Coderly Texts

Nanaca Crash - I got 3999.51m. Dammit! .41m short!

In reading Adrian Mackenzie's "Introduction: Softwarily", I was reminded a bit of my previous readings on Readerly/Writerly texts and the ideas of Work vs Text by Barthes. The line that did it for me was "consumption is not a passive activity but a highly complex and variable process" (8). Indeed it is, and according to Barthes any form of reading/consumption is also a act of writing/production; when talking about books he describes how a work that is read is assembled into something greater than simply the words on the page by the reader who receives: a text. In such a way, not only does the author of a text have agency in writing something, but the act of reading also has consequences in creating something new in the reader, giving the reader agency.

Now I feel Mackenzie's ideas about Agency in software fit in nicely with Barthes's theory on texts, works, authors, and readers, but in some ways is also problematic because of the nature of code. Mackenzie describes how both Originators and Recipients both have agency in creating the repercussions and use of a software. Eventually, he admits that the barriers between originator and recipient sometimes collapse into one, much like Barthes describes how the reader is also a producer of meaning (and later how Jenkins talks about fanculture grassroots production).

Now I haven't really shut up in class about how code is socially formed and forms society, and its interesting to note how originators create software with a specific use in mind (their own agency), while recipients use the code in their own way (changing or adopting it, applying their own agency. Sometimes the code is structured around a model or prototype (again, the imitated object has exercised agency on the programmer, code, and user who all have the prototype culturally ingrained in them). However, sometimes unintended effects from the code that are neither a result of the coders or users, nor do they imitate the prototype they are modelled on; things such as a bug, crash, or memory dump are things that lie in the agency of the code. What's interesting to note here is that while Barthes admits that texts are influenced by "prototypes", in a sense, the executability of code gives agency to the very text being studied.

Where lies the "authorship" of code's agency? Are originators responsible for the actions code takes that are unintended and unexpected? Or are users responsible for "misusing" the program (although their agency lies in using the program any way they want, even taking it apart and rewriting it literally)? Or can we say that it is other code, such as a new OS, that can cause a code to act in an unexpected way when operating in relation to other pieces of software on a machine (an out of date computer game running on Windows Vista, per se)? The idea of the code having agency seems to be an idea that has potential of developing a dangerous idea; that the inanimate software has the potential to be animate, or have intention is somewhere I don't want to go yet. Yet all other compromises to deny such seem unsatisfactory, and possibly Mackenzie's four divisions need to be reassessed. Perhaps Barthes needs to be reassessed. I guess this will be my point of discussion.