Critical Code Studies Software Studies Lev Manovich and Noah Wardrip- Fruin, editors Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, Noah Wardrip- Fruin, 2009 Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life, Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, 2011 Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011 Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression, Geoff Cox and Alex McLean, 2012 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10, Nick Montfort, Patsy Baudoin, John Bell, Ian Bogost, Jeremy Douglass, Mark Marino, Michael Mateas, Casey Reas, Mark Sample, and Noah Vawter, 2012 The Imaginary App, Paul D. Miller and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2014 The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, Benjamin H. Bratton, 2015 Coding Literacy: How Computer Programming Is Changing Writing, Annette Vee, 2017 The Software Arts, Warren Sack, 2019 Critical Code Studies, Mark C. Marino, 2020 Critical Code Studies Mark C. Marino The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and by ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Marino, Mark C., author. Title: Critical code studies / Mark C. Marino. Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2020. | Series: Software studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019024253 | ISBN 9780262043656 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Computer software--Social aspects. | Coding theory--Philosophy. | Programming languages (Electronic computers) | Rhetoric. Classification: LCC QA76.9.C66 M628 2020 | DDC 005.3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019024253 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 for my family, especially Barbara, Genevieve, & Dayveon who give my life meaning Contents Series Foreword ix Hacknowledgments xi 1 Introduction 1 2 Critical Code Studies: A Manifesto 37 3 The Transborder Immigrant Tool 55 4 Climategate 105 5 FLOW- MATIC 129 6 Kittler’s Code 161 7 Generative Code 199 8 Futures of Critical Code Studies 227 Final Words 239 Notes 241 Works Cited 251 Index 271 Series Foreword Software is deeply woven into contemporary life—economically, culturally, creatively, politically— in manners both obvious and nearly invisible. Yet while much is written about how software is used and the activities that it supports and shapes, thinking about software itself has remained largely technical for much of its history. Increas- ingly, however, artists, scientists, engineers, hackers, designers, and scholars in the humanities and social sciences are finding that for the questions they face, and the things they need to build, an expanded understanding of software is necessary. For such understanding, they can call upon a strand of texts in the history of computing and new media; they can take part in the rich, implicit culture of software; and they also can take part in the development of an emerging, fundamentally transdisciplinary, computational literacy. These provide the foundation for software studies. Software studies uses and develops cultural, theoretical, and practice- oriented approaches to make critical, historical, and experimental accounts of (and interven- tions via) the objects and processes of software. The field engages and contributes to the research of computer scientists, the work of software designers and engineers, and the creations of software artists. It tracks how software is substantially integrated into the processes of contemporary culture and society, reformulating processes, ideas, institutions, and cultural objects around their closeness to algorithmic and formal description and action. Software studies proposes histories of computational cultures and works with the intellectual resources of computing to develop reflexive think- ing about its entanglements and possibilities. It does this both in the scholarly modes of the humanities and social sciences and in the software creation/research modes of computer science, the arts, and design. The Software Studies book series, published by the MIT Press, aims to publish the best new work in a critical and experimental field that is at once culturally and techni- cally literate, reflecting the reality of today’s software culture. Hacknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the help, support, and encourage- ment of many people, so many that this list will likely omit more than I include. This list should begin with my close collaborators Jeremy Douglass and Jessica Pressman, who read draft after draft. I would also like to thank Tara McPherson, who supported my work on the Transborder Immigrant Tool, as well as the ASHSS sabbatical that gave me time to work on this manuscript. My thanks to Doug Sery, who always believed in this book despite various reviwer #2s. Thanks to Kathleen Caruso, Noah Springer, Michael Sims, copy editor extraordinaire Melinda Rankin, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lev Manovich, and the whole MIT Press team. This book would also not be here without Max Feinstein, whose interest in CCS gave rise to the working groups, the members of which continue to develop new methods and readings. Todd Millstein of UCLA and the computer science faculty of Loyola Marymount University gave considerable sup- port, including Philip Dorin, Ray Toal, John David N. “Dondi” Dionisio, B. J. Johnson, Andrew Fourney, and especially Stephanie August, who delivered the first draft of the manifesto to a CS conference at UC Irvine. The birth of a field requires tools and talent. For example, Craig Dietrich and Erik Loyer created the code annotation functionality for Scalar for the investigation of the Transborder Immigrant Tool. Thanks to all those who gave feedback on drafts, including, in addition to those already mentioned: Rochelle Gold, Jason Lewis, Jon Corbett, Stephanie Boluk, Sarah Lehne, Paul Feigelfeld, Brett Stalbaum, Susanne Holl, and Peter Berz. Thanks to my mentors, N. Katherine Hayles and Toby Miller. Thanks to those other scholars who have contributed to the development of the field: Evan Buswell, David M. Berry, Damon Loren Baker, Wendy Chun, Stephen Ramsay, Dennis Jerz, Judy Malloy, Mez, micha cárdenas, Chris Lindgren, Liz Losh, Federica Frabetti, Annette Vee, Kevin Brock, Kevin Driscoll, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Jessica Marie John- son, Mark A. Neal, Arielle Schlessinger, Steve Anderson, Jacqueline Wernimont, Patsy xii Hacknowledgments Baudoin, Nick Montfort, Ben Allen, Chandler McWilliams, Jim Brown Jr., Evan Gerst- man, Stephanie Boluk, Patrick LeMieux, Ed Finn, Moritz Hiller, the Electronic Distur- bance Theater, and Daniel Temkin, along with the many others who gave their time to participate in the CCSWGs. Thanks to those who helped coordinate the CCSWGs, including, Ali Rachel Pearl, Viola Lasmana, Catherine Griffiths, Jason Lipshin, and Teddy Roland. Thanks to Ariane Hanrath and the Hammermann family for their help translating German. Thanks to Rob Wittig for all his support and encouragement in all matters related to writing. Thanks to all the members and affiliates of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies (HaCCS) Lab at USC, as well as HASTAC, SLSA, MLA, and ELO. Sections of this book were previously published in earlier versions in Electronic Book Review, American Book Review, and Digital Humanities Quarterly, and I am grateful to Joseph Tabbi, Steve Tomasula, and Jessica Pressman and Lisa Swanstrom who edited the drafts for those publications, respectively. Thanks to Jentery Sayers, Lauren Klein, and Matthew Gold who edited related CCS chapters. And lastly, I thank my family for their love and support: my wife, Barbara, who has taught me about more than just assembly; my parents, Arthur and Patricia, who offered boundless encouragement; and my uncle, James Marino, who tirelessly proofread various drafts of the manuscript. 1 Introduction Code Heard ’round the World if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,'Oooops!' — briffa_sep98_e.pro Who reads computer source code, and what does it mean to them? Pundits and poets, hacktavists and humanities professors, lawyers and laypeople— far more than just pro- grammers are reading code for a wide range of reasons. Whether finding Easter eggs or getting a whiff of code smells,1 seeking aesthetic pleasure or searching for ways they have been manipulated, the curious have a sense that something awaits them in the code. If we are going to take up this communal practice of reading code, we must read it critically, for the way we read code is just as important as the fact that we are reading code. Consider the following example.2 In 2009, leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of England’s Univer- sity of East Anglia seemed to hand a smoking gun to climate change deniers, proof positive that climate change is a fabrication. These emails included code used to model climate change, and the comments in that code seemed to indicate a manipulation of the data. Soon the blogosphere was buzzing with quotations from the code, par- ticularly from a file called Harry_Read_Me, named for its programmer, Ian Harris, who collaborated with Keith Briffa on the code.3 As he attempts to document his progress, making sense of and reconciling the various data, Harris writes in the code comments, “What the hell is supposed to happen here? Oh yeah—there is no ‘supposed,’ I can make it up. So I have : - ).” Other comments throughout the leaked files express the frustrations of a program- mer as he complains about the lengths to which he has to go to reconcile conflicting 2 Chapter 1 and at times contradictory data. Seizing on this code as raw meat, climate change con- tenders called the comments proof that the data used to demonstrate global warming was bunk, a conspiracy in the code. This source file purportedly provided a glimpse behind the curtain of a mass deception, and the staging ground for that charade was the computer source code itself.