With the “logic of general substitutability,” software has become a thing, Chun argues, embodying the central function of magic—the manipulation of symbols in ways that impact the world. This fundamental alchemy, the mysterious fungibility of sourcery, reinforces a reading of the Turing machine as an ur-algorithm that has been churning out effective computability abstractions in the minds of its “users” for eighty years. The “thing” that software has become is the cultural figure of the algorithm: instantiated metaphors for effective procedures.
