Adrian Mackenzie

The performativity of code: Software and cultures of circulation

This article analyses a specific piece of computer code, the Linux operating system kernel, as an example of how technical operationality figures in contemporary culture. The analysis works at two levels. First of all, it attempts to account for the increasing visibility and significance of code or software-related events. Second, it seeks to extend familiar concepts of performativity to include cultural processes in which the creation of meaning is not central, and in which processes of circulation play a primary role. The analysis concentrates on the practices and patterns of circulation of Linux through versions, distributions, clones and reconfigurations. It argues that technical ‘culture-objects’ such as Linux take on a social existence within contemporary technological cultures because of the authorizing contexts in which the reading, writing and execution of code occur. The ‘force’ or performance of certain technical objects, their operationality, can be understood more as the stabilized nexus of diverse social practices, rules and personae than as a formal property of the objects themselves.

Wisdom, decision support and paradigms of decision making

Many decision support tools have been developed over the last 20 years and, in general, they support what Simon termed substantive rationality. However, such tools are rarely suited to helping people tackle wicked problems, for which a form of procedural rationality is better suited. Procedurally rational approaches have appeared in both management science and computer science, examples being the soft OR approach of cognitive mapping and the design rationale based on IBIS. These approaches are reviewed and the development of Wisdom, a procedurally rational decision support process and accompanying tool, is discussed and evaluated. � 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

From Cards to Code: How ExtremeProgramming Re-Embodies Programming as aCollective Practice

This paper discusses Extreme Programming (XP), a relatively new and increasingly popular ‘user-centred’ software design approach. Extreme Programming proposes that collaborative software development should be centred on the practices of programming. That proposal contrasts strongly with more heavily instrumented, formalised and centrally managed software engineering methodologies. The paper maps the interactions of an Extreme Programming team involved in building a commercial organisational knowledge management system. Using ethnographic techniques, it analyses how this particular style of software development developed in a given locality, and how it uniquely hybridised documents, conversations, software tools and office layout in that locality. It examines some of the many artifices, devices, techniques and talk that come together as a complicated contemporary software system is produced. It argues that XPs emphasis on programming as the core activity and governing metaphor can only be understood in relation to competing overtly formal software engineering approaches and the organisational framing of software development. XP, it suggests, gains traction by re-embodying the habits of programming as a collective practice.

The Problem of the Attractor A Singular Generality between Sciences and Social Theory

Contemporary complexity sciences claim a literal, non-metaphorical applicability to physical, economic, social and cultural events. They envision the development of a general social or historical physics. Conversely, in the social sciences and humanities, complexity sciences have been typically treated as a source of new metaphors or tropes to be used in theory-building. Can there be a critical social or historical physics that is not a world-view and that does not treat science as a source of metaphors? The Lorenz attractor figures centrally in the history of complexity science as a popular image of ‘deterministic chaos’ and the ‘butterfly effect’, as an indication of how far complexity science has progressed in the last two decades, and, as this article argues, as an event whose multiplicity of interpretations attests to the problem it raises, the problem of generality associated with complexity. Via the Lorenz attractor, the article examines three attempts to treat complexity non-metaphorically in recent theoretical work (Delanda; Massumi; Stengers). In these accounts, the attractor performs several different functions. It forms part of a re-engineered concept of multiplicity, it helps conceptualize feeling or sensitivity, and it raises the general problem of practice in theory-building.

Untangling the unwired : Wi-Fi and the cultural inversion of infrastructure.

A somewhat banal component of contemporary computing technology, Wi-Fi, or 802.11b wireless local area networking, has begun to “naturalize” itself in buildings, cities, parks, transport systems, and towns throughout Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. This technology connects computers to one another or to the Internet using radio links in an unlicensed part of the radio spectrum, 2.4 GHz. It replaces the cable that runs from a computer to a network socket in

The production of prediction: What does machine learning want?

Retail, media, finance, science, industry, security and government increasingly depend on predictions produced through techniques such as machine learning. How is it that machine learning can promise to predict with great specificity what differences matter or what people want in many different settings? We need, I suggest, an account of its generalization if we are to understand the contemporary production of prediction. This article maps the principal forms of material action, narrative and problematization that run across algorithmic modelling techniques such as logistic regression, decision trees and Naive Bayes classifiers. It highlights several interlinked modes of generalization that engender increasingly vast data infrastructures and platforms, and intensified mathematical and statistical treatments of differences. Such an account also points to some key sites of instability or problematization inherent to the process of generalization. If movement through data is becoming a principal intersection of power relations, economic value and valid knowledge, an account of the production of prediction might also help us begin to ask how its generalization potentially gives rise to new forms of agency, experience or individuations.

The Technicity of Time

In modern social and critical theory, clocks have figured as the embodiment of social order or, more ominously, as an exemplar of the threat posed to living thought by technology. As an alternative to such a bipolar evaluation, this paper examines the technicity of clocktime. The concept of technicity was suggested by the French philosopher, Gilbert Simondon. It is way of understanding the mode of existence of technical objects ontogenetically, that is, in terms of how they come to be rather than what they are. This paper introduces an ontogenetic account of clocktime as a new capacity to articulate diverse geographical, economic, technical and political realities together. It explains the convoluted precision of contemporary clocktime ensembles as just such an articulation. It discusses an ineliminable residue of metastability in the increasing precision of clocktime.

More Parts Than Elements: How Databases Multiply

Databases organise, configure, and perform thing-and-people multiples in sets. Belonging, inclusion, participation, and membership: many of the relations that make up the material-social life of people and things can be formally apprehended in terms of set-like multiples stored in databases. Mid-20th century database design derived different ways of gathering, sorting, ordering, and searching data from mathematical set theory. The dominant database architecture, the relational database management system, can be seen as a specific technological enactment of the mathematics of set theory. More recent developments such as grids, clouds, and other data-intensive architectures apprehend ever greater quantities of data. Arguably, in emerging data architectures databases themselves are subsumed by even more intensive set-like operations. Whole databases undergo set-like transformations as they are aggregated, divided, filtered, and sorted. At least at a theoretical level, the mathematics of set theory, as philosophically rendered by Alain Badiou, can also suggest some explanations of how multiples expand, ramify, and split in databases. Badious account locates forms of instability or incoherence inherent in any set-based doing of multiples in the relation between parts and elements, between inclusion and belonging. Against the grain of Badious resolutely philosophical project, a set-theoretical account of databases might also point towards some vertiginous elements that elude regulation, norms, and representation.

Problematising the Technological: The Object as Event?

The paper asks how certain zones of technical practice or technologies come to matter as “the Technological”, a way of construing political change in terms of technical innovation and invention. The social construction of technology (SCOT) established that things mediate social relations, and that social practices are constantly needed to maintain the workability of technologies. It also linked the production, representation and use of contemporary technologies to scientific knowledge. However, it did all this at a certain cost. To understand something as socially constructed implies that it can be positioned on a pre‐given social grid. Making this understanding stick risks affronting others with the claim that their position is not singular, only ordinary. It also runs the risk of not having purchase on those aspects of technological relationality that overflow the framing context of the social (Callon et al. 2002). Building on the ground prepared by SCOT and relying on the work of (Stengers 2000) and (Simondon 1964, 1989), the paper discusses how technologies could be understood as relational events within the contemporary political space. Developing an account of technologies centred on relationality, this paper outlines an epistemology and ontology of the anomalies of technological events, and suggests how excess could explain the Technological.

Five rules of thumb for post-ELSI interdisciplinary collaborations

In this paper we identify five rules of thumb for interdisciplinary collaboration across the natural and social sciences. We link these to efforts to move away from the ‘ethical, legal and social issues’ framework of interdisciplinarity and towards a post-ELSI collaborative space. It is in trying to open up such a space that we identify the need for: collaborative experimentation, taking risks, collaborative reflexivity, opening-up discussions of unshared goals and neighbourliness.