Cutting Code: Software and Sociality

by Adrian Mackenzie

Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures, and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities, and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.

Genres: Technology

216 pages, Paperback

First published February 24, 2006

About the author

Adrian Mackenzie is Professor of Technological Cultures in the Department of Sociology at Lancaster University and the author of Wirelessness: Radical Empiricism in Network Cultures (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Wendy Liu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this in the library (it was sitting next to Software Studies: A Lexicon, which I thought might be an interesting read) and figured I'd give it a shot even though I was a little confused about the intended audience of the book. After reading it, my impression is that it's geared towards those with a background in cultural studies/social theory/philosophy (notable references: Bruno Latour, Hardt & Negri) who have little to no understanding of how software is produced. If that describes you, you may find this book useful; personally, I was kind of hoping for the opposite approach, since my background in the former is much weaker than my understanding of the latter.

A brief summary of the chapters: 1 is an introduction to what software is from a cultural POV, with a focus on the concept of agency. 2 talks about code as art, which I personally found to be a bizarre detour. 3 makes some good points about algorithms but the focus on bioinformatics is a bit too limiting, IMO. 4 covers the history of the development of Linux. 5 discusses the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and its role as a mediator between the programmer and the operating system. 6 felt very out of place, as it focused on a project (now lost to the annals of time) called the Rural Access Multiplexing Operational Support System (RAMOSS), developed by Forge Research in Sydney, which helped connect rural areas to the Internet? 7 is an ethnography featuring a specific strategy for agile development called "extreme programming", and includes some hilarious quotes from programmers trying not to step over each other in the primitive environment of the late 90s/early 2000s (version-control-wise, anyway).

Software development changes rapidly, which means that some of the material in this book is extremely dated---it was originally published in 2006, and most of the ethnographies seem to have taken place before 2002, so keep that in mind. For example, chapter 7 features a team of programmers using the source control system CVS, which I don't think any professional programming team has used in at least a decade (Git/Mercurial/Perforce in larger corporations/maybe SVN are dominant now, and they all represent incredibly different paradigms
---and thus styles of working---compared to CVS).

[Daniel Drexler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very smart and well done, though a bit overly dense - even for an academic text. Mackenzie uses much more academically laden language than he needs to in order to communicate his excellent analysis of software and its production. Written in 2004 and still wonderful in 2019. Highly relevant.