us to a slightly different depiction of the Zombie-figure.

The Western zombie, in contrast to the Haitian zonbi, does not come to life through individual witchcraft, but through mass contami- nation and infection. Western zombies are cannibals and their bite

104 Parikka and Hertz use the zombie figure as a signifier for their media archaeological method- ology for art and design practices (as discussed previously) symbolizing the act of literally resurrect- ing dysfunctional and discarded consumer electronics. Not through Voudou wizardry, but through another form of sorcery, namely circuit bending and hacking which not only bypass the expert territory of the discarded electronic devices, but put them into new uses. This likens the role of the artist/designer to the role of the witch doctor within Haitian Vodou practice, where a newly dead is resurrected through magic sorcery and thus turned into a Zonbi.

191 transfers the zombie infection to the human they have bitten. Per- haps we can best understand this adaptation of the initial colonial zonbi into what Deleuze and Guattari have dubbed the monster of modernity (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, p. 335), as a self-regulating, second-order cybernetic system. The infection itself is a black-boxed unknown, but the input, a bite, produces the output of a newly infec- ted zombie whose only desire is to eat human flesh—and who in turn through its bite will produce yet another zombie. Where previous mythologies of the living dead, for instance the Victorian vampire or Frankenstein’s monster depict the monsters as strong protagonists equipped with individual characteristics such as being attractive, se- ductive, noble savages, etc. (McAlister 2017, p. 75), the zombies of twentieth and twenty-first century Western pop culture may best be described as “everywoman and everyman,“ the monster of the mas- ses (Larsen 2017, p. 157). The individual zombies in themselves are unimportant, whenever one is killed, another always follows (Larsen 2017, p. 168). Even a loved one, once infected, becomes a disposable being, as is ceaselessly depicted in zombie films where protagonists are often forced to kill off their own child, parent or spouse.

The term “silent majority,” which the PR manager used to descri- be COBOL, not only evokes a dying language but also resonates with the immense widespread implementation of the language. On November 3, 1969, as public demonstrations against the Vietnam war were intensifying, President Nixon pleaded for support from Americans who didn’t take part in the anti-war protests. In a tele- vision speech he addressed them as “the great silent majority of my fellow Americans” (Nixon 1969). The speech was later dubbed the “Silent Majority” speech. And since then, politicians have used the term “silent majority” in order to address the massive part of a po- pulation, who because of their passivity, seem to be potential allies and supporters. But according to Jean Baudrillard, the silent majority is something very different from non-voters’ potentiality to vote. In a 1972 essay titled “In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities,” a dys- topian analysis of the masses of a post-Fordist, consumerist society, he provokingly turns the notion around, describing how the concept within “the folklore of silent passivities” (Baudrillard 1983, p. 12), of the masses being “misled or mystified” with a potential of being activated, enlightened or educated by the elites is merely a myth ser-

192 ving only to support the illusion of having power (Baudrillard 1983, p. 14). Baudrillard states that,

this indifference of the masses is their true, their only practice, that there is no other ideal of them to imagine, nothing in this to deplore, but everything to analyse as the brute fact of a col- lective retaliation and of a refusal to participate in the recom- mended ideals, however enlightened. (Baudrillard 1983, p. 14)

Thus, the very silence and detachment of the masses is their real power. A power that prevents categorization or prediction through surveys or opinion polls, subsequently making representation im- possible (Baudrillard 1983, pp. 20–22). The apathy of the masses will eventually undermine the power structures in place, by turning obliviousness into a black hole in which power, in due course, will implode.

When I asked a senior engineer at IBM to pinpoint the problematics of COBOL he replies:

I think there are about five trillion lines of code that have been written in COBOL and of that there are probably around four trillion still running—That is the problem! That is really the problem. Say four trillion lines of code, if you want to rewrite it: nobody has the patience and nobo- dy has the money to do it... So, fundamentally the reason for the longevity of COBOL is the fact of the amount of code.105

By way of explaining, the extent of Cobol as coded infrastructure is what makes it endure.

In a testimony by The Government Accountability Office (GAO) be- fore the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, House of Representatives in the US on May 2016, GAO revealed that in the financial year 2015 the Federal Government had spent more than three quarters of its yearly budget on so-called Operations and Ma- intenance tasks [O&M] (Powner 2016, p. 6). Significantly, out of seven thousand IT investments made by the government in 2015, 5233 investments had spent all of their reserves on O&M (Powner

105 Interview, October 2014.

193 2016, p. 6), which is equivalent to more than three times the ex- penditures used on so-called DME activities—Development, Moder- nisation, and Enhancement processes (Powner 2016, p. 6). O&M expenditure has grown continuously in recent years resulting in a $7.3 billion decline in the Federal Government budget on expendi- tures on DME activities between 2010 and 2017 (Powner 2016, p. 8). In other words, the processes of keeping legacy systems alive are having a massive impact on the technological development processes within large corporations and institutions, such as in this case the US Federal Government, in a non-linear direction. Moreover, GAO stresses the difficulties in carrying out the maintenance work on le- gacy systems and points to the US Social Security Agency, SSA, as an example, where they were forced into “re-hiring retired employees to maintain its COBOL systems.” (Powner 2016, p. 16).

Kimberly A. Byrd, Deputy Assistant Inspector General at the Ala- bama Social Security Administration, who directs and oversees the financial and IT inspections of the SSA, was already emphasizing the problems and difficulties of carrying out the actual maintenance pro- cesses of legacy systems in July 2016. SSA is responsible for paying around sixty-seven million Americans $930 billion annually (OIG 2016), and they are maintaining “more than sixty million lines of COBOL… along with millions more lines of other legacy program- ming languages” (Byrd 2016, p. 1).

So far, these legacy back-back-ends have remained invisible to the greater public, however in spring 2020, they surfaced as part of the COVID-19 crisis. On April 4, the state governor of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, made a public call for COBOL programmers along with doctors and nurses (Murphy 2020). The background for the gover- nor’s announcement for COBOL volunteers was problems related to delays in unemployment registration and compensation due to the escalating unemployment rate in the wake of the US national lockdown. People were laid off due to employers shutting down or slowing down their businesses and over the course of just a couple of weeks, the unemployment rate escalated by 1600 percent in New Jersey alone. The resulting pressure on the more than forty-year-old information architecture handling the registration and payment of unemployment benefits was enormous. New Jersey was not alone. A

194 survey by Verge stated that COBOL was used in the unemployment systems of at least twelve states including Alaska, California, Kansas, Rhode Island, Iowa, and Connecticut (Kelly 2020). GAO’s testimony before the Committee on Oversight and Govern- ment Reform in 2016 had pointed to the Gartner Group’s 2010 re- port which even then had urged institutions and businesses to move away from COBOL and turn to newer and more modern languages (Powner 2016, p. 15). Similar reactions were seen in the wake of the COBOL-COVID-19 crisis as exemplified in tech-columnist and technologies advisor Joseph Steinberg’s urge to finally get this right by getting all legacy systems renewed and replaced (Steinberg 2020).

But is that possible at all?

When I ask about COBOL’s future, the vice president of Global at one of India’s largest IT-companies answers promptly, “COBOL has a very bright future.”106

And she continues:

We cannot sunset most of the legacy systems around the globe. If it is three billion lines of code, it will take three hundred thou- sand programmers fifteen to twenty years. Most of them will probably stop after a while, because they cannot migrate systems which are this efficient to something which will be running on another disparate platform. Volume is growing. Lines of code are growing. Customers stay in business. Satellite applications can probably be migrated, channels, etc., but not the core—the heart of the application system. Customer-facing applications can be changed but not the core. For a bank, the running of a JCL banking is a core. Transaction in millions of dollars/mil- lions of transactions. Heart has to be there—up and ticking!

Lars Bang Larsen notes:

The zombie pushes a horizon of empty time ahead of it; whether that time will be messianic or apocalyptic is held in abeyance. The zombie represents the degree zero of our capa-

106 Interview, October 2014.

195 city to imagine the future. How can we look over its shoul- der? What future race comes after the zombie? How do we cannibalize self-cannibalization? (Larsen 2017, p. 168).

So, like the zombie, COBOL has a bright hereafter in a non-futu- re-future. Namely, the sheer amount of working COBOL code around limits the possibility for changes like migration to more mo- dern programming environments. Basically, it is often too costly and there may not even be enough programmers to do it. COBOL, as the silent majority of global IT, is not just what the PR-manager of the UK-based software company seems to suggest, a massive amount of humble, insignificant and steady applications executing their task as well as possible. On the contrary, COBOL poses a very interesting Catch-22 within technological development and our information society. Due to COBOL’s legibility, the programming language has been immensely widely implemented, but at the same time due to the very same legibility turning illegible, it has also been immensely unpopular and thus neglected, which has resulted in a sort of mar- ginal position. And because of this very position it seems that it is now extremely hard, if not impossible, to stop using the language. And even if another language were used, it would also, eventually, become legacy.

Legacy COBOL systems are seemingly against all principles of the hegemonic discourse of evolutionary development and how we have come to perceive technological life cycles. Through vivid depictions of programmers’ work with legacy code, we may easily imagine the wrapped COBOL codes side-lining Romero’s Dawn of the Dead zombies, out for a stroll in a shopping center, incapable of shopping (Romero 1978). The maintenance processes ensure the endurance of that which is otherwise considered dead, but seemingly in return affects the supposedly “natural forces” of evolutionary development negatively. It becomes a sort of black boxed catch-22. A futureless future. Or does it?

Like Baudrillard’s masses, the silent majorities of COBOL can be read as a symptom of post-Fordism understood as the rise of the service economy after the impact of automation. The computer lang- uage of COBOL paved the road for computerized automation to

196 reach most parts of our society and now it takes up a key position by being the (back-)back-end of our world economy. The silence of the- se quotidian applications organizing our unemployment payments, financial transactions, payroll systems, retail, insurance, transporta- tion, health care, and airplane traffic is due to their insignificance: we are all busy checking the balance of our bank accounts, and not interested in which programming language has delivered the upda- tes—as long as the applications are working. Hence, COBOL exists at the margins and yet is still central to the functioning of systems at the heart of modern and global capitalism. These are not fric- tion-free systems, although they appear like that from the frontend user’s perspective, where one cannot see the ongoing updating, fixing and enhancement processes of the old code taking place in order for it not to break down and fall apart. Subsequently, COBOL descri- bed as “the silent majority of global IT” may on one hand suggest a hidden power active through its zombie state and inconspicuousness combined with sheer volume of implementation. This may in turn be likened to the power of passivity of Baudrillard’s silent majori- ties—which from the perspective of the hegemonic understanding of evolutionary technological development, takes the form of a zombie or mighty bug in the system which eventually might cause the system of linear technological development to implode.

Alternatively, on the other hand, we may also perceive the black- boxing and hidden maintenance labor of COBOL and other legacy systems as part of the logical side to the capitalist production cycle in a post-Fordist, post-global neoliberal economy. Actually it is the capitalist model of technological development that is being kept alive by the act of blackboxing and maybe here the fact that it is black that is used as a color is also unintentionally suggestive of the racialized capitalist structures behind this form of hiding away labor, materi- ality, untold and best forgotten “legacies”? Does the zombie really upset the system here after all? It is there, but will it make the system eventually eat itself?

197 MAINTAINING EXECUTION THROUGH PARTICIPATION #3

Endless Endtime—Ongoing Acts of Analogue Computation, a participatory fax intervention, Norrköping’s Museum of Art, 14 September, 2017.

In 2017, as part of the symposium “Det oförklarliges medieekologier” at Norrköpings Art Museum, I was on stage doing analogue computations on the words, terms, and phrases used in the various presenta- tions. The audience was also invited to do their own computations. Every time 666 was identified, it would be faxed to the Endtime Magazine.

Page right-top: Photo by Jakob Lien. Page right-bottom: Photo by Ragnild Lome.

198 199 200 3.5 MAINTAINING FLOWS

In The trilogy, Manuel Castells used the term “the space of flows” to denote an understanding of the postmodern cha- racteristics of space in which it is possible to interact synchronously over distances (Castells [1996] 2010, p. 442). In Castells’ view, one of the main pillars of the postmodern conceptualization of space is the advancement in telecommunication and information infrastructure: digital materiality and processes from electronic circuits to processing power and high-speed cables (Castells 2010, p. 443). These technolo- gies allow (when combined), for a perception of an assumed singular global omnipresence, characterized by temporal synchronicity and instantaneousness, where remoteness allegedly had been abolished. Nevertheless, Castells argues that although the structural logic of the Space of Flows is “placeless,” it does not lead to the disappearing of places, but rather to a transformation of the meaning and logic of places as they “become absorbed in the network.” (Castells 2010, p. 443) After all, the networks are based on the connection of specific places within their mesh, which is defined through the exchanges of the networks flows (Castells 2010, pp. 442–43). Castells however, is careful to reject technological determinism, and emphasizes that flows are “the expression of processesdominating our economic, po- litical, and symbolic life.” (Castells 2010, p. 442)

In Castells’ analysis, technology is in itself represented as friction- less. In spite of the material basis of the analysis, processes carried out within digital infrastructures are understood as flows, and not examined to any greater extent. The underlying infrastructures are continuously executing these flows, and any possible frictions, in Castells’ approach, occur due to external factors.107 Castells thereby overlooks the crucial point of internal friction: in reality, as examined throughout the previous parts of this thesis, there is a back-back-end

107 That is, not being connected to the network at all.

201 to globalization, namely the spaces of flaws,108 containing a large group of programmers who are maintaining the underlying infor- mation architectures of the spaces of flows. In the background, this human factor ensures and sustains information architectures and sys- tems in such a way that they appear to produce the information flows of the front-ends in a frictionless way. This workforce is, for instance, programmers working with the maintenance of legacy systems, and thereby ensuring the continuously seamless flow of global businesses.

In the next section, I’ll turn to the site of global flaws, where the continuous maintenance of the global flows is being pursued. Spe- cifically, to India, where a lot of legacy maintenance work is being outsourced to.

On the Production of Spaces of Flows / Global Space

“No, this definitely wasn’t Kansas. It didn’t even seem like India. Was this the New World, the Old World, or the Next World?” Thomas L. Friedman, 2005.

In 2005, after paying a visit to Infosys headquarters in Bangalore, American journalist Thomas L. Friedman wrote that “the world is flat.” Impressed with his encounters at India’s second largest IT company, Friedman intended the expression “the world is flat” to be a description of how he had now been convinced that “the global competitive playing field was being leveled” (Friedman 2007, p. 8). This, Friedman states, is characteristic of a new era, which he dubs “Globalization 3.0” (Friedman 2007, p. 10). According to Friedman, Globalization 3.0 is driven by technological innovation within the software field as well as implementation of network technologies em- powering individuals from all over the world to partake in global capitalism.

Infosys is India’s second largest IT service company. The company was founded in 1981 and, as with most of the Indian IT services, un-

108 I would like to thank Matthew Fuller who suggested introducing this twist to Castellian terminology.

202 derwent exponential growth triggered by the Y2K bug. As of March 2018, Infosys had eighty-two offices and 123 development centers around the world (Infosys 2018).

When I visit Infosys in 2014, it has around two hundred thousand employees109 between thirty and forty thousand of whom are wor- king on projects related to mainframes (which means that their job somehow relates to applications written in COBOL).110 I visit in order to get an understanding of the global space described by Friedman. According to Doreen Massey, spatial discourses are enactments of power (Massey 2005), and with this assumption, we should ask what kind of power is manifest in Friedman’s supposedly egalitarian “flat world.” What does it look like? How is it produced and constructed? And what is it that encourages or allows such space to emerge? Ques- tions like these lead me to the Infosys corporate campus, the Global Education Center, which is located in Mysore, South India.

Global Education Center, Mysore

“So we do not believe in the colleges. We run our own academia. We have a six-month university program in Mysore,” says an employee of Infosys Labs in the corporation’s headquarters in Bangalore. This makes sense, as none of the major universities in India are providing training in COBOL and at least twelve thousand Infosys employees are working specifically with COBOL and thirty to forty thousand of them are working with projects related to it. I ask him how they en- sure the right qualifications of newly recruited employees since none of the major universities provide this type of training any longer.

The Education and Research Principal at Infosys Global Education Center, Mysore, formulates a more formal answer when asked to explain the motivations behind the centralized training campus, the largest corporate training facility in the world:

When we started to recruit in big numbers our leaders thought that this had to be centralized. Because everybody will get the

109 In May 2020, the number of employees was more than 240 000 (Infosys 2020). 110 Source: Interview with engineers at Infosys, October 2014.

203 same kind of training and they decided to make it a residential program. So that trainees can focus completely on the training program and we can expose them to world class facilities. Lear- ning within Infosys can possibly have a lot of advantages. The trainees are not only learning the technology—they are even lear- ning the business etiquette.

Infosys employs around eighteen thousand employees annually. The recruitment process starts at selected universities where the compa- ny conducts interviews with final-year-students. One out of a hun- dred applications are accepted. Before starting at Infosys, graduates have to complete a paid training-period of eighteen to twenty-six weeks (depending on their prior education). This takes the form of a residency program, where all trainees are referred to as “freshers” who live and study at the corporate campus. The training period is structured in three parts. The first consists of a Generic Technology Program (GTP), where the basic foundations for programming, data- base, etc., are introduced. The second part consists of Technological Specific Training Programs (TSTPs) where students are allotted spe- cific streams for example JAVA, Microsoft, Apple, mainframes (CO- BOL training), Open systems, etc. The assigned stream dictates later job assignments within Infosys. The third and last part of the training period is dedicated to business etiquette and communication. After completing training, freshers are delegated to Infosys offices, taking their place in what Friedman calls “Globalization 3.0.”

The 126 km train ride from Bangalore to Mysore takes almost three hours. The train passes gently through the beautiful landscape. Mysore is an enormous contrast to Bangalore. It is evident that I am now in the countryside. The air is fresher, the atmosphere is relaxed, and there is much less traffic. Mysore is situated at the foot of the Chamundi Hills and served as the capital of the Kingdom of Mysore from 1399 to 1956. The many palaces of the city bear witness to its cultural heritage. The fort located within the old city center hosts India’s second largest tourist attraction, Mysore Palace. The Info- sys Global Education Center, described as the “second palace of the city” by an auto rickshaw driver, is situated in an industrial area at the periphery of the city, approximately a half-hour taxi ride from

204 the old palace. I catch a glimpse of the enormous dome of the Global Education Center II from the taxi on the highway. It is a very surreal experience and I almost feel that I have to pinch myself, as if St. Pe- ter’s Basilica suddenly popped up behind a coconut grove.

We arrive at the gates. The area is officially called Hebbal Industrial Estate, but there don’t seem to be many other businesses on site. Eve- rything is quiet. No other cars, no auto rickshaws, no street vendors. The silence is temporarily interrupted as a bus passes. There are two entrances: one for staff and another for guests. A group of guards are hanging out by the guest entrance. They seem happy when I arrive. I am registered and the usual control calls are made. But to my sur- prise the security is not as tight as I am used to. They were stricter at Infosys headquarters in Bangalore. Bringing my camera is not an issue. I am supposed to meet the principal of the training center in the Global Education Center I. The guards describe the route: go straight then turn left. I enter the premises a little before two o’clock. Like Infosys headquarters in Bangalore, everything seems perfect: the lawn is like a golf course and I wonder if I might have entered a real 3D world.

Universal, Virtual and Specific Bodies

Friedman writes:

(T)he dynamic force in Globalization 3.0—the thing that gives it its unique character—is the newfound power for individuals to collaborate and compete globally. And the lever that is enabling individuals and groups to go global so easily and so seamlessly is not horsepower, and not hardware, but software—all sorts of new applications—in conjunction with the creation of a global fiber-optic network that has made us all next-door neighbors. (2005, p. 10)

Moreover, he states that:

It was Western countries, companies, and explorers who were doing most of the globalizing and shaping of the system. But going forward, this will be less and less true. Because it is flat-

205 tening and shrinking the world, Globalization 3.0 is going to be more and more driven not only by individuals but also by a much more diverse—non-Western, non-white-group of indivi- duals. Individuals from every corner of the flat world are being empowered. Globalization 3.0 makes it possible for so many more people to plug and play, and you are going to see every color of the human rainbow take part. (Friedman 2007, p. 11)

Friedman’s visions are sound with the cyber-optimism of the 1990s. John Perry Barlow’s libertarian Cyber-Manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” from 1996 is one such example. The internet too was seen as possible means of overcoming questions of race and inequality. Such optimism was also exemplified in the cartoon by Peter Steiner (1993) for The New Yorker, which illustra- tes the relation between race, technology and empowerment, and the supposedly endless possibilities of virtual representation, in the form of a little dog busily typing on a computer while the caption reads “On the Internet nobody knows that you are a dog.” (Steiner 1993)

However, as Lisa Nakamura pointed out in “Race In/For Cyberspa- ce: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” although the notion of race was optional in virtual meeting spaces “players who elect to describe themselves in racial terms” were “often seen as engaging in a form of hostile performance, since they introduce what many consider a real life ‘divisive issue’ into the phantasmatic world of cybernetic textual interaction.” (Nakamura 1995, p. 2) Nakamu- ra dubs such ignorance of race as “cybersocial hygiene” (Nakamura 1995, p. 6). Nakamura highlights a specific event where a petition intended to “impose penalties upon characters who harassed other characters on the basis of race” was neglected (Ibid.), since, as the opponents suggested, “those offended in this way had the option to ‘hide’ their race by removing it from their descriptions.” (Ibid.) The internet of the 1990s was dominated by white male users, which meant that unless otherwise stated, anybody browsing would pass as a white male. However, that didn’t mean that racism had been abo- lished, on the contrary, you could “fit in” by not stating actively that you were non-white. The supposed freedom of the net just offered the dog the possibility to “pass” as a human (Nakamura 1995, p. 1).

206 Friedman’s vision of “Globalization 3.0” being driven by software without hardware does not make sense in technical terms: software simply does not run without hardware—and optic fiber is hardware too.111 Accordingly, only a minor percentage of the world’s popula- tion is privileged enough to actually be able to “connect” to global capitalism, simply because most people do not have the means/ hard- ware to do so.

In connection with Friedman’s notion of the participation of all co- lors of the “human rainbow” it is hard not to read his emphasis on software versus hardware as a symbol of mind over body, where the dismissal of hardware becomes analog to the non-white bodies of the “human rainbow,” i.e. a classic case of how an “inclusionary vision” hides a huge exclusion. His observations may seem to be the ultimate fulfillment of the enlightenment libertarian vision of all humans being born free and equal, as well as the universalism of development theo- ry of the twentieth century, now finally being achieved through the advancements of technology. However, as software needs hardware, minds, as Nakamura emphasizes, are dependent on bodies, even in so-called virtual spaces and the question is, is it really everybody who can pass, or just those who can manage to adapt to the ideal space of “Globalization 3.0”? A space which, like other colonized spaces before it, requires its subjects to be educated and discipline their be- havior in order to comply with a specific global standard.

Bodies in Universal “Real” Space

The Mysore Infosys compound is vast. The weather is very hot and the promenade appears to be longer than expected. I wonder if I am lost, but since there is no one to ask for directions I continue. I pass the monumental building, the Global Education Center II. The buil- ding is the largest structure built in India since its declaration of in- dependence in 1947. And it is indeed massive. Although inaugurated in 2009,112 the style is Western classicism. Its features are associated

111 A bold approach to this is German media theoretician Friedrich Kittler’s provocative state- ment that “there is no software,” and that software eventually is nothing but signifiers of voltage difference (Kittler 1995). 112 Global education Center II was inaugurated September 15, 2009 by Sonia Gandhi, Chairper- son of UPA and President of the Indian National Congress (Infosys 2009).

207 with grand Western buildings. The building is said to have been de- signed to resemble St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican (Brook 2014), and indeed the huge dome flanked by two impressive side buildings lends associations to the view of St. Peter’s Square. However, another interesting reference, which although smaller in scale, springs to my mind, is the pre-enlightenment campus, Collège des Quatre-Na- tions113 in Paris (which today hosts the Institut de France). The col- lege was not built for French students, but as a campus for students from the newly acquired French territories after the treaties of the Pyrenees and Münster. The students came from well-established fa- milies of the remote areas, and they were invited to Paris in order to be educated and thereby “taught to be good French citizens, Catholic and French speaking.” (Babelon 2001, pp. 6–7)

The entrance to the Global Education Center II is, similarly to the Collège des Quatre Nations’ entrance, dominated by a row of co- lumns that resemble the entrance of the Parthenon. Later, during a guided tour, I am informed that the entrance of the Global Education Center II was carefully constructed according to Vignola’s Doric or- der of architecture. The grand dome is sixty-five feet in diameter and 195 feet high. The board of Infosys has its exclusive meeting hall just beneath the dome. The library is situated at the edge of the Atrium.114

I turn left and suddenly I find myself beneath another set of Doric columns. I had accidentally used the “backdoor” to enter Global Education Center II, where there are plenty of people, young people. A food court. People entering and exiting elevators.

In Black Skin, White Masks from 1952 Frantz Fanon describes the complex relationship between colonized and colonizers. Fanon gives an example of how the privileged group of the colonized Martiniqu- ais distinguished themselves from their country and their status of being colonized by mimicking French culture and language (Fanon [1952] 2008, pp. 9–11; 147-149).115 Thus, by trying to be like the

113 The construction of Collège des Quatre-Nations began in 1657. The building was designed by Le Vau, who was also the main architect of Louis XIV (Babelon 2001, p. 2). As its name indicates, “the college of four nations,” the university was not intended for local students of Paris, but rather as an education institution for “young foreigners” who “had become the new subjects of the king through the treaties of Münster and of the Pyrenees” (Babelon 2001, p. 6). 114 See also Hafeez Contractor (2020). 115 Aimé Césaire similarly describes this in his conversations with Francoise Vergès, as the “black

208 colonizers, the ones in power, the colonized aspired to gain some of that power themselves. The act of mimicry was encouraged de- liberately as a practice by colonial powers to manage and exercise control within the colonies. In Observations on the State of Society Among the Asiatic Subjects of Great Britain, Particularly with Re- spect to Morals, and on the Means of Improving it (1813), Charles Grant highlighted Christianity’s potential as a form of social control. Grant suggested that British expansion in India should focus on soci- al reform through the introduction of Christian values. According to Grant, the colonial subjects would be induced to stay under the pro- tection of the British as a result of the imitation of English manners (Bhabha 2004, p. 124). Grant’s approach was a great inspiration to British politician Thomas B. Macaulay, who served as a member of the governing Supreme Council of India and who among other things is responsible for the introduction of English as a standard langua- ge in India. Macaulay viewed native Indian culture as barbaric and irrelevant (Said 1979, p. 152). Macaulay’s strategy of reforming the Indian education system as formulated in his “Macaulay Minute” from 1835, included the elimination and substitution of Indian cul- ture with British culture (Bhabha 2004, pp. 124–25). In the name of development, this transformation mainly aimed at making the Indi- an education system an instrument of the Empire, mimicking British culture in order to produce future cheap labor.

In Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place, Nirmal Puwar, however, turns the act of mimicry on its head by showing how marginalized bodies, are “Matter Out of Place” (Puwar 2004, p. 10), which are forced to mimic heterogeneous stereotypes in order to at best be able to fit into universal spaces. Puwar’s analysis is a sharp criticism of the universal body as it has been promoted since the enlightenment as being free and equal. She notes:

...enlightenment thought is able to successfully claim that all bo- dies are the same precisely because whiteness and masculinity can occupy the privileged position of being unmarked by their bodily natures and desires. Definitions of masculinity and white- ness, however, are constructed as negations of what women and non-white symbolize. (Puwar 2004, p. 142) petite bourgeoisie” with a “deep-seated need to imitate Europeans” (see Césaire 2020 pp. 1–3).

209 While the “Others” are being “racially stereotyped” (Puwar 2004, p. 142), Puwar highlights how critics have elaborated “on the exclusionary somebody in the nobody of political theory that proclaims to include everybody” (Puwar 2004, p. 141). In this way they unveiled “the disembodied human ‘individual’” as “the corpo- real specificity of the absolute human type” (Puwar 2004, p. 141). That means that women and non-white people who are entering these spaces are being measured after the template defined in op- position to women and non-whites (Puwar 2004, p. 141). Specific bodies are designated as lacking rationality and all that which the white male body has exemplified as central features in the constitu- tion of the human subject (Puwar 2004, p. 142).

As Puwar unfolds enlightenment discourse on the body as suppressi- ve and dismissive of other bodies than the one in power, so Doreen Massey unearths the enlightenment’s relation to space as suppressi- ve in what she dubs “a power-geometry of intersecting trajectories” (Massey 2005, p. 64). One of the main characteristics of enlighten- ment (and modernity as a whole) understanding of space was to clas- sify geographical distinction in relation to time. Space became inter- preted according to a universal, linear form of development in which “different ‘places’ were interpreted as different stages in a single temporal development” (Massey 2005, p. 68). In this way, Massey points out how the world’s geography became converted into “the world’s (single) history” (Massey 2005, p. 68). A history in which spatial multiplicity and heterogeneity was reduced to a universal ti- meline of “linear progress” (Massey 2005, p. 68). Different nodes on the timeline would denote the divergence of different places. The places would be signified according to the overall temporal logic with labels such as “backward,” “developing” or “developed,” which would denote their individual temporal distance from the shared, universal future (Massey 2005, p. 68). A future which surprisingly happened to be that of the “developed” nations—the advanced Wes- tern civilization—Europe and Northern America as they appear here and now. Following Massey’s argument, this means that since Eu- rope and India will share the same future—they are inherently “the same”—it is just that India is behind.116 Massey emphasizes the supp-

116 Massey gives the example of Africa instead of India (Massey 2005, p. 68)

210 ressive politics implicit in this discourse. She points out the paradox in modernity’s means of literally slicing geography into time, which suppresses the spatial, at the same time as it reduces possibilities for other temporalities:

The lack of openness of the future for those “behind” in the qu- eue is a function of the singularity of the trajectory. Ironically, not only is this temporal convening of the geography of moder- nity a repression of the spatial, it is also the repression of the possibility of other temporalities. (Massey 2005, p. 70)

It follows that, “we are repressing the actuality of those differen- ces” (Massey 2005, p. 74). Similar to Puwar’s analysis of the bodies within universal space, the places within a modern conception of spatiality, are excluded multiplicity, all having to submit to the grand narrative of Western civilization.

Institutionalization

I am guided from the “back entrance” back on the right track and finally reach my destination, Global Education Center I, a building which is more mundane, modernist, and normal-office-building-like than its younger neo-classicist sister, Global Education Center II. I do interviews with managers and teachers, but I am not allowed to talk with any of the trainees or take part in their classes. When talking with the teachers, the manager closely supervises our conversation. I realize that the security is embedded differently, but it is as tight, if not tighter, than at Infosys headquarters in Bangalore where, al- though I couldn’t take any pictures, everybody was relatively open in conversation and I was allowed to walk freely around the area and welcome to participate in lectures and team meetings.

A teacher explains the principle of assigning students to specific tech- nological streams during the training period. Such a process is direct- ly connected to the Infosys Delivery Unit, the part of the corporation which is in charge of the coordination of the overall labor scheme

211 and logistics for administering and carrying out the client’s projects. The Delivery Unit may, for instance, ask the Global Education Cen- ter in Mysore to deliver seven hundred new employees specialized in JAVA, eight hundred in Apple and four hundred in mainframe. The latter involves learning COBOL. Newly enrolled trainees are allotted their streams according to these requests.117

In Mysore the teacher continues his explanation of how the Delivery Unit may regulate the curriculum of a specific stream. Some years ago, the Delivery Unit adjusted the content of the final project period of the Mainframe stream in such a way that the trainees would not have to make a running program-application as their final project, but instead would be fixing bugs and making enhancements and re- visions of existing code. “Like this, it is as close as it gets to the real work-experience,” states the teacher.

After the interviews, I am picked up by a PR-representative and of- fered a guided tour of the premises in a golf buggy. We pass the dormitories. The campus has fourteen thousand rooms altogether, which probably makes it the largest hostel in the world. Dining is in huge food courts with global restaurants: North-Indian, Chinese, or European cuisine. The dormitories are arranged in such a way that from a bird’s eyes perspective (or Google Maps) their plans make up the letters I-N-F-O-S-Y-S. An enormous mirror-glass variation of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome hosts a multiplex cinema com- plex offering the trainees the latest Hollywood and block- busters. There is a vast choice of sports facilities: swimming pools, squash, tennis courts, gyms, a yoga center and a musical lighting fountain on the main square in front of the Doric columns of the Global Education Center II (the site that resembles St Peter’s square). These are the leisure facilities for the trainees on weekends. Again, I notice how everything is kept perfectly clean. It is almost as sterile as if the physical surroundings are perfect renderings of architectural 3D drawings. The PR-rep encourages me to take more photographs and asks the golf buggy driver to escort me back to the entrance gate.

In “A Phenomenology of Whiteness” Sara Ahmed analyses the pro- duction of whiteness in university institutions. Ahmed highlights how

117 A COBOL-teacher I later meet at Bangalore’s local unit tells me that the allotment of students is all done algorithmically according to results of tests. He reveals that his students cry when they find out they have been allotted to the Mainframe stream.

212 recruitment and integration within an institution affects the newly employed individuals, who are subjected to the norms of the institu- tion. The act of recruitment is, according to Ahmed, not just an act of physically occupying the workplace and its premises, but rather a process of identifying with it and “follow its line” (Ahmed 2007, p. 158). Ahmed gives the example of identifying with the institution through a “we’” when referring to it or becoming part of its everyday circulation of documents, and taking part in the institution’s joys as well as sorrows (Ahmed 2007, p. 158). Ahmed writes, “To be recruited is not only to join, but to sign up to a specific institution: to inhabit it by turning around as a return of its address” (Ahmed 2007, p. 158).

Ahmed is referring to Althusser’s notion of interpellation, in which everyday practices and actions are inseparable from the ideologies which they are part of and form. Althusser gives the example of how an individual is made into a subject through the act of responding, by turning around when someone (a policeman) in public space calls, ”Hey, you there!” (Althusser 2014, pp. 190–91; Ahmed 2005, p. 158). Althusser notes, “The existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing.” (Althusser 2014, p. 191)118

In other words, individuals are constantly being formed as subjects through (ideological framework hauled through the) everyday acts, social forces, and interactions of which they are part. Althusser gi- ves the example of the unborn child which is already positioned as a subject by social expectations. Since space may be thought of as affording certain kinds of social activities and everyday practices (Gibson [1979] 1986), it can thus be understood as an important part of the subjugation of individuals. Michel Foucault’s well-known analysis of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon epitomizes such subjuga- tion of individuals through space (Foucault [1975] 1995). Bentham’s panopticon was a calculated prison design in which the structures of the building allowed for omnipresent surveillance, while at the same time the prisoners wouldn’t know when they were being surveilled. Consequently, the prisoners would, according to Foucault’s analy- sis, regulate and discipline their own behaviors to the omnipresent

118 The text was originally written in 1969.

213 structure of surveillance in order to avoid punishment, and thus be- coming what Foucault dubbed “docile bodies” (Foucault 1995, pp. 135–169). Foucault’s analysis foregrounds how architecture in the modern period had turned into a concept of governance—a globally applicable/displaceable program.119,120

The Collège des Quatre-Nations in Paris may also be understood as a function (although it opened a hundred years before Bentham started sketching out his concept of the panoptic architectural appa- ratus). The building complex’s celebration of Roman antiquity which was designed to not merely educate, but also impress and discipline privileged, non-native French adolescents, who had recently beco- me subjects of Louis XIV. The campus would teach them universal French etiquettes and culture and thereby mold them into represen- tative French citizens. The submissiveness to French culture and Cat- holicism was meant to prevent uprisings from the privileged families and to integrate them in the French regime.

Similarly, Infosys’s Global Education Center is a real virtual-real-si- mulation—a corporate gated education center for the production of new employees rather than new citizens, as was the case with its older sister campus in Paris. The Global Education Center looks like an exclusive brand space: the leisure areas, the imposing classicist education area with its libraries, gigantic lecture halls and generous meeting facilities, everywhere one feels copy-pasted into an adver- tisement campaign for a global consumerist lifestyle: it could be anywhere and nowhere.

I leave the campus through the gates. As I stand on the other side, I am again overwhelmed by the contrast between inside and outside. The next day I ask an auto rickshaw driver to drive me around the campus. The premises are carefully enclosed by a high wall. There are watch towers and surveillance cameras at intervals. I learn that

119 Edward Casey indicates multiple variations of Panopticons were built at many different sites, which became variations of the initial concept/program (Casey 1997, pp. 185–186). 120 Zygmunt Bauman/David Lyon’s concept of liquid surveillance takes Foucault’s analysis further through discussing his concept of surveillance in the context of what they call the modern liquified world which resembles a theorisation of global neoliberalism and its socio-technical as well as economic and moral regimes. Now the Panopticon is no longer fixed, but has become liquefied, leading to phenomena such as the “Ban-opticon”, keeping people out by fluidly adaptable exclusion. See Bauman and Lyon (2013).

214 there are rather strict curfews for the trainees. The gates close every day at 10:00 p.m. Visitors are not allowed.

During the four to six month training period, newly recruited trai- nees of Infosys are separated from their families, friends and homes, in other words from their culture and belonging, and implemented in the Global Education Center situated on a field in rural South In- dia. The corporate campus is training freshers in not only technical knowledge, but even a certain global business culture. They learn how to write emails in the correct way, eat global food, and watch American movies, while navigating a postmodern real virtual reali- ty of classicist architecture. During the training period, the trainees are thus being inscribed into the multinational company, which is literally manifested in the architecture by having the plans of the dor- mitories, their housing, making up the company name: The freshers are becoming “Infosysians.” Hence the knowledge production of the training campus facilitates the delivery unit of the company almost as a post-Fordist-Fordist-factory. Where the production of employees is made in the “assembly lines” of the large in-house training and leisure facilities. The production of employees becomes yet another layer of the production of the global corporate space.

Fanon pointed out how the colonized attempted to gain power by mimicking those in power, whereas Purwar turned this on its head and showed how difficult it is for a non-universal body to take part in universal space—the best they can do is to try to fit in by mimicking hegemonic structures. “Globalization 3.0,” like the cyber-optimism of the 1990s, may be marked by what Nakamura called “cybersocial hygiene.” In fact, it seems like it is not the non-white-colored indi- viduals of Friedman’s “human rainbow” who are granted access to the global market, but rather an exclusively selected and disciplined mass of global workers exemplified in this case as Infosysians (but which may equivalently be found within similar corporate education centers anywhere in the Global South as well as North). Such glo- bal corporate training facilities are thus a means for teaching how to pass as universal humans in the so-called “3.0 Globalization,” which, rather than allowing individuals to participate, seems to ho- mogenize and stream-line premises for participation into an “all-in- none” global corporate brand-space.

215 Endless Endtime—Ongoing Acts of Analogue Computation, a participatory fax intervention, transmediale festival, Berlin, 5 February, 2017.

216 Endless Endtime—Ongoing Acts of Analogue Computation, a participatory fax intervention, transmediale festival, Berlin, 5 February, 2017.

217 218 3.6 MAINTAINING DEVELOPMENT

It is Saturday and I am attending a Mainframe course in an indepen- dent training institute a ten minutes’ walk from my temporary home in Indiranagar, Bangalore. The teacher works as a COBOL program- mer in an IT company, but she gives courses on weekends, when she is otherwise off work. The classroom is small without windows and equipped with one standard tower desktop PC. The walls are very thin and from the room next door we can hear another teacher loudly explaining the foundation of database handling. Our teacher sits in front of the PC. Her bangles sound like bells as she types her examples on the keyboard. My co-student and I are sitting behind her on chairs with built-in foldable tables. The teacher explains the basics of JCL, Job Control Language, the script system used to in- terface the operating system of the mainframe machine on which legacy COBOL applications are most often executed. We carefully note down her directions on how to open and close files and how to execute a COBOL program within JCL. The textbook is a handwrit- ten notebook and she hands it over to my co-student so he can write a copy of the assignment for the coming week into his own notebook before she leaves.

After the instructor has left, we are allowed to stay and try out the ex- amples on the computer’s virtual IBM mainframe simulator. During my initial talk with the manager of the training institute, he assured me that each student would have their own virtual IBM Mainframe account in order to practice at home, but it turns out that we only have a single shared log-in, which means that we either have to sit together here or agree on specific times in order not to get blocked from the IBM license. We chat while trying to solve the assignments. He tells me that he is a fresher (newly graduated) in mechanical engi- neering. During his final year at college, different IT companies came to his institution to set up employment interviews with the students. First came Infosys, TCS, and Wipro, then came the lesser known companies. He was not offered a job until the third round. But he

219 was glad that he got one. However, against his will he got assigned to the mainframe/COBOL stream. Unfortunately, he fell sick with pneu- monia for three weeks during the training period, which is the reason he is now enrolled in this course. He needs to catch up on what he missed during his illness. The course costs fifteen thousand rupees— approximately equivalent to one month of salary. He asks me where I am from. I tell him that I am a PhD student at a Swedish University, but Danish. “Denmark?” he says, surprised. Then he tells me that many of his colleagues are doing maintenance work for Danske Bank and that he will be working with them as soon as he has improved his skills. Now it is my turn to be surprised. I tell him that Danske Bank actually is my bank. He is not pleased and asks, “Why?” I assure him that it is actually not by choice, but more of an old habit. I got my first account there when I was a child and have never bothered to change it. I ask him what kind of bank he has. He says that he prefers government banks. We continue to solve the assignment, but a bug keeps stopping us, perhaps we missed something while transcribing the teacher’s notes. Finally, we give up and I go back home. But it is hard for me to stop thinking about my co-student and his colleagues working day in and day out fixing bugs, changing client requests, and making enhancements that have perhaps been caused by my very own bank transactions.

At Infosys’s Global Education Center in Mysore, the COBOL teacher explains how the teaching of COBOL has undergone many changes over the last ten years. The Education Center is closely linked to the Delivery and Production unit of Infosys, from which the team of teachers get periodic inputs and suggestions on how to structure their training. The last change was the largest so far. Initially the “final stu- dent project” (a twenty-five day final project as the concluding ele- ment of a six month training period) was focused on developing app- lications from scratch. But the production unit suggested the team of teachers change the training perspective from application develop- ment to application maintenance since, as the production unit noted, “That is what we do. Here we do not have (m)any development pro- blems.” So, during one summer, all teachers blocked their calendars for two months in order to create a new “dummy” application for the final student project. They took inputs from production units, banking experts, insurance experts, etc., in order to make the appli-

220 cation look exactly like a real application. The final result certainly resembles a real industry application with around forty thousand li- nes of code. The team of teachers has intentionally implemented bugs that have to be fixed along with the assignment of making a minor as well as a major enhancement of the existing application. This means that now, during their final project trainees in the mainframe-stream of Infosys are not asked to develop anything from scratch, except a small module in the very last part of the project dealing with major enhancement—the final trainee project has instead become an exten- ded exercise in maintenance and bug-fixing.

As my third COBOL lesson reaches its end, I close the textbook and find myself confronted with a peculiar label on the front cover of the book stating:

RESTRICTED! FOR SALE ONLY IN INDIA, BANGLADESH, NEPAL, PAKISTAN, SRI LANKA & BHUTAN.

I dwell on the irony of the message and flip the book. On the back, it reads:

This Wiley Student Edition is part of a continuing program of paperbound textbooks especially designed for students in deve- loping countries at a reduced price. (Stern and Stern 1998—my emphasis)

Accordingly, this specific edition of the Stern and Stern textbook on structural COBOL is part of the American publishing house Wiley & Sons’ so called “international student editions,” which are offe- red to students in developing countries at a considerably lower price than the “normal” editions on sale in so-called developed countries. In this way knowledge production represented by this International Student Edition of Stern and Stern’s textbook can be read as an in- tentional practice essential to that of development theory in which Wiley & Sons supposedly are supporting an empowerment strategy through knowledge production.

However, the question remains: Developing into what…?

221 Developed Developing Development

When trying to understand the complex intersecting power structu- res that the learning of COBOL in India is part of, there are seve- ral things to consider. Throughout this thesis I have engaged with the different domains of power in which COBOL and learning and working with COBOL is situated. In this final part of the MAIN- TENANCE chapter, I would like to put it all together in an analysis relating to the structural domains of power.

First of all, learning COBOL in India is, on the one hand, a privile- ge. The software sector is one of the best paid in the country. The salary for a twenty-one-year old fresher amounts to twenty thousand rupees a month for the time spent in the learning academy; after the first six months it is increased to twenty-five to thirty thousand, and after three to six years of working experience the salary level will reach fifty thousand, which is equivalent to that of a lawyer, doctor or university professor.121

Due to the large size and availability of the Indian tech workforce it is possible, according to Carol Upadhya and A. A. Vasavi, for Indian software companies, as a form of marketing strategy for their inter- national clients, to hire engineers who are often over-qualified, and in terms of the level of education they have, “ill-suited” to the jobs they perform (2008, p. 17). Subsequently a form of deskilling is taking place (where the Indian software worker is unfit for the work tasks because they know too much). A former Infosys employee describes the task of legacy software maintenance:

These programs require slight changes, because of changes in the way that data are being fed or changes in government rules... or any other situation. …The small changes that you make, which is called maintenance of a project, or the production support both deal with making small changes to existing code. So people do not feel challenged—they feel bored. Because, it does not require them to do much thinking, much organizing and all the informa- tion they have learned and studied, like , system

121 These salary levels are based on numbers given in an interview with the manager of a local training institute in Bangalore as well as a retired COBOL programmer in 2014 and 2018.

222 requirements specifications, all this is not given a chance. They do not have a chance to do that. They just have to look at the code and understand it and make small changes to the logic and make it run.

As discussed to greater extent in the previous chapter, systems ba- sed on COBOL that are currently in use are legacy systems trapped between being business critical systems and being entirely outmoded. The maintenance of these systems sustains them and ensures that they can adapt to new client requests and uses, while at the same time increasing the amount of code and in that way sustaining them but also eventually making the code more illegible. Nevertheless, le- gacy maintenance is disdained by programmers, where development is seen as the most exciting work task and maintenance as not so interesting, legacy maintenance is the least well regarded. In training institutes, students are not asked to develop any programs in the language, but to simply maintain and enhance existing code. Thus, the job of a COBOL programmer may be likened to that of a janitor of information architectures.122

Seen from a macro perspective, mainframe maintenance is not a na- tional issue in India, as a senior engineer of IBM explains. Due to India’s history of economic enclosure, IBM along with other transna- tional corporations (Coca-Cola, Texas Instruments) left India in 1978 following the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, which had been put in effect during the Indira Gandhi government in 1974.123 But when Rajiv Gandhi took over as prime minister after the assassination of his mother, Indira Gandhi in 1984, the IT sector was deregulated and the country began to open up for foreign investment as well as export of the Indian IT sector. Prior to the enclosure, there were two to three hundred IBM mainframe computers in India. When IBM re- turned at the beginning of the 1990s, they realized that in their years of absence from the Indian market, mainframes had lost territory to

122 Similar to how Lilly Irani has described labor in the automation industries, so called mi- cro-workers, as “data janitors” (2015). 123 The Foreign Exchange Regulation Act aimed to preserve India’s foreign exchange resources. Followingly, it restricted multinational companies’ possibilities of operating in the country by, for instance, making it obligatory for foreign corporations to restrict their equity share to a maximum of forty percent (i.e. foreign corporations were only allowed to own maximum forty percent of the shares in their companies, which again meant that the companies needed to have minimum sixty percent of Indian shares) (Singh 2019, pp. 28–29).

223 the cheaper PCs. That means that the COBOL maintenance carried out in India is mostly done on mainframe machines located in other countries. The largest amount is in North America, which makes up approximately fifty percent, the second largest amount is on machi- nes located in Europe, this amounts to around twenty-five percent. In short, Indian engineers are outsourced, which makes their work invisible from India as well as from the users and clients who are located in Northern America and Europe.

The outsourced work-force has been called a form of “virtual mig- ration” by A. Aneesh (2006). Virtual Migration of software labor is characterized by two key aspects: The first is temporal integration, where different time zones are unified in real-time through informa- tion networks (Aneesh 2006, p. 69). The second aspect is spatial integration in which the work site is decoupled from the work per- formance (Aneesh 2006, p. 69). Aneesh notes:

... just like traditional immigrant workers, they do cross natio- nal boundaries and directly occupy some employment space in sectors of the American economy. In short, they migrate without migration (Aneesh 2006, p. 2).

During the millennium problem at the end of the 1990s (as examined in the second lesson, CRISIS) many Indian engineers migrated tem- porarily to the US and other countries in order to solve the Y2K pro- blems on site, where their skills and expertise were needed. Doreen Massey notes that as a consequence of modernity’s “convening of spatial difference” into temporality, distance within modernity is not only a question of spatiality, but also of temporality (Massey 2005, p. 77). Hence, migration is not solely an event where those who pre- viously were in the periphery arrive in the center, but also time travel, where the migrants depart from the past and arrive in the present.124 In this way migration, according to Massey, eradicates temporal as well as spatial distance, and this, she notes, makes migration “an assertion of coevalness” (2005, p. 70), a form of co-existence. The

124 This was actually reversed in the end of the 1990s, as Indian engineers migrated temporarily to the West in order to fix the Y2K problem, which means they were coming from the future, accord- ing to that lesson.

224 spatial could thus be said to constitute a potential bridge between engineers in India and engineers in America.125 Today however, as the outsourced labor as a form of virtual migration accentuates, any tiny possibility for coevalness that may have happened through mig- ration can no longer take place and there is no eradication of spatial, but only eradication of temporal distance. Hence, the engineer in India, although united with the North American client in a singular moment of universal instantaneousness, stays in the distance as the human extension of the machines.

The flatness of globalization may be understood as the compression of spatial distance by annihilation of the temporal in such a way that the space is perceived as compressed, unified time. But even if this “is an imagination of instantaneity—of a single global present” (Massey, p. 76), it is not a “flat world” as in an understanding of “flat” as equal. In fact, the entire concept of outsourcing depends on a playing field which absolutely is not leveled—it is in other words an effect of difference.

Despite being one of the best paid sectors in India, the salary level of an Indian software developer amounts to less than a fifth of a software developer doing exactly the same job but based in the UK (Smith 2016). With the British software developer eventually earning nearly £64,000 more than her colleague in India over a year (Smith 2016).126 Moreover, as C. M. Malish and P. Vigneswara Ilavara- san, point out, since the Indian ICT market is “over-dependent” on foreign markets, and there are “no spillover effects in the domes- tic market” the Indian software workers are “vulnerable to external market conditions” (2010, p. 55).

Even the synchronized temporality is also not that “flat.” Despite a universal global sense of synchronic presence, it is still daytime in In- dia when the night hits the US. Consequently, the engineer in India is capable of fixing bugs and making adjustments and minor enhance- ments for American customers overnight, while American engineers

125 Well, at least they have the possibility to meet, similar to Orr’s “out of place photocopy repairmen” who, although a minor part, still are part of the office landscape as discussed previously in this chapter. 126 According to OECD, Purchasing Power Parities (PPP) for cross country comparison was 0.689 for UK and 17.481 for India. Source: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-pari- ties-ppp.htm (accessed on 13 February 2020).

225 and clients are sound asleep. Hence, as the American clients arrive in the office the following morning, the previous day’s problems have been solved and the project has advanced overnight, which gives a sense of an unstoppable machinic flow, executing 24/7.

In Digital Labour and Karl Marx, Christian Fuchs explores labor aspects of the Indian software sector within a global context through a Marxist perspective. Fuchs’s analysis emphasizes India’s size (the world’s second largest country after China), and huge labor force which makes the country interesting to outsourcing services for com- panies located in the West, since it makes the salaries lower and the- reby increases the companies’ profits (Fuchs 2014, p. 202). Fuchs stresses that, although Indian software engineers are well educated and their work is well respected in India, they are heavily exploited in the global economy. Fuchs characterizes this as a form of what David Harvey calls “new imperialism” (Harvey 2005), in which

The value created by Indian software engineers to a large degree does not stay in the country and does not benefit at all, but rather is appropriated and owned by Western capital, which accumula- tes capital by selling software based on the dispossession of the value created by Indian software engineers in such a way that high exploitation rates are given. (Fuchs 2014, p. 211).

For Fuchs this appropriation of the value of the workforce in India is an expression of racism within global capitalism (Fuchs 2014, p. 206). Moreover, it entails, as emphasized by Fuchs, part of a tenden- cy of unequal development of India (Fuchs 2014, p. 211).

Fuchs refers to Anthony D’Costa’s characteristic of the Indian software industry’s development as being “embedded into an uneven and combined development of Indian capitalism that produces win- ners and losers and develops some regions, cities and groups at the expense of others.” (Fuchs 2014, p. 203) In other words, the Indian software sector increases class differences. Field work and surveys in two software corporations in Bangalore by P. Vignesware, Pro- fessor of Information Systems at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, has found that Indian software engineers foremost come from well-educated middle or upper-class backgrounds in urban or

226 semi-urban areas (Ilavarasan 2007, pp. 813–816). As it is unlike- ly that people with lower class backgrounds and less education are able to become software engineers, it is predominantly people who already possess “advantageous positions” (i.e. well-educated male, upper and middle class) who are able to benefit from the software industry (Ilavarasan 2007, pp. 818–819). This in turn reinforces the difference between urban and rural regions as key aspect of the une- qual/uneven development of India (Ilavarasan 2007, pp. 819).

The IT and BMP industries accounted for 7.7% of India’s GDP in 2018 (Statista 2020).127 However, as Fuchs points out, only a very small percentage of the Indian labor force is employed in the sector (Fuchs 2014, p. 203). In 2018, it amounted to a share of 0.76%128 of India’s total workforce, while forty-seven percent are employed within the agricultural sector. The agricultural sector however, ac- cording to the CIA World Factbook, only accounts for 15.4% (2016 est.) of India’s GDP (CIA 2020). Fuchs concludes that since the labor force is very small it makes a “modest impact” if we understand the Indian economy based on labor force (Fuchs 2014, p. 203), whereas if we understand it as capital, it has a very high impact (Fuchs 2014, p. 203). This in turn results in an unbalanced division of capital.

According to a report from Edelweiss, India held a fifty-two percent share of the total worldwide market for global outsourcing in fiscal 2017 (as quoted in Bhaskar 2018). Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services are both ranked among the top one hundred of the world’s leading Digital Companies as well as best regarded companies (For- bes 2019 and 2019b).129 According to employees at Infosys Lab, six- ty percent of Infosys’s business relies on Mainframe maintenance, and they estimate that for TCS it is even more.

127 Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/320776/contribution-of-indian-it-industry-to-in- dia-s-gdp/ (accessed July 8, 2020). 128 In 2018, the total Indian labor force was 521.9 million (CIA factbook 2020), 3,968,000 of those were employed in the IT—BPM sector (CEIC 2020), this amounts to 0.76% of the total workforce. Moreover, of those 0.76%, 880,000 were employed in the domestic market. The remain- ing employees were engaged in export related processes (IT services and software (1,970,000) and Business Process Management (1,188,000)) (CEIC 2020). 129 In 2019, Infosys was ranked number three on Forbes list of global Top Regarded Companies as well as ranked number seventy-one on Forbes list of “Top 100 Digital Companies” (Forbes 2019b and 2019a). In the same year, Tata Consultancy Services was ranked number twenty-two on Forbes list of global Top Regarded Companies and ranked number thirty-eight of “Top 100 Digital Compa- nies” (Forbes 2019 and 2019b).

227 The modern era structured the world according to “history” where spatiality was sliced into different time-pockets. To travel geographi- cally was also to travel in time whether from developed to backwards to developing or vice versa (Massey 2005, p. 68). The postmodern conception of space is a seemingly different approach. Massey notes that this conception is often depicted as “purely spatial” (Massey 2005, p. 76), which resonates with Friedman’s characterization of the world as being flat. In this conception, the world appears inte- gral as “a depthless horizontality of immediate connections” (Mas- sey 2005, p. 76), writes Massey while at the same time calling out for an awareness of the inherent “stasis” in this reticular mesh of ubiquitous presents (Massey 2005, pp. 76–77). Massey argues that a “claustrophobic holism,” is characteristic of the omnipresent present that negates the inherent complexity and multiplicity of time (Massey 2005, p. 77). She states, “Globalization, here is as inevitable as mo- dernity’s story of progress” (Massey 2005, p. 82). In the concept of globalization this “inevitability,” whether manifested as submission to an irrevocable technological determinism or unstoppable market forces, consequently hails the concept of globalization as a “grand narrative” (Massey 2005, p. 82).

Both discourses, modern as well as postmodern, eventually depict time/space as teleological. Hence, they are both colonial projects, rejecting multiplicity. Within globalization, modernity’s temporal se- quencing of space is thus being reduced to a binary division of those who are connected and part of the global network’s synchronicity, versus those who haven’t managed to catch up (read: develop) and join the network, and thus, as it appears, at least for now, are being excluded.130 This was very directly articulated by the CEO from an Indian IT company, who stated that “the proximity with the locals was seriously undermining the growth of the IT economy in the area” (IOCOSE 2014, p. 39). Thus, the privileged “globally con- nected” class is separating itself from the local disconnected class. In other words, in order to become “flat” the space of flows is elevated from the local. This division is manifested spatially as gated business hubs or education campuses (like for instance the GEC in Mysore or Electronic City in Bangalore); gated residential areas (without electri-

130 This was of course Castells’ famous division of interactive and interacted. See Castells, 2010 (1996).

228 city breakdowns or water shortages); or as flyovers.131 Subsequently, the physical segregation, not only manifests, but continuously re- enacts, class segregation.132

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon described the difference between the colonial city and the native city: Where the colonial city, the settler’s town, is a solid, bright, clean and smooth place (Fanon 1963, p. 39), the native city is dirty, cramped, short of resources whether that be food, water, light or energy—“a crouching village,” “wallowing in mire” (Fanon 1963, p. 39). According to Fanon, it is also a violent place (with evil men and so forth) and he describes the desire of the native for a place in the colonial city and observes that: “The governing race is first and foremost those who come from el- sewhere, those who are unlike the original inhabitants, ’the others’” (Fanon 1963, p. 40).

The global spaces as manifested in the GEC in Mysore or Infosys’s headquarters in Bangalore’s Electronic city in many ways resemble the colonial city as depicted by Fanon, (clean, entering a 3D rende- ring and brand space). Fanon’s observation however gets a second meaning in the context of spaces like GEC in Mysore or the business headquarters in Bangalore’s E-city or similar hubs all over India. In those spaces, the middle class is not from a remote foreign country, but distance themselves from the complex and chaotic local (regio- nal/national) everyday by elevating themselves into friction free spa- ces like gated business hubs and campuses or gated residential areas. Despite this elevation and separation, they are paradoxically not en- tirely leveled within the supposed flatness of the global. Eventually,

131 The flyovers are toll highways, which literally elevate users above the traffic. Due to high toll fees, these pay-roads ensure a frictionless flow from, for instance, Bangalore to Electronic City, com- fortably removed from the usual traffic congestion and chaos, and takes only ten minutes compared to the “normal” road, which takes an hour. 132 New York based Indian artist Sreshta Rit Premnath investigates real estate development in India, his work discusses how the development of gated communities is tightly interwoven with class discrimination, where the newly rich middle class are distancing themselves from the poorer classes in order to be able to maintain their mentally smooth, global lifestyle (Premnath 2014, p. 101). See also the Italian artist group IOCOSE’s work on elevation as a physical as well as mental distancing (IOCOSE 2014, p. 32). IOCOSE notes “the dreams associated with the digital revolution of Bangalore have to do with the expectations of a clean, smooth, fluid Californian style of living, a possibility that can be achieved only through elevation and detachment” (IOCOSE 2014, p. 36). IOCOSE describe it as a “a collective hallucination” which promotes “division and unfairness” (IOCOSE 2014, p.54).

229 as such an intersectional approach reveals, the global labor market exploits Indian software engineers ruthlessly.

As the senior engineer of IBM pointed out, COBOL maintenance is not a national issue in India. The maintenance jobs take place prima- rily on computers located in North America and Europe. Which aga- in makes the agency of my COBOL textbook’s specific international student edition questionable. Basically, not only the textbook, but also the Global Education Center in Mysore is reproducing colonial structures, in which the engineers from the Global South are “produ- ced,” not to join global flows, but rather to maintain them through the maintenance work done on the global information systems.

My research could be said to reinforce Christian Fuchs’s work on how Western corporations exploit the Indian software engineers in the name of globalization. However, there is a further complexity to this exploitation, which exceeds the linear condition of exploitation and its claustrophobic global holism as the understanding of time and space of the postmodern era has been characterized by Mas- sey. Through a material engagement with COBOL, on a granular level, which according to Susan Shuppli is also the level where poli- tics are located (Schuppli 2015), I have tried to get at the paradoxes of development and agency behind this exploitation which are not visible otherwise. What adds to the irony of the entire case, is that the so-called developing countries are supposed to develop by learning to maintain obsolete systems of the so-called developed countries in or- der for those legacy structures not to break down. Which again turns the whole notion of “developing” and “developed” on its head. Thus linear technological development, even in its most adaptive and mo- dular forms, as inscribed in capitalism, proves to be a myth in which the hidden maintenance of the back-back-ends happens not only to produce its apparently smooth flows, but to keep it giving an impres- sion of being developed at all. This process involves this constructed Western world’s re-colonial exploitation of Indian software engineers in order for the developed to remain developed and the developing, to seem to continue to be developing.

230 231 232 IV: CRISIS COMPUTING

233 CRISIS COMPUTING

Endless Endtime—a complete index of all ele- ments leading to the end of this world.

A (forever) ongoing book project in collaboration with the Swedish experimental publishing house, Rojal Förlag (Olle Essvik and Joel Nordqvist). The books are produced every time the Endless Endtime algo- rithm finds 666 words corresponding with the code’s criteria for adding up to 666. Out of these, the code creates 666 new letters to the editor and thus, the content of the books is generated as a result of the ongoing computation. This is a laborious process both in terms of waiting for the next 666 items to be ready, but also in the physical manifestation of these volumes which are hand-made, heavy tomes, with descriptions and explanations of each term, indica- ting the human factor within systems of execution and automation. The idea of a smooth process of execution feeding this series of generative literatu- re is contrasted with the slowness of maintaining the algorithm—finding the right data-sets and publishing the hand-bound books with long intervals in between. A crucial part of the project is my contract with Rojal, which is infinite.

234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 4 CRISIS COMPUTING

The concept of Crisis Computing, as it has been formulated throug- hout this thesis, is an attempt to include the material entanglements and multi-contextual situatedness of automation and execution, taking us beyond the conceptual framework of friction-free flows. From an outside perspective, computational execution processes may appear to be smooth and seamless, to be “automagical,” to use Kit- chin and Dodge’s term (Kitchin & Dodge 2011, p. 5). However, as I have been arguing throughout this thesis, this view neglects the hid- den entanglement of the triangular concepts Execution, Crisis, and Maintenance, which constitutes any applied automated execution process, and which I have labelled Crisis Computing. Just as crisis is integral to execution, maintenance is needed in order to sustain and continue the execution process, which would otherwise be halted by the crisis. Execution is therefore dependent on maintenance, and the maintenance is keeping-up the execution.

Crisis Computing is thus a continuous, ongoing process, continuous- ly changing, continuously becoming, and gives us an idea of com- putational execution processes as relational and entangled, rather than smooth and seamless flows.

Throughout the first three main chapters of this thesis, I have addres- sed Crisis Computing through an iterative close reading of the pro- gramming language COBOL. This analytical iteration has taken shape through a diffractive model presented as three lessons. There is a double-sided relation to the idea of the “lesson” at play here: on the one hand, I have been subjecting readers to my research on COBOL as presented throughout this thesis, on the other hand, the format reflects my own engagement with and submission to COBOL as part of my ethnographic work among programmers and at COBOL trai- ning sites in Southern India. Hence, it is not only the reader, but also myself on the receiving end of these lessons.

243 Each lesson engages with the concept of Crisis Computing by fore- grounding one of its main components, singling out either execution, crisis or maintenance (although the two other aspects are of course always present in the background). In this way, the thesis engages with COBOL through the tracing of its messy histories: its crisis, breakdowns and its maintenance, its upkeep. In other words, CO- BOL has been engaged through the ways it constitutes a multifaceted example of Crisis Computing.

In the first lesson, EXECUTION, I examined utopian visions of execu- tion and automatic management through a close reading of COBOL’s initial development and implementation. COBOL was analyzed as representing one of, if not the first, instance of a classic dilemma of interaction design. Technology is blackboxed to make it more user-friendly and reach a larger audience, which results in the user experiencing a lack of control on a different scale to the user-friend- liness and a fundamental lack of understanding the technology. The lesson complemented this analysis with a theoretical discussion of automated management and the contingent relation in high-level programming to spatiality, (post-)modernity, capitalism and colonia- lism. I discussed a universal spatial approach as being inherent to the visions of automated management. In that context, COBOL appears to be a tool of displacement which, through Doreen Massey’s critique of absolute space, may furthermore be understood as a blackboxed product of colonialism (2005). However, in the final chapter of the lesson, I turned away from the initial utopian visions of COBOL as an interface to frictionless, automatic management, and addres- sed how COBOL not only executes and displaces through smooth acts of automation, but is in itself being executed and affected by its context. This in return opened up counter narratives questioning the dominant discourse of friction-free automated management, which I examined more closely in the following two lessons.

In the second part, the CRISIS lesson, I elaborated on the first lesson’s notion of execution as a continuous, incomplete process always on the verge of breakdown, but now looking at its connection to techno- logical, social, and economic systems and how this is related to glo- bal flows. This was investigated through a close reading of the crisis related to the Year 2000 problem, or Y2K bug. The lesson examined

244 how power mechanisms of maintenance and execution are mutually dependent, by exposing how the bug which was to be fixed “once and for all,” was actually a feature integral to the technology and so- mething that needed to be continuously maintained in order to even- tually execute. By obscuring this codependency, dominant narratives of technological development as linear reinforce neo-colonial power regimes. However, these regimes were disrupted by Y2K, with the paradox that the West was dependent on developing nations in order to keep their own, supposedly more advanced, systems running. Fol- lowing this puncturing of the linear logic of development, the status of being Y2K compatible became an indication of being developed. Which in turn led some developing countries to go out of their way in order to also become Y2K compatible. Later, it would be revealed that the assumptions of all countries being hit by the same problems were fabricated, the result of a form of tragic colonial consciousness, ignoring the fact that nations like India were already among the best equipped to deal with the Y2K problem (and were indeed providing maintenance services to the rest of the world). In this way the exis- ting binary divide between developed and developing was sustained, even though the obvious flaws of linear development were exposed.

In the third lesson, I turned to MAINTENANCE and continued my exploration of the paradox of maintenance and linear technological development. The focus was foremost on maintenance work done on what I call the back-back-end systems, as sites of crisis compu- ting. Where human labor maintains information architectures and systems at the granular level, and thus keeping the flow flowing. But my analysis also attended to the meta-production of global flows as seen through the perspective of the teaching of COBOL. Here I dis- cussed the contradiction of how engineers in the so-called developing world are supposed to become more advanced, by learning a sup- posedly dead programming language and thereby be able to sustain the business critical legacy systems of the developed world. In other words, how the developing world keeps the developed world develo- ped, by maintaining systems written in an obsolete and disregarded programming language.

In this last concluding chapter of the thesis I would like to attend to crisis computing in a more general setting, by taking the “lessons”

245 learned from my engagement with COBOL, and transporting them into a broader discussion of Crisis Computing in relation to current understandings of automation. This includes a contemporary per- spective via the discourse of the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolu- tion which repeats many of the previous projections of technology and automation, boosting them into the world of artificial intelligen- ce and modular automation on new global scales. By looking at this in a longer trajectory beginning with my analysis of the design impe- ratives behind a language like COBOL, we can also start to see the contours of the futuristic AI/Automation horizon in a new light. This has deep implications for the field of interaction design, regarding the neglected back-back ends of these “futures” that are in reality already both past and present.

The past decade has seen an increase in buzzwords and terms such as “Fourth Industrial Revolution,” “Second Machine Age,” and “Industry 4.0.” These buzzwords are used to promote visions of a new iteration of Castells’ “network society,” an improved version constituted by networked, and fully automated infrastructures that are supposed to pave the way for new forms of disruption and capi- tal accumulation, evolving through the design of systems boosted by machine learning based on so-called neural networks, increasingly popularized in the concept of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Although the concept of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is not the main focus of this last lesson, it can, however, be used as a starting point for a wider discussion of Crisis Computing. Especially relating to the inherent entanglement of execution and automation with crisis and maintenance and how this takes shape today, despite spectacular attempts claiming otherwise.

I relate the current 4IR concept to my analysis of Crisis Compu- ting, finding that it neglects key aspects already highlighted such as maintenance and human labor. This then leads me on to go deeper into examples of automation beyond the utopian hype of the 4IR narrative. Here I engage with the unwrapping of different sites of Crisis Computing, through discussions and analyses of more specific examples of sites where human labor is blackboxed within the con- cept of full automation. In the first example, I turn to the back-end of systems, where human labor related to back-end content proces-

246 sing is taking place (i.e. content moderation, AI training, labelling, etc.). In the second example, I turn to the systems’ front-ends. Here I discuss how labor is internalized, as the users are subjected to the omnipresent surveillance of their actions and activities, which even- tually is needed for the upkeep and sustaining of the fully automated systems and devices.

Along with my previous analysis of the back-back-ends of informa- tion architectures as sites of Crisis Computing, the front-ends and back-ends are sites where human labor is needed for sustaining the automated systems and devices. At the same time, they are sites of different levels of exploitation.

Ironically, a concept like 4IR is being much hyped in African countri- es. This eventually resembles and links to my previous analysis of developing countries’ role and marginalization in relation to the Y2K Problem. I will turn to this discussion in the final section. Here I also point out the problem of bundling the different levels of exploitation together, and point to intersectional analysis as a means to study multidirectional power structures.

Finally, I make a call for designers to materially engage with Crisis Computing, and thereby highlight more context aware and ethical design practices that do not fall into the trap of universalism and neglect of different power structures.

Dreams of Full Automation: The Fourth Industrial Revolution

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a term coined in 2016 by Klaus Schwab, German economist, engineer and founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum. It depicts how advance- ments within digital technologies combined with physical as well as biological elements will lead to major global socio-economic trans- formations (Schwab 2016, p. 7). Schwab predicts that the business principle behind current social media services, the collecting of big data, will expand into networked products, to be monitored, tracked and serviced throughout their life cycle. Christian Fuchs dubs these “networks of communicating machines” (Fuchs 2018, p. 281). Schwab’s term, 4IR, borrows heavily from the German notion “In-

247 dustrie 4.0” (Industry 4.0), a term coined in 2011 to describe ways of catalyzing the German manufacturing industry and its export economy through technological development133 (Kagermann et al., 2011). Industrie 4.0 has mainly been framed as a model for lower- ing wage expenditures through full automation and thereby boost- ing the technological aspects of the German economy (Fuchs 2018, pp. 282–283). This would, for example, allow Germany to relocate globally outsourced production facilities to fully automated regional factories, the so-called lights-out factories,134 and thus shaving off expensive labor costs.135

Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from MIT’s Center for Dig- ital Business take a more epic approach in the title of their popular book The Second Machine Age, foregrounding their vision of how computers will be capable of radically expanding humanity’s mental powers, and subsequently guide the transformation of society into a new machine age (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014). Brynjolfsson and McAfee also lean to full automation, and imagine how it would im- pact humans with new possibilities as well as new roles (for instance, in relation to labor and production) through the harnessing of the best characteristics of humans as well as machines (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, p. 297). Humans are, the authors claim, on the one hand great at asking surprising questions and developing new and interesting ideas and concepts, making them perfectly equipped to drive development further through creativity and innovation.136 Ma- chines, on the other hand, are geared to carrying out tasks and giving answers fast and precisely, and are thus suited to doing tedious labor (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014, p. 297).

Approaching the relation between human and machine as a hierar- chical dichotomy, where the machines work for and thus linearly

133 Industrie 4.0 involves the following German businesses: SAP, Siemens, Software AG, Wincor Nixdorf, Psipenta, Seeburger, CA, Bosch, Felten AG, KUKA, and Festo AG (Fuchs 2018). 134 Lights out factories are fully automated factories, which since no humans are working there can run 24/7 even without lights on. 135 In comparison to, for instance, the UK or US economy, the German economy relies on manu- facturing to a larger extent (Fuchs 2018, 281); wages make up a relatively large part of the turnover. Germany has previously tried to compete with the US regarding the internet, but failed. Industry 4.0 is an attempt to regain this lost terrain (Fuchs 2018, pp. 281–283). 136 This approach is also reflected in Elon Musk’s Tweet: “Yes, excessive automation at Tesla was a mistake. To be precise, my mistake. Humans are underrated.” (Musk 2018)

248 extend humans’ creative visions, resembles the approach taken in the Human Factor exhibition of Ars Electronica (as discussed in the Pro- logue of the MAINTENANCE section). It is a posthuman approach, where the human itself may be understood as a machine that can be improved, optimized, and perfected through technologies.

Despite Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s very positive expectations for the future (The Second Machine Age carries the subtitle Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies), they also analyze a flipside of automation. Namely that of technological advancements leading to the abolishment of unskilled human labor, which in return may lead to technological unemployment.137 Similar arguments are put forward by Frey (2019) and Osborne and Frey (2016), and are seen in the underlying anxiety that is part of Schwab’s otherwise pre- dominantly optimistic visions for the 4IR. In Schwab’s take on the prospect of technological unemployment, he uses the example of car factories in Detroit in the 1990s compared with the digital industry based in Silicon Valley in 2014, noting:

In 1990, the three biggest companies in Detroit had a com- bined market capitalization of $36 billion, revenues of $250 billion, and 1.2 million employees. In 2014, the

three biggest companies in Silicon Valley had a considera- bly higher market capitalization ($1.09 trillion), generated roughly the same revenues ($247 billion), but with about 10 times fewer employees (137,000). (Schwab 2016, p. 14)

What seems to escape Schwab here is the difference between pro- ducing objects and producing systems. Whereas the car factories of Detroit delivered individual products, the digital companies of Sili- con Valley are selling systems and services. Obviously, any external car mechanic would not be included when counting the number of employees sustaining the car industry of Detroit anno 1990. After the car leaves the factory, the factory’s involvement stops and when a car breaks down it does not directly affect the car’s site of manu- facture. By contrast, the systems and services of Schwab’s 4IR are dependent on software maintainers and moderators to ensure their

137 Unemployment due to technological innovation, where machines are replacing human labor.

249 automation is continuously executed. As I have argued throughout this thesis, without maintenance, no applied system can be made to flow in a seemingly friction-less way. Hence maintainers sustain and enable the systems inherent to 4IR to continue executing, while the labor is outsourced in different ways, making its presence not neces- sarily reflected in the employee numbers. Unfortunately, this aspect is not addressed, either in Schwab’s scenarios nor in the studies de- veloped by Frey and Osborne or by Brynjolfsson and McAfee. In Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution, the term “revolution” ap- pears 215 times, whereas “maintenance” only appears five times; in The Second Machine Age by Brynjolfsson and McAfee “maintenan- ce” does not occur at all. In Frey and Osborne’s study “The future of Employment,” the term “maintenance” occurs ten times (2016). This neglect in return spills into the post-work (and post-marxist) visions as put forward by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (2016), and most recently Aaron Bastani (2019) among others (as discussed in the CRISIS lesson). These post-marxist thinkers quote and build their arguments on the studies of the arguably more libertarian Bryn- jolfsson and McAfee as well as Frey and Osborne and unfortunately end up repeating those researchers’ negation of reproductive work as integral to full automation.

The neglecting and disregarding of human labor spent on maintenan- ce work integral to execution processes is highly problematic. As has been examined throughout this thesis, human roles are far from that of being simply the initiators, ideating, developing and then com- manding information systems in a uni-linear way. Maintenance is central to execution, and in the case of software systems, between fifty and seventy-five percent of the total budget of software projects goes to maintenance tasks (Shukla and Misra 2008, p. 107). For AI and machine learning projects, the situation is similar. A 2019 report by the think tank Cognilytica calculates the time used for human data labelling and annotation as eighty percent of the total time for most projects138 (Cognilytica think-tank 2019 as quoted in Tubaro and Casilli 2019, p. 8). Consequently, neglecting the field of maintenance

138 Note this figure indicates time and not costs, due to the salary inequalities. The payment for low-skill tasks like annotation and labeling is way lower than that of software development. Subsequently, if comparing costs the figures would hide the amount of time put into low-skilled labor behind the much higher salaries of the software engineers.

250 may lead to unexpected expenses as also pointed out by Fuchs in his critique of the German concept of Industrie 4.0 (Fuchs 2018, p. 281), but even more importantly, the neglect and blackboxing of labor is signified by an alarming power asymmetry, where hiding actual labor tends to lead to precarious and/or traumatizing working conditions (see Roberts 2019; Gillispie 2018).

Despite the fact that this human labor is carried out in Silicon Valley infrastructures, it is not to be found in the numbers of Silicon Valley employees on which Schwab is building his argument of post-work/ technological unemployment. The human labor is instead outsour- ced to so-called third-party data labeling solutions. These markets for third-party data labeling solutions are, according to the Cogni- lytica think tank report, estimated to increase from $150 million in 2018 to more than $1 billion by 2023 (Cognilytica 2019 as quoted in Tubaro and Casilli 2019, p. 8).

The hidden human labor workforce is invisible in the employment statistics of Silicon Valley, obscured by outsourcing to third parties, who then sustain the systems and services provided by Silicon Val- ley’s tech companies. It follows that, automation “does not replace labor,” as heralded by the evangelists of the fourth industrial revolu- tion, “it displaces it,” as highlighted by Lilly Irani (2016).

Encoding Displacement

Several studies in recent years have emphasized the need for fore- grounding the human factors of digital production, not only as ide- ators, but rather, humans carrying out labor processes that maintain and sustain our information architectures.139,140 From commercial content moderation to the optimization of data-sets, these labor pro-

139 See Roberts 2019, Gillespie 2018, Ekbia & Nardi 2017, Irani 2015; 2016, among others. 140 Nearly two decades ago, Italian theorist Tiziana Terranova was already calling for the notion of the internet as an immaterial fun playground to be abolished, and for the immense amounts of human labor sustaining the net to be recognized (Terranova 2003). Such labor proved often to consist of what she has dubbed “Free Labor,” where users themselves are becoming the sources of value production (Terranova 2013, p. 70). Terranova’s studies did away with the myth of digital media industries as playgrounds for creativity and a happy sharing economy and emphasizes instead the flipside of the coin, not only for those employed in the business with ninety hour work weeks, but more specifically for the actual users and the great amount of free labor they put into keeping the internet running (Terranova 2013, pp. 33–34).

251 cesses consist of the assessment and valuation of media materials and/or instances where algorithms fall short.141 Here, human labor forces step in, in order to extend the machines by acting as machines, doing tedious, repetitive tasks. It is important to note that this phe- nomenon is not regarded as temporary or passing. On the contrary, studies of the material labor integral to so-called machine learning or AI systems suggest that the human labor needed to assist automated decision making systems, will increase as such systems get more com- plex and implemented to a greater extent in critical infrastructures (Tubaro and Casilli 2019, p. 8). This sort of human labor may thus be said to manifest cracks in the otherwise glossy visions of full au- tomation, and thereby unwrapping the supposedly fully automated processes as prime sites of Crisis Computing.142

From labor forces relegated to the back entrances of hi-tech compa- nies (Wilson 2011), to the outsourcing to developing countries (Block and Riesewieck 2018), or human labor transformed into “scalable infrastructures” (Irani 2014), the human labor stepping in and car- rying out manual tasks where digital computational processing falls short, is blackboxed through different means of displacement. Sarah Roberts characterizes this as invisibility “by design” (Roberts 2019, p. 3). That is to say, deliberate means are taken to obscure the human labor needed to maintain the systems.143 This takes form as different levels of blackboxing, from Google’s human book-scanners displaced locally within the company’s premises,144 to outsourcing to call cen-

141 For example, due to cultural factors; ambiguity in meaning. 142 A case in point is how platform capitalism depends on frictionless flows of information and user contributions. The importance of keeping it friction free is of main interest. Despite companies assuring users of their rights and the enforcement of particular frictionless codes of conduct, the Free Labor of the users’ contributions may not fit into these codes of conduct, but rather present themselves as various forms of friction including undesired content, disturbances, offensiveness, or in the form of what Gillespie dubs “’labor’ of harassment” (Gillespie 2018, p. 133). 143 In fact, the hidden labor has foremost surfaced into public view by accident or through whis- tleblowers deliberate attempts to call out poor working conditions or security/personal data abuse and so forth. Examples include Facebook’s content moderation guidelines as leaked to Gawker in 2012 (Chen), and Burcu Gültekin Punsmann’s article in SZ-Magazin 2018. But also through docu- mentaries like The Cleaners (Im Schatten der Netzwelt, 2018) by Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck or Andrew Norman Wilson’s Workers Leaving the Googleplex (2011). 144 The human book-scanners maintain Google’s utopian project of digitizing all books in the world. In a similar way to the servants who inhabited Erving Goffman’s rear entrances in the 1956 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, these Google workers are designated to specific areas within the Google Campus, for instance rear entrances, while also not enjoying the same privi- leges as other Google employees (bikes, arcade games, free coffee and other goodies), as documented by Wilson in his film Workers leaving the Googleplex (2011).

252 ters and software consultancy companies abroad,145 to displacement through system architectures and interface design. In this section I will examine the displacement taking place through system and in- terface based outsourcing in greater detail.

A service like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) presents itself as a marketplace where employers can access a large labor pool of wor- kers to carry out on-demand tasks (MTurk 2020). Workers are as- signed to a project either through customizable CSS/HTML templa- tes, or directly imported into programs via the MTurk API. MTurk’s CSS/HTML user interface (UI) is specifically tailored to overcoming any problems that workers may cause the employers. Hence, the key features of the UI include a “Flexible Requester UI for task crea- tion and management” where employers easily connect to the service through the internet and are capable of managing the work tasks without the hassle of any direct human interaction between employer and employee (MTurk 2020). It is very easy to create multiple tasks, and as a result the number of workers may be smoothly scaled up and down as deemed fit for the employer’s needs. Hence, the UI al- lows the employers to comfortably “Manage and qualify workers” (MTurk 2020).

In her work on Mturk, Lilly Irani has foregrounded how the platform provides the tools for treating workers as “scalable infrastructures” (Irani 2014). With its broad range of features, the MTurk website may be characterized as a form of “liquid management,” to paraph- rase Zygmunt Bauman’s term (2000; Bauman and Lyon 2013). Irani furthermore points to the MTurk API as an ultimate form of outsour- cing (Irani 2014).

And indeed, liquid management is taken to a new level through the MTurk API. All tasks offered through MTurk’s CSS/HTML web in- terface are un-wrapped from the graphical interface and turned into callable operations (Amazon Mechanical Turk 2017). The API featu- res thirty-eight operations including “CreateHIT” (to automatically create a new assignment), “ApproveAssignment” (which automati- cally initiates the payment to the worker as well as a fee to Amazon

145 This form of outsourced labor is, similarly to the Indian software maintainers, obscured by employment responsibilities being transferred from the mother company to external companies. Generally, these workers have much lower payment due to their geographical location.

253 Mechanical Turk), “GetAccountBalance” (which the employer can use to check the status of his MTurk account), “ContactWorker” (which makes it possible for the employer to automatically send emails to any number of workers, with the possibility of having a common subject line or customized subject lines for each individual worker), and “CreateWorkerBlock” (which allows the employer to block up to hundred thousand workers at a time, if for example they are performing poorly (Amazon Mechanical Turk 2017, p. 28)). The- se API operations are all scalable, making it possible to hire, contact, pay, rate or exclude workers in mass amounts.

Lilly Irani and Michael Silberman have emphasized how MTurk “works by keeping worlds apart” (Irani and Silberman 2014, p. 32). The platform was developed in order to literally remove the low-sta- tus workers from the workplaces of the creative class, getting them out of sight and thereby upholding the image of a media design stu- dio as a fun and creative environment (Irani 2014). The platform manifests itself as an ideal site of sustaining this dichotomy between creativity and development on one side, and low status labor on the other, since the two otherwise entangled worlds are successfully kept apart by the platform architecture (Irani and Silberman 2014, p. 32). The API version of MTurk thereby enacts a separation of labor and work as defined by Arendt even further (see the MAINTENANCE lesson for a discussion of Arendt’s analysis). Through the MTurk API, human labor may literally be commanded and executed through a program. Subsequently, the human labor is not only rendered com- pletely invisible, but also completely interchangeable and displacea- ble.

As the MTurk API wraps the Human Factor into a regular computa- tional program, to be commanded and called like any computational function, the API may be said to be performing a Crisis Computing on the Crisis Computing. This form of Crisis Computing not only obscures the Crisis Computing performed by humans but also the crisis in itself, as it is comfortably blackboxed by wrapping it into an executable program. In this way, any friction that might otherwise result from or signify the crisis within computing is eliminated and the post-human illusion is enacted.

254 Internalization

In this section I will move from the back-end of full automation to the front-end and examine how labor is increasingly pushed to the level of the user, so that they can internalize it in the name of full automation.

The way AI-boosted smart products are being heralded as pushing the Second Machine Age, or 4IR, forward resembles the visions of saving tiresome labor and muscle power through technological ad- vancement and efficiency as signified by previous industrial revolu- tions. In fact, the boom of automatic tools and kitchen devices that hit the market after the Second World War are the forerunners of the fully automated homes and lives we are to inhabit in the 4IR, a Se- cond Machine Age, an age with a new promise of machines carrying out all tedious tasks not only automatically, but fully automatically, that is to say, all by themselves.

Full automation is characterized by Klaus Schwab as a state in which the machines are continuously “listening to us, anticipating our needs, and helping us when required—even if not asked” (Schwab 2016, p. 15). Hence, users are no longer required to consciously inte- ract with machines. On the contrary, machines are there and will fix what is needed, when needed. Consequently, all tedious labor, even that of interaction, seems to have finally been abolished. Or has it?

Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s 1983 study on household machines and la- bor, More Work For Mother, turned conceptions of housework and technology upside down. Rather than examining how automatic household appliances optimized single tasks, Cowan traced how and by whom single tasks historically used to be carried out. She thereby turned to the historical contexts of the overall labor process and exa- mined the structural transformations related to single tasks in relation to industrialization. The result appears rather surprising. Housework used to be common work for the entire family including the husband and children, but as the family became dependent on the wages of the husband, all work tasks within the home were transferred to the wo- men (Cowan 1983, pp. 63–64). That means the restructuring of the home through industrialization and the implementation of automatic appliances eventually resulted in many more tasks to do, at least for women. Meanwhile, husbands and children were set free of homely

255 obligations and thus eventually got more leisure time (Cowan 1983, n.p.). By tracing the labor processes historically, Cowan reveals a flip side of capitalism-driven technological development and/or innova- tion: the way tasks, which used to be the responsibility of men and/ or children, in mass-industrialized consumer society were taken over and carried out solely by women.

Revisiting Cowan’s studies and her approach appears refreshing at a time when technological revolutions are being proclaimed even be- fore they have happened (Fuchs 2018, p. 281). Labels such as smart homes, smart cities, smart cars, and smartphones promise the user a sort of “smart” dumbness—to just sit back and relax as things are carried out automatically, thus carrying with it the implicit promise to abolish the tedious labor associated with these contexts. However, if, similarly to Cowan, one refuses to accept the thesis of simply abo- lishing the labor of everyday tasks and instead examines the interre- latedness of work processes and its intersecting power structures, a rather different picture of the context of effectivity and labor through so called full-automation emerges.146

Machines cannot “listen” as suggested by Schwab, if listening means being able to contemplate and interpret the meaning of a message, but what they can do is register, record, compare, and thereby moni- tor, track, and additionally attempt to predict users’ activities. Hen- ce, any fully automated execution carried out within, say, a smart home is executed according to tracked behavior generating data and patterns. Thus, in order to avoid direct user interaction, the systems need to track and monitor users’ actions continuously. The fabled an- ticipation of the users’ actions, in reality means to act on previously collected data. Since that is made up of all the actions which are being monitored and tracked, users are constantly laboring through their interactions in order to produce data-sets which the machines are capable of reacting upon. This labor takes place within the context of what is thought of as an avoidance of old-fashioned, tedious acts of labor, such as adjusting the lights in your living room, preparing a cup of coffee or taking notes. The setting for the example above is the private sphere, but in fact the same applies to any other “smart” situ-

146 It is often said that the solutionism of Silicon Valley mostly solves problems for white, single, middle-class men (Maney 2015).

256 ation or device, no matter if it is a smart city, a smart car or a smart whatever, the principle of “smartness” is internalized user labor.147

Following this line of argument, the fully automated systems or devi- ces of the 4IR or Second Machine Age may appear as being beyond labor (even labor understood as interaction through interfaces). In reality, the systems are driven by continuous human user labor.148 This labor is not, as in the reproductive tasks previously described by Hannah Arendt, carried out in order to sustain, maintain and thus up-keep life. On the contrary, the user labor is here the undertaking of actions to become data, as needed to not only trigger the system’s executions and automatic tasks, but making up the on-going repro- ductive labor of upkeeping the smart systems themselves.

Asymmetric Arrangements

Concepts like 4IR or Industry 4.0 have become extremely hyped in developing countries. For instance, Google queries for the term “4IR” are most frequent in developing countries, with the top three returns all located on the African continent.149 A case in point is South Afri- ca, where the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, appointed a presidential commission on 4IR at the beginning of 2019. In this context, Ra- maphosa stated to the nation that the aim of the commission was to “position South Africa as a global competitive player within the di- gital revolution space” and that South Africa was “ready to take ad- vantage of the technological changes sweeping the globe to make our economy grow and create jobs for our people” (Ramaphosa, 2019). Later, in the fall of that same year, David Mabuza, the South African deputy president, was asked a question in the parliament regarding 4IR and its impact on medical care. Mabuza had trouble explaining the concept of 4IR clearly and stuttered back and forth between first, second, and third Industrial revolutions, until eventually replacing the question with another question, asking which era South Africa actually belonged to (Phakathi 2019).

147 The ATM is an early adopter of this form of internalized labor, which links back to COBOL. 148 Similarly to Terranova’s concept of Free Labor, but now no longer confined to the realm of the internet, but instead applied to all parts of everyday life. 149 A Google Trends query on the term “4IR” / worldwide / in the last 12 months, returns the following Top Five: 1: Lesotho; 2: South Africa; 3: Botswana; 4: Zimbabwe and 5: Oman. Source: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=4IR (accessed on February 19, 2020). 257 The sad irony of this anecdote is that the hyping of a phenome- non like 4IR in the developing world corresponds to my previous analysis of the role and marginalization of developing countries in relation to the Y2K Problem. As the incident in the South African parliament shows, the question now being posed is not, “are you Y2K ready?” but “are you 4IR ready?” Just as Y2K exemplified, developing countries cannot simply catch up since, as Y2K and the more contemporary examples of current maintenance of COBOL systems show, such an approach ignores the real power relations at play in the interdependence of the Global South-Global North, deve- loping-developed construction (as analyzed throughout the CRISIS and MAINTENANCE lessons).

Integral to, for example, South Africa’s buying into new technologi- cal revolutions is the hope of by-passing iterations of development and instead “leapfrogging” to the latest revolution or machine age. Which is also, in a way, the possibility being promised by concepts such as 4IR. Hopes are high that disruptive technologies will solve problems like unemployment by bypassing old hierarchies—anyone can start working for companies like Uber at any time (but also just as easily be laid off)—or will ease the inconveniences of pollution and traffic in mega cities through sensors and data collection (Toma et al 2019), or assist with the delivery of medicine to remote areas via drones (Murray 2019).

In spite of these promises of a smoother and better place, even in the developing world, the main vision driving concepts such as 4IR and Industry 4.0 is the idea of full automation relocating produc- tion back to the developed world through automated production fa- cilities and thereby eliminating labor and subsequently also salary expenses (Fuchs 2018, p. 283). If those visions are realized, it may lead to “de-industrialization” in the developing countries, where the production is currently located (Fuchs 2018, p. 285). Which in turn may increase inequalities on a global level (Fuchs 2018, p. 285).150 However, as this thesis has shown, even supposedly fully automated systems are in need of maintenance and sustainment. This work is thereby likely to still become displaced and outsourced, as is already customary, to countries where the salaries are as low as possible.

150 For example, through increased unemployment in the countries where the production current- ly is situated. 258 That may be to predominantly English-speaking countries, however niches with local languages will also be needed, like French-speaking countries in Africa, for example (Tubaro and Casilli 2019, p. 9).

In any event, it is important to keep in mind that this back-end and/ or back-back-end labor remains concealed in the name of full auto- mation. Which, again, means there is not much hope of actual le- apfrogging, if perhaps only locally, with better payment. Albeit, the job tasks are likely to be at best tedious and boring, but at worst disturbing and traumatizing—for example when content moderators are subjected to disturbing imagery (Roberts 2019). This means that, despite future prospects of new forms of labor, these are more likely to concern tasks which merely sustain the flows of the developed world.

In 2011, Christian Fuchs highlighted the hidden labor integral to online social network platforms as a form of exploitation and noted that any contributor to Web 2.0 media platforms is part of an explo- ited group (Fuchs 2011). However, as Silvia Federici stresses, there is a danger in bundling a broad precarious group together, since the cri- tique eventually tends to overlook its own privilege (2008). Frederici was writing a critique of Hardt and Negri’s post-Marxism and the then influential notion of immaterial labor. In her critique, Federici specifically targets the problem of lumping a wide range of different forms of work together under the label “cognitive” labor (2008). Federici and Caffentzi state:

It is an arbitrary move (for instance) to assimilate, under the “cognitive” label, the work of a domestic worker—whether an immigrant or not, whether s/he is a wife/mother/sister or a paid laborer—to that of a computer programmer or computer artist (Federici & Caffentzi 2009, p. 129).

Similarly, Trebor Scholz, referring to Jonathan Beller, draws atten- tion to the class inequality in the concept “digital labor” and calls for greater awareness of “the ’real’ places of exploitation—namely the slums of economic developing countries. Digital labor in the over- developed world is contingent upon the sweat of exploited labor in countries such as China.” (Scholz 2013, p. 3)

259 In these examples, Federici along with Scholz and Beller, pin-point the discrepancies and inequalities that put attempts to wrap different levels of exploitation in danger of ignoring or glossing over impor- tant asymmetries and resulting in class, race and/or gender blindness. Throughout my analysis of COBOL in this thesis, I have used an in- tersectional approach in order to examine my examples and emphas- ize the interrelated, transversal, and even sometimes multidirectional power structures at play. Intersectional theory diffracts, and thereby draws attention to the effects of difference, rather than difference in itself. Subsequently, the approach has helped me to elaborate on these effects in terms of spaces of flows versus spaces of flaws. I have used the methodology to make a scalar analysis of the people doing the COBOL maintenance work in terms of race and class, along with an analysis of the cultural connotations of the work tasks, while fur- thermore expanding this analysis to include structural, economic, spatial, and political implications. The young engineers in India who are forced to learn COBOL after getting jobs at well-known com- panies are a case in point here. They take up positions as well-paid and well regarded middle-class engineers, with a long and high-sta- tus education but, at the same time, their enforced engagement with COBOL means that they are subjected to a language which is disre- garded in the West (and also today in India), and as a consequence, the position of their job is re-inscribed in the global economy as a sort of low-status, janitor of global information architectures (see MAINTENANCE section).

There is a great difference between the internalized labor forms of the developed world’s smart technologies and Indian middle-class engineers performing tasks they regard as boring and un-challeng- ing and for which they are over-qualified (see MAINTENANCE-sec- tion). Equally, the hidden “smart” everyday labor is different to that of the workers invisibly carrying out the outsourced, repetitive and even disturbing tasks of content moderation and/or AI optimization and media labeling. In this chapter, the aim has not been to bund- le these different forms of blackboxed human labor together under one and the same roof. Instead, it is to raise a general awareness of the different sites of Crisis Computing, with their different levels of exploited human labor, by highlighting different examples that are continuously being wrapped in the promises of full automation.

260 Unsettling Ontologies

As examined throughout the last chapter, we are currently witnessing how “interaction” is being wrapped into supposedly fully automa- ted AI-based re-action. Everyday activities and social relations are subjugated to algorithmic back-end regulation without interfaces for operation or control. As a consequence, interaction becomes mani- festations of eternal feedback loops of acted-upon actions, where the continuously automated management of events, based on monito- ring, tracking and quantitative data, is turning action into re-action. Through the dissolved interfaces, the user as a subject of the interface is turned into the user as a subject of the invisibly automating algo- rithms. Think IoT, Google searches, News-flows, Facebook streams, automatically queued up streaming media, Spotify recommendations and, thinking further, the smart cities of the next new technological revolution or the next new age of machines.

Ideas of transparency, smoothness, and seamlessness in interface design have been around for a long time. As demonstrated in this dissertation, COBOL is a case in point. COBOL has been neglected in the history of interaction design151 in spite of the fact that it ma- nifested a defining moment in the design of interfaces and computer accessibility twenty years earlier than what is usually regarded as the rise of transparent and user-friendly design, the development of the GUI interface. As part of this thesis, I have outlined this hidden history of programming language design, as an integral part of deve- loping the very idea of the user and the interface, including the idea of transparency and empowerment, so central to later conceptions of these notions in the field—notions mostly ascribed to GUI interfa- ces—rather than to this legacy of pre-GUI interfaces.

However, as my analysis shows, each structure has its own gram- mar of smoothness, maintenance, control, and what it makes pos- sible and what it makes less possible: COBOL’s design was intended to ensure increased legibility through an easily accessible English-li- ke-language interface. However, this coincided with the obscuring of the inner workings of the machine and the user losing control

151 Except perhaps for Ben Schneidman’s paper from 1985 as discussed in the EXECUTION lesson.

261 of underlying computational processes, while allowing managers to inspect the working process. COBOL has been prototyping all draw- backs of unobtrusive and user-friendly-design and computing as we are currently experiencing them and where, to command is not by definition the same as being in command, but on the contrary, may be poles apart.

Moreover, throughout this thesis I have emphasized how this history repositions the idea of the empowered user and transparency within a global power-nexus of neo-colonial implications. As I have shown, automation is far from automatic. On the contrary, maintenance and upkeep, although invisible and blackboxed, are absolutely integral to the idea of smooth and seamless interfaces and flows. This, in turn, calls for a redefinition of the simplistic idea of designing the good and transparent interface, and must at the same time move us beyond certain types of critical design which predominantly engage with disturbances and friction at the front-end user level.152

Maintenance work is ongoing and dynamic, and it happens in the background all the time in order for the smoothness to remain smooth. It is multileveled and its arrangements may manifest as asymmetrical or symmetrical. The examples unearthed throughout this chapter, as well as my analysis of COBOL throughout the rest of this thesis are asymmetric. These arrangements entail a political economy of devaluation of labor versus idealization of work, whe- re mundane and repetitive tasks are reorganized geographically by being disposed of and displaced into certain global zones while gla- morized development and ideation work happens elsewhere. Sub- sequently, a wrenched conjunction between so-called development and underdevelopment is established. Here, the overdeveloped world has its systems maintained by displaced and thus invisible workers, keeping the technological paths running, and thus allowing for the developed to occupy an idea of, not only seamlessness, but also futu- re. Meaning the process works both to produce frictionless space—a spatial dimension—and frictionless time—a temporality of moving forward.

152 A case in point is Anthony Dunne’s notion of Post-Optimal Object, which he characterizes as a “gentle provocation” and a “call for ‘user-unfriendly design’“ as part of his and Fiona Raby’s wider call for a practice of critical design in opposition to affirmative design (Dunne 1999, p. xvii). But also, more recently Carl Disalvo’s notion of Adversarial design (2012).

262 As I have outlined in the thesis, there is a tendency within the field of design to exoticize maintenance and repair work taking place in the Global South, as evident in some formulations of broken-world thinking. Rather than attempting to understand the interdependency between the supposedly Global North and Global South, the main- tenance and repair work of the Global South is presented as prai- seworthy examples of improvised and creative forms of technologi- cal innovation. In this way the Global South is being subjugated to categories of either the chaotic or the inventive other. Yet, I argue that instead of seeing the Global South as somewhere separate, the Global North and South are fully integrated and interdependent.

The implications of these understandings are begging us to redefine and reject claims of paradigm shifts and new revolutions, which are continuously promoted by systemically overlooking and neglecting the underlying material conditions and the blackboxed and displaced human labor inherent to promises of frictionless futures and seamless spaces.

Instead I am proposing an unsettling of the overall ontological no- tion of technological development, by attending to the systems’ en- tanglement with the world, and acknowledging this as continuous processes of what I have termed, “Crisis Computing.” The concept of Crisis Computing approaches computational flows as part of a tri- adic structure consisting of three components: Execution, Crisis, and Maintenance. Here, execution is an event taking place within a larger system, and not just a command automatically performed by a com- puter. Subsequently, through execution’s situatedness in the world it becomes a site of friction, contingency, erosion, and decay—a site of entropic breakdown. This is figured here as a configuration of crisis, which is ongoing and folded into the world and is thus integral to the system, but continuously sustained through maintenance.

As the thesis outlines, current models of approaching maintenance work within computer sciences tend to focus on exhaustive map- pings of the field, in order to predict, plan, and extensively manage the maintenance, and to, if not eliminate, then at least tame the crisis.

At the same time, with the concept of Crisis Computing I am offering a rather different way of relating to and engaging with maintenance.

263 This is not just a shift in awareness but also in practice. The concept of Crisis Computing opens our current design practices to questions, considering how processes and products would be shaped if we were to acknowledge that interaction design is not just user-interaction, but also the interaction taking place behind the scenes, at the back- ends and back-back-ends of our systems. What would happen if we instead started to think of the three core elements of Crisis Com- puting (execution, crisis, and maintenance) together in relation to design practice? How would that affect and structure our overall design processes and results? In other words, what happens if we as designers approach crisis, and thus maintenance, as core to automa- tion and smooth interfaces in the same way as Mierle Ukuele Lader- man proposes maintenance as core to art, or as Lilly Irani proposes maintenance as core to computer sciences? How can we design for multiple levels? Such an approach implies a design practice engaged with re-turning and thereby turning the information architectures over and over again, through material engagement on a granular sca- le as well as engaging in the complex and intersecting power structu- res integral to our systems’ underlying material conditions. Design practices preoccupied with front-ends sustain the asymmetrical or- ganization exemplified throughout this thesis. Instead I would like to advocate, through the concept of Crisis Computing, for a more situated approach that is sensitive to the socio-political and spatial inequalities of users, maintainers, and developers alike. The existing ontologies are unsettling in their continuous asymmetric and neo-co- lonial arrangements, hence they are begging to become unsettled.

The thesis also works as a lesson in artistic research. Through my practice as an artist researcher, I have unraveled and unwrapped, over different scales, the topologies of Crisis Computing. Moreover, my analyses have manifested in different forms of “diffractions in matter,” from thesis writing to code writing, from spatial exhibitions to artist books, and from lectures to interventions. Through these different materialities and formats I am allowing my audiences to join my COBOL LESSONS in different ways and on different levels.

This entails an erasing of the clear-cut between artistic and academic research practice, and instead engage with means of unsettling tra- ditional research approaches. Hence, the thesis itself manifests as an

264 ambiguous artifact, to be engaged with in different ways and on dif- ferent levels, for example as a book it can quite literally be read from two sides. Through Rogoff’s encouragement to utilize everything at hand in order to “produce new realities of knowledge,” my take on artistic research practice has become a means of rewriting the exis- ting hegemonic histories of the institution in which I have been situa- ted—the field of interaction design—from within. Here, I am offering an unsettling of ontologies, through the concept of Crisis Compu- ting. I bring this to the starting point of application and practicaliza- tion. Accordingly, my hope is that these lessons may be openings for others to engage and continue my work from here.

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288 289 A COMPLETE INDEX OF ALL ELEMENTS LEADING TO THE END OF THE WORLD (IN THIS LECTURE)

computer, 23, 33, 35, 37, 50 usually, 35 A COMPLETE INDEX OF ALL ELEMENTS LEADING TO THE END OF THE WORLD (IN THIS THESIS)

accordingly, 21, 23, foremost, 11, 66, 79, opposing, 121 39, 66, 74, 89, 104, 85, 185, 226, 229, Opsroom, 112-113 121, 162, 207, 221, 245, 252 outcomes, 5, 150 265 formation, 24 outsider, 38 altogether, 212 fundamental, 31, 76, Parthenon, 208 amusement, 34, 47, 49, 141, 152, 160, 244 pictures, 211, 280 anomalous, 39 governing, 209, 229 proudly, 49 Bolsonaro, 132 humanity, 98, 104, 248 relatives, 46 Cherry Coke, 98 illusion, 159, 193, 254 reserves, 85, 193 compliancy, 121, initially, 28, 45, 47, revision, 20 computer, 5, 17, 19, 66, 70, 84, 107, 21, 29-30, 46, 58, 135-136, 141, 161, rickshaws, 205 65-67, 69-74, 76- 181, 220 Santa Claus, 98 80, 84, 87, 90-95, insanity, 38 Scandinavian, 19, 43 103-106, 113-120, Ipad Touch, 98 significant, 27, 69, 103, 122, 142, 150, 154, iteration, 132, 172, 171, 193, 196 156, 159, 163, 243, 246 169, 184-185, 188, somewhere, 79, 116, 196, 206, 219, 259, maintaining, 8, 29,-30, 153, 263 261, 263,-264, 268, 34, 54, , 126, 132, strength 140 146, 151, 153, 158, 269-280, 282-284, templates, 253 286-288 159, 161-162, 164, 176, 179, 186,-187, Terence Hill, 15, 98 convergence, 116 194, 198, 201-202, terminals, 69 Corbynite, 132 219, 234, 245 The Brexit, 132 corporate, 30, 33, 47, majority, 8, 50, 184- treasured, 13 79, 114, 121, 203- 185, 191-192, 196- usually, 21, 67, 118, 204, 214-215 197, 283 122, 154, 172, 261 Cybersyn, 112-114 mandatory, 68 Victorian, 192 Dijkstra’s, 91 misusing, 34 witchcraft, 191 disclosing, 105, 126, moreover, 12, 20, 33, electrons, 42 66, 72, 94, 104, estimates, 116 118, 140, 156, 186, 194, 205, 225-227, exception, 74, 76, 112, 262, 264 140, 159, New York, 98, 137, excessive, 123, 248, 229, 267-269, 271- 282 280, 282-289 explaining, 174, 187, observing, 105 193, 219, 257 WHICH TURNS THE WHOLE NOTION OF DEVELOPING AND DEVELOPED ON ITS HEAD.

131 WHAT ADDS TO THE IRONY, IS THAT THE SO-CALLED DEVE- LOPING COUNTRIES ARE SUPPO- SED TO DEVELOP BY LEARNING TO MAINTAIN OBSOLETE SYSTEMS OF THE SO-CALLED DEVELOPED COUNTRIES.

SO THAT THEIR LEGACY STRUCTU- RES DO NOT BREAK DOWN.

130 THIS MAKES THE AGENCY OF MY TEXTBOOK QUESTIONABLE. BASICALLY, COLONIAL STRUCTU- RES ARE BEING REPRODUCED THROUGH KNOWLEDGE PRODUC- TION, WHERE THE GLOBAL SOUTH IS SERVING THE GLOBAL NORTH.

129 AN EXECUTIVE AT IBM SOUTH PACIFIC POINTS OUT THAT COBOL MAINTENANCE IS NOT A NATIONAL ISSUE IN INDIA.

THE MAINTENANCE JOBS TAKE PLACE MOSTLY ON COMPUTERS LOCATED IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE.

THUS THE JOB OF A COBOL PROGRAMMER IN INDIA IS EQUI- VALENT TO THAT OF BEING A JANITOR OF THE INFORMATION ARCHITECTURES OF THE GLOBAL NORTH.

128 BUT DEVELOPING INTO WHAT?

127 THE TEXTBOOK IS PART OF WILEY & SONS’ “INTERNATIONAL STUDENT EDITIONS,” OFFERED TO STUDENTS IN SO-CALLED DEVELOPING COUNTRIES AT A LOWER PRICE THAN THE “NOR- MAL” EDITIONS ON SALE IN THE SO-CALLED DEVELOPED COUNTRIES.

126 AS MY FOUTH COBOL LESSON REACHES ITS END, I CLOSE THE TEXT BOOK AND FIND MYSELF CONFRONTED WITH A PECULIAR “FOR SALE ONLY TO STUDENTS IN …” LABEL.

125 124 “WE CANNOT SUNSET MOST OF THE LEGACY SYSTEMS AROUND THE GLOBE. IF IT IS THREE BILLION LINES OF CODE, IT WILL TAKE 300,000 PROGRAMMERS FIFTEEN TO TWENTY YEARS. MOST OF THEM WILL PROBABLY STOP AFTER A WHILE, BECAUSE THEY CANNOT MIGRATE SYSTEMS WHICH ARE THIS EFFICIENT TO SOMETHING WHICH WILL BE RUNNING ON ANOTHER DISPARATE PLATFORM. VOLUME IS GROWING. LINES OF CODE ARE GROWING. CUSTOMERS STAY IN BUSINESS. SATELLITE APP- LICATIONS CAN PROBABLY BE MIG- RATED CHANNELS ETC, BUT NOT THE CORE—THE HEART OF THE APPLICATION SYSTEM. CUSTOMER- FACING-APPLICATIONS CAN BE CHANGED BUT NOT THE CORE. FOR A BANK, THE RUNNING OF A JCL BANKING IS A CORE. TRANSACTION IN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS/MILLIONS OF TRANSACTIONS. HEART HAS TO BE THERE—UP AND TICKING!”

123 SHE EXPLAINS:

122 “COBOL HAS A VERY BRIGHT FUTURE,”

SAYS THE VICE PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL AT ONE OF INDIA’S LAR- GEST IT-COMPANIES.

121 120 LESSON Iv: crisis computing

FOR THEIR EXAM, TRAINEES ARE NOW NOT ASKED TO DEVELOP ANYTHING FROM SCRATCH—THE FINAL PROJECT HAS INSTEAD BE- COME AN EXTENDED EXERCISE IN MAINTENANCE AND BUG FIXING.

117 “AND SO THEY DID,” THE TEACHER SAYS.

THEY CREATED SOMETHING RE- SEMBLING A REAL INDUSTRY APPLICATION WITH AROUND FORTY THOUSAND LINES OF CODE, COMPLETE WITH INTENTIONALLY IMPLEMENTED BUGS.

116 BUT THE PRODUCTION UNIT SAID:

“WHY DON’T YOU CHANGE YOUR TRAINING PERSPECTIVE FROM DEVELOPMENT TO MAINTENAN- CE. THAT IS WHAT WE DO. HERE WE DON’T HAVE (M)ANY DEVELOP- MENT PROBLEMS.”

115 A TEACHER AT THE TRAINING CENTER EXPLAINS HOW THE TEACHING OF COBOL HAS UNDER- GONE MANY CHANGES OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS.

THE INITIAL FOCUS WAS ON DE- VELOPING APPLICATIONS FROM SCRATCH.

114 A DRONE’S EYE VIEW OF THE CAMPUS REVEALS THAT THE LIVING QUARTERS OF THE TRAI- NEES ARE IN THE FORM OF THE WORD INFOSYS.

113 112 IN ONE EXCEPTIONAL QUARTER, THEY TRAINED A THOUSAND NEW EMPLOYEES IN COBOL.

111 EVERY QUARTER, AROUND THREE HUNDRED NEW EMPLOY- EES ARE TRAINED IN MAIN- FRAME AND COBOL. THAT MAKES AROUND TWELVE HUNDRED NEW COBOL PROGRAMMERS EVERY YEAR.

110 “BASED ON OUR BUSINESS DE- MANDS, WE ASK OUR DELIVERY UNIT ABOUT HOW MANY PEOPLE THEY WANT.”

109 THE DEAN EXPLAINS:

108 THE GLOBAL EDUCATION CEN- TER-II IS THE LARGEST BUILDING TO BE BUILT IN INDIA SINCE INDE- PENDENCE.

IT WAS INAGURATED IN 2009.

107 106 ALL NEW EMPLOYEES UNDERGO A TRAINING PERIOD AT THEIR GLOBAL EDUCATION CENTER IN MYSORE.

105 INFOSYS IS THE SECOND LARGEST SOFTWARE CONSULTANCY BU- SINESS IN INDIA. IT HAS AROUND 240,000 EMPLOYEES.

104 “YOU WOULD IF YOU’VE EVER WORKED FOR A BANK, AN INSURANCE COMPANY, OR ANYWHERE IN INDIA.”

103 THE NEXT DAY A USER NAMED “BRIAN” REPLIES:

102 “I HAVE NEVER IN MY ENTIRE SO-CALLED ‘PROFESSIONAL’ PROGRAMMING CAREER, MET ANYONE WHO WAS ACTIVELY WRITING COBOL CODE.”

101 ON AUGUST 9, 2009, A FORUM USER NAMED “CEZAR” STATES:

100 IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE A SURVEY FROM 2013:

SEVENTY PERCENT OF ALL BU- SINESS TRANSACTIONS WORLD- WIDE ARE STILL MADE THROUGH COBOL.

TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY BILLION LINES OF ACTIVE COBOL CODE ARE STILL IN USE.

IN A SINGLE YEAR THERE ARE TWO HUNDRED TIMES MORE CO- BOL TRANSACTIONS THAN GOOG- LE AND YOUTUBE SEARCHES PUT TOGETHER.

AND FINALLY, THE AVERAGE AME- RICAN REPORTEDLY COMES INTO CONTACT WITH A COBOL PRO- GRAM THIRTEEN TIMES A DAY.

APPARENTLY WITHOUT ANYBODY NOTICING.

99 98 LESSON III: MAINTENANCE

CONSEQUENTLY, THE EXECUTIVE ORDERS BY THE EX-TERMINATOR- TURNED-GOVERNOR SCHWARZE- NEGGER ARE THEMSELVES TERMINATED BY THE EXECUTION OF COBOL.

95 HE EXPLAINS THAT IT WILL TAKE SIX MONTHS TO REWRITE THE THIRTY-YEAR-OLD COBOL PRO- GRAMS THAT ARE IN CHARGE OF THE STATE EMPLOYEES’ PAY- ROLLS, FOLLOWED BY NINE OR TEN MONTHS TO REVERSE THE ORDER.

94 BUT STATE CONTROLLER JOHN CHIANG REFUSES TO IMPLEMENT SCHWARZENEGGER’S ORDERS.

93 IN ORDER TO PREVENT A COLLAPSE OF THE STATE BUD- GET, SCHWARZENEGGER ISSUES AN EXECUTIVE ORDER TO CUT THE SALARY OF TWO HUNDRED THOUSAND STATE EMPLOYEES TO THE MINIMUM WAGE, $6.55 AN HOUR (FOR THE MONTH OF AUGUST IN 2008), UNTIL A NEW STATE BUDGET HAS BEEN PASSED.

92 LOS ANGELES 2008 A.D.

ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER ROSE FROM THE ASHES OF TERMINATOR 3.

AS GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA, HE NOW FACES FAILING FISCAL BUDGETS

BUT HIS BIGGEST OPPONENT TURNED OUT TO BE THE LEGA- CY SYSTEMS’ ANCIENT COBOL CODES

ACTIVE HERE,

IN OUR PRESENT.

91 90 BUT THE MISSION IS UNSUCCESS- FULL.

89 IN AN ATTEMPT TO ALTER ITS OWN DESTINY SKYNET ORDERS THE CYBERDYNE SYSTEMS’ MODEL T-101, PLAYED BY ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER, TO TRA- VEL BACK IN TIME TO 1984, THE YEAR THE FILM IS BEING PRODU- CED, AND EXECUTE THE MOTHER OF THE LEADER OF THE HUMAN RESISTANCE GROUP, BEFORE SHE GIVES BIRTH TO HIM.

88 THE FILM FAMOUSLY BEGINS WITH THE FOLLOWING TEXT:

“LOS ANGELES 2029 A.D.

THE MACHINES ROSE FROM THE ASHES OF THE NUCLEAR FIRE.

THEIR WAR TO EXTERMINATE MANKIND HAS RAGED FOR DECADES, BUT THE FINAL BATTLE WOULD NOT BE FOUGHT IN THE FUTURE.

IT WOULD BE FOUGHT HERE, IN OUR PRESENT.

TONIGHT...”

87 BUT A GROUP OF HUMAN RESI- STANCE FIGHTERS MANAGE TO DEFEAT SKYNET.

86 85 THE POINT OF VIEW OF HK-AERI- AL: THE CODE DEPICTED IN THE RIGHT-HAND CORNER IS WRITTEN IN COBOL INDICATING THAT SKY- NET IS COBOL-BASED.

84 SKYNET USES HK-AERIAL, A NON-HUMANOID HUNTER-KILLER VERTICAL TAKE-OFF... WITH AND COBOL LAN- DING CRAFT, TO KILL THE REMAI- NING HUMANS...

83 SKYNET USES HK-AERIAL, A NON-HUMANOID HUNTER-KILLER VERTICAL TAKE-OFF AND LAN- DING CRAFT, TO KILL THE REMAI- NING HUMANS...

82 SKYNET IS PROBABLY THE MOST ADVANCED ARTIFICIAL INTELLI- GENCE EVER IMAGINED.

IT IS AN AUTONOMOUS, ARTIFICI- AL GENERAL SUPERINTELLIGEN- CE DEFENSE SYSTEM DEPICTED IN JAMES CAMERON’S 1984 BLOCK- BUSTER THE TERMINATOR.

AS SKYNET DEVELOPS SELF- AWARENESS, HUMANS DECIDE TO DEACTIVATE IT. IN TURN, SKYNET INITIATES A NUCLEAR WAR TO DESTROY ALL HUMANS.

81 80 LESSON I: EXECUTION

77 NOT ALL DINNER TABLES ARE POKER TABLES.

NOT ALL WAR ROOMS ARE WAR ROOMS.

76 I START WONDERING ABOUT THE MATERIAL THAT COVERED THE TABLE OF THE Y2K WAR ROOM IN INDIA.

75 DESPITE THE FILM BEING SHOT IN B/W, KUBRICK INSISTED ON COVERING THE TABLE IN THE WAR ROOM OF DR. STRANGELOVE WITH GREEN FELT.

TO GIVE AN IMPRESSION OF HOW THE POWERFUL MEN GATHERED AROUND THE TABLE WERE PLAY- ING FOR THE FATE OF THE EARTH LIKE A POKER GAME.

74 “... VERY FEW CRITICAL PROB- LEMS WERE THERE. IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH THE DATE, JUST THE USUAL PRODUCTION SUPPORT PROBLEMS.”

73 THE ENGINEER IN INDIA SAYS:

72 71 SUNRISE 01-01-00

70 “SOMEHOW I MANAGED TO BE AWAKE AND IN THE RIGHT PLACE AT THE RIGHT TIME TO WATCH THE SUN RISE BEHIND MAY ISLAND ON THE FIRST OF JANUARY, 2000—IT WAS PERFECT!”

69 A PHOTOGRAPHER SAID:

68 “WE HAD TO MANAGE THE ENTI- RE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS—JUST FOLLOW THE SUN ON THAT DAY.”

67 THE ENGINEER IN INDIA SAYS:

66 “I’M NOT WORRIED BY NEW ZE- ALAND AND AUSTRALIA, I’M A BIT MORE WORRIED BY JAPAN, BUT I’M MORE CONCERNED BY THE REST OF THE FAR EAST THE WORST PREPARED COME FIRST. I WISH THAT FOR ONE EVENING THE EARTH WOULD ROTATE THE OTHER WAY.”

PETER DE JAEGER AKA MR. MILLENNIUM

65 A WESTERN Y2K EXPERT HAD SAID:

64 63 A WAR ROOM

62 “WE HAD SET UP SOMETHING CAL- LED THE WAR ROOM TO MONITOR THE SYSTEMS’ CHANGE OVERS.

THE WAR ROOM WAS A 360° ROOM. EVERYBODY HAD A TERMINAL TO MONITOR THE SYSTEMS AND TALK TO CLIENTS.

THEN THERE WERE THE ALTERNA- TIVE PHONES.

THEY THOUGHT EVEN THE PHO- NES WOULD FAIL—EVEN THE PHO- NE COMPANIES, SO THERE WERE ALTERNATIVE COMMUNICATION METHODOLOGIES. THERE WAS A BACKUP LINK. THERE WAS A FI- BER OPTIC LINK.

THERE WERE NOT MANY PEOPLE IN THE ROOM. ONLY THE KEY PE- OPLE. ABOUT FIFTY OF US.”

61 THE ENGINEER IN INDIA SAYS:

60 59 AS A CONSEQUENCE OF HARSH IMPORT RESTRICTIONS AND THE LIMITED AVAILABILITY OF COM- PUTER HARDWARE, COBOL WAS STILL REGARDED AS A MAJOR LANGUAGE IN INDIA IN THE 1990S.

THE DISCOVERY OF SUCH AN IM- MENSE BODY OF ENGLISH SPEA- KING COBOL EXPERTS IN INDIA, A CHEAP WORKFORCE FOR WES- TERN COMPANIES, PROVED TO BE A WELCOME SOLUTION TO THE DI- LEMMA OF THE WESTERN SHOR- TAGE OF COBOL EXPERTISE.

58 SAVED BY THE BELL

57 COBOL WAS STILL THE MAIN BACK- BONE OF ALL BUSINESS TRANS- ACTIONS WITH A BILLION LINES OF ACTIVE CODE ESTIMATED TO BE IN USE.

BUT THE LANGUAGE APPEARED TO BE SLOWLY ON ITS WAY TO EX- TINCTION: A LARGE NUMBER OF THE COBOL PROGRAMMERS HAD ALREADY RETIRED.

YOUNGER PROGRAMMERS DIDN’T HAVE ANY COBOL SKILLS, SO CHECKING AND DEBUGGING ALL THESE LINES OF CODE APPEARED TO BE IMPOSSIBLE.

DESPERATE ATTEMPTS WERE MADE TO CALL THE RETIRED MASTERS BACK TO SERVICE, BUT NUMBERS WERE FAR FROM HIGH ENOUGH.

56 LUCKILY, MR. GARFUNKEL PRE- SERVED HIS DOODLES.

THIS ONE IS FROM AUGUST, 1993. IT WAS A TUESDAY …

THE DOODLE GIVES US A RATHER FRANK INSIGHT INTO THE STATE OF COBOL AT THE TIME WHEN EU- ROPE AND NORTH AMERICA STAR- TED PAYING ATTENTION TO THE POTENTIAL Y2K BUG.

“BELLIES BULGING OVER BEN- DING BELT BUCKLES: SIGN OF MIDDLE AGE” 54 “… I FOUND MYSELF ‘DOODLING’ A LOT.”

53 52 “WHILE SITTING AT HUNDREDS OF ANSI, ISO, CODASYL, PLSG, SPARC, WG4, CEG, ECMA, SMTG, OOC, WG11, X3J4, SC22 COMMIT- TEE MEETINGS AND SPEAKING AT HUNDREDS MORE GUIDE, SHARE, HLSUA, DECUS, ACM, IEEE, AFIPS, ISECON CONFERENCES IN EU- ROPE, SOUTH AMERICA, AFRICA, ASIA, AND THE U.S.…”

51 LET ME INTRODUCE YOU TO THE LESSER-KNOWN BROTHER OF ART GARFUNKEL.

JEROME GARFUNKEL WAS A COM- PUTER ENGINEER WHO LIKED TO DOODLE:

50 “IT IS EXTRAORDINARILY DIFFI- TO ANTICIPATE THE OUTCO- ME IN ADVANCE. IT CREATES THIS UNCOMFORTABLE FEELING THAT SOMETHING’S GOING TO HAPPEN, WE JUST DON’T KNOW WHEN OR WHERE.”

L. M. BOWMAN IN “EARLY Y2K BUGS AREN’T ALL FUN AND GA- MES,” ZDNET, DECEMBER 21,T 1999.

49 THE REST REMAINED BEWILDERED.

48 “FEDERAL OFFICIALS HAVE SAID THAT IF THEY ARE NOT SATISFIED WITH OTHER COUNTRIES’ PLANS FOR AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL, THE DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPOR- TATION COULD BAN FLIGHTS BETWEEN SPECIFIED AIRPORTS AND THE U.S. OR PREVENT U.S. AIRLINES AND CODE SHARERS FROM FLYING OVER CERTAIN COUNTRIES.” GAUTAM MALKANI IN “FAA TO DECIDE SOON ON Y2K FLIGHT BANS,” MARCH 16, 1999.

IN THE UK, THE SEMI-PUBLIC PRI- VATE BODY, TASKFORCE 2000, ADVISED TRAVELLERS TO AVOID GERMANY, FINLAND, CZECH RE- PUBLIC, ITALY, HUNGARY, POLAND, PORTUGAL, RUSSIA, SPAIN, AND SWITZERLAND FOR A FIVE-WEEK PERIOD AROUND JANUARY 1, 2000.

47 OTHERS SOUGHT CONTROL.

46 45 SOME FOUND PROOF.

44 “IF YOU THINK YOUR COMPANY WILL BE OK BECAUSE ALL YOUR SYSTEMS ARE Y2K COMPLIANT, GUESS AGAIN. JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE WORKED OUT YOUR Y2K BUGS DOESN’T MEAN YOUR SUPPLIERS HAVE. IF 5% OF YOUR SUPPLIERS GO OUT ON YOU, CAN YOU SURVIVE?” THE FUTURIST, APRIL 1, 1999.

“Y2K DISTURBANCES WILL BE MINIMAL IN THE U.S. BUT WI- DESPREAD OVERSEAS, OCCUR- RING PRIMARILY IN LESS DEVE- LOPED AREAS, SUCH AS ASIA, EASTERN EUROPE AND RUSSIA. DISRUPTIONS COULD CRIPPLE DISTRIBUTION CHANNELS AND PREVENT U.S. COMPANIES FROM SELLING THEIR GOODS IN THO- SE REGIONS. THE RESULTING LOSS OF SALES WILL CUT INTO THE PROFITS OF MANY AMERICAN COMPANIES, SLICING THE VALUE

OF THEIR STOCKS.” 43 D. PRIAL, DECEMBER 29, 1999. SOME WERE CONCERNED.

42 “THEY THOUGHT THAT ON JANUARY 1, 12 AM IN THE MORNING ALL PLANES WILL STOP, ALL TOWERS WILL STOP, ALL TRAINS WILL STOP, ALL THE CLOCKS WILL STOP, AND ALL SYSTEMS WILL COME TO A STANDSTILL.”

41 AN ENGINEER IN INDIA SAYS:

40 39 —THE SO-CALLED MILLENNIUM OR Y2K BUG.

38 FROM THE VERY BEGINNING A SIMPLE LITTLE “MISTAKE” WAS A STANDARD IMPLEMENTATION WITHIN THE COBOL LANGUAGE.

“TODAYS-DATE” WAS THE INTE- GRATED FUNCTION USED TO STA- TE TODAY’S YEAR AND DATE. BUT IT ONLY RETURNED THE DAY, THE MONTH, AND THE TWO LAST DI- GITS OF THE YEAR.

IT DID NOT SPECIFY THE MILLEN- NIUM.

THIS WAS A CONSCIOUSLY DESIG- NED FEATURE TO SAVE PRECIOUS COMPUTER MEMORY.

BUT EVENTUALLY, IT LED TO THE WORLD’S LARGEST BUG EVER.

37 36 THE SYNTAX IS RATHER VERBOSE.

IT IS NOT SO-CALLED “BEAUTIFUL SYNTAX” IN THE WAY COMPUTER SCIENTISTS USUALLY CHAMPION LOGICAL SIMPLICITY.

BUT THAT WAS INTENTIONAL.

HOPPER SOUGHT TO DEVELOP A “PEOPLE-ORIENTED” LANGUAGE, AS CLOSE AS POSSIBLE TO HU- MAN LANGUAGE.

SHE WANTED EVERYONE TO BE ABLE TO READ AND UNDERSTAND IT.

LET ME JUST TRY TO EXECUTE THE PROGRAM …

35 LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT THE REASON MIGHT BE FOR SUCH HARSH CRITIQUE.

A SIMPLE COBOL PROGRAM TO PROMPT TODAY’S DATE.

34 ONE COMPUTER SCIENTIST SAID:

“THE USE OF COBOL CRIPPLES THE MIND; ITS TEACHING SHOULD, THEREFORE, BE REGARDED AS A CRIMINAL OFFENCE.”

EDSGER W. DIJKSTRA, 1975.

33 32 ITS UNPOPULARITY, HOWEVER, REMAINED.

31 OVER THE YEARS, COBOL WAS WIDELY IMPLEMENTED.

30 29 28 27 SHE IS THE SHORT LADY STAN- DING AT THE VERY FRONT.

HER NAME WAS GRACE HOPPER.

SHE INVENTED THE FIRST COMPI- LER AND WAS THE GRANDMOTHER OF COBOL, WHICH IS LIKELY THE MOST UNPOPULAR PROGRAM- MING LANGUAGE EVER.

26 25 24 1947: A MOTH WAS FOUND FRIED IN THE CIRCUITS OF THE MARK II COMPUTER AT HARVARD.

A WITTY ENGINEER GLUED THE MOTH INTO THE LOGBOOK.

HERE IS A PICTURE OF THE ENGI- NEER …

23 22 FIRST CASE OF A BUG BEING FOUND.

21 20 LESSON I: CRISIS

THE FOLLOWING LESSONS IN CRISIS COMPUTING COVER KEY MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF COBOL IN ORDER TO OUTLINE THE UNDERLYING FRICTIONS AND ASYMMETRIES FORMING PART OF GLOBAL FLOWS OTHERWISE THOUGHT OF AS SEAMLESS.

17 THE GOVERNOR’S CALL, HOW- EVER, CONCERNS MORE THAN COBOL PROGRAMMERS. IT POINTS TO THE INTERDEPENDENCE OF CRISIS, EXECUTION, AND MAINTE- NANCE.

IT IS AN INTERDEPENDENCE THAT IS BOTH CRITICAL AND MESSY, AND THAT HAS A LONG HISTORY IN THE CRISIS COMPUTING THAT HAS RESURFACED ON A GLOBAL SCALE IN 2020.

16 THE CORONA CRISIS HAS LED TO MASSIVE UNEMPLOYMENT AND A BIG SPIKE IN APPLICATIONS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS.

BUT THE STATE’S COMPUTING IN- FRASTRUCTURE IS PARTLY MADE UP OF FORTY-YEAR OLD COBOL PROGRAMS THAT NEED MAINTE- NANCE TO EXECUTE THE NEW DEMANDS.

15 HIS CALL IS MEANT FOR PROGRAMMERS OF THE SIXTY- YEAR-OLD, SUPPOSEDLY OUTDA- TED PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE, COBOL.

14 BUT THE GOVERNOR IS NOT REFERRING TO ENGINEERS SPE- CIALIZED IN THE BLUE METALLIC CHEMICAL ELEMENT, CO-27, AS USED IN LITHIUM-ION-BATTERIES.

13 12 “COBALT PROGRAMMERS”

11 HOWEVER, DURING A PRESS BRIEFING IN NEW JERSEY ON APRIL 4 2020, THE STATE GOVERNOR MAKES A RATHER UN- EXPECTED CALL FOR SOMEONE ELSE …

10 DURING SPRING 2020, THE COVID-19 CRISIS HITS THE GLOBAL WORLD. WHAT STARTED OUT AS A VIRAL OUTBREAK IN WUHAN, CHI- NA, SOON LEADS TO WORLDWIDE LOCKDOWNS TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF THE VIRUS.

THIS RESULTS IN AN URGENT NEED FOR DOCTORS AND NURSES.

9 8 INTRODUCTION

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION...... 7

LESSON I: CRISIS...... 19

LESSON II: EXECUTION...... 79

LESSON III: MAINTENANCE...... 97

LESSON IV: CRISIS COMPUTING...... 119

A COMPLETE INDEX OF ALL ELEMENTS LEADING TO THE END OF THE WORLD (IN THIS LECTURE)...... 133

LINDA HILFLING RITASDATTER UNWRAPPING COBOL

Lessons in Crisis Computing

Malmö University Y2K+20 Doctoral Dissertation in Interaction Design School of Arts and Communication Dissertation Series Faculty: Culture and Society Department: School of Arts and Communication, K3 Malmö University CC* Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter, 2020 Designed by Linda Hilfling Ritasdatter Layout by Nina Gribat Copy Editor: Janet Leyton-Grant Supported by grants from The National Dissertation Council and The Doctoral Foundation ISBN 978-91-7877-115-8 (print) ISBN 978-91-7877-116-5 (pdf) DOI 10.24834/isbn.9789178771165 Print: Holmbergs, Malmö, Sweden, 2020 * This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International. UNWRAPPING COBOL SCHOOL SCHOOL OF ARTS AND COMMUNICATION DISSERTATION SERIES LINDA HILFLING RITASDATTER UNWRAPPING COBOL

Lessons in Crisis Computing

WWW.MAU.SE 978-91-7877-116-5 isbn (pdf)

205 06 MALMÖ, SWEDEN MALMÖ, 06 205 978-91-7877-115-8 isbn (print)

MALMÖ UNIVERSITY MALMÖ

back-ends of automated systems. automated of back-ends

interaction taking place behind the scenes, at the back-ends and back- and back-ends the at scenes, the behind place taking interaction

tion design, to be focused not just on user interaction, but also on the the on also but interaction, user on just not focused be to design, tion

- interac of reconsideration a than less nothing demand lessons the

learning and reflecting on and in this neglected language. Ultimately, Ultimately, language. neglected this in and on reflecting and learning

of lessons, reflecting the author’s own method of artistic research as as research artistic of method own author’s the reflecting lessons, of

in point for this entanglement, the thesis is structured through a series series a through structured is thesis the entanglement, this for point in

ations of execution, crisis and maintenance. With COBOL as a case case a as COBOL With maintenance. and crisis execution, of ations

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of COBOL. Further, Crisis Computing is proposed as a concept to to concept a as proposed is Computing Crisis Further, COBOL. of

Bug, its connection to the outsourcing boom in India, and the legacy legacy the and India, in boom outsourcing the to connection its Bug,

are surfaced, as demonstrated in an analysis of the infamous Y2K Y2K infamous the of analysis an in demonstrated as surfaced, are

visible in moments of crisis when asymmetrical power structures structures power asymmetrical when crisis of moments in visible

and informational flows. Frictions within these flows are made more more made are flows these within Frictions flows. informational and

reality, central to the execution and maintenance of global economic economic global of maintenance and execution the to central reality,

hidden workforces and computational infrastructures that are, in in are, that infrastructures computational and workforces hidden

language, the dark sides of automation are examined in this thesis: thesis: this in examined are automation of sides dark the language,

By engaging with a detested and would-be obsolete programming programming obsolete would-be and detested a with engaging By

, 1996. , Dictionary Hacker’s New The -

ritual expressions of disgust or horror. (...) horror. or disgust of expressions ritual

(Synonymous with {evil}.) (…) Its very name is seldom uttered without without uttered seldom is name very Its (…) {evil}.) with (Synonymous :COBOL: /koh´bol/, n. [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] Language] Business-Oriented [COmmon n. /koh´bol/, :COBOL: