Endless, multilayered, super-fast and infinitely complex boredom: hooray
Matthew Fuller
What makes software jump? What words, what
styles of thought do we need to understand
running code and the multi-layered compositions
it is part of, and how, if at all, does software
establish relations with what might termed
freedom? Such questions, of how to act in and
understand complex technologies and live
situations are not unique to technology, and for
a figure by which to understand them, it is often
useful to start from the wrong place, not with
software, but with a frog. In his book Lifelines
the biologist Steven Rose describes the way in
which a number of his workmates might, whilst
sitting at the edge of a pond, compete to
describe the leap of a frog. By trade, they are a
physiologist, an ethologist, a developmentalist,
an evolutionist and a molecular biologist. Each
sets their particular disciplinary scale of
perception against those of the others. The
frog, responding not to the nattering of the
knowledge workers but to a snake spotted on a
nearby tree splashes elegantly into the safety of
a pond. The representatives of their disciplines
each in turn ascribe the 'jump event' to: the
interaction of nerves, muscles and bones
containing and releasing structured patterns of
energy and movement; learned or grown behavioural
responses; the result of the particular pattern
of growth of the organism; the action of an
inherited genetic imperative; or the biochemical
properties of its muscles.
As the ripples in the pond spread and interact
with other movements in the water, Rose's
argument is to encourage equally multivalent ways
of thinking a non-reductive biology of
life-patterns. Whilst, in his experiments on the
physiology of memory, there can be few people in
the world who have scissored as many heads off
hatchling chicks, Rose's appetite for a wet,
complex, living biology is something from which,
with all necessary irony, our understanding of
software can learn. The trick for biology as a
whole, he suggests, is to find a way of engaging
both the volition to detail entrained by
disciplinary approaches, which are in turn geared
to particular constituent scales of reality,
those of the gene, the molecule, the organism and
so on, whilst at the same time recognizing the
radical interweaving of such scales.
If we talk about freedom in relation to
software, and after having spat a few times to
clear our mouths of a word so enduringly soured
as freedom, a word that still however makes our
mouths water and tongues wag, perhaps then we
can suggest that a similar set of scales might
pertain to software. Imagine a group of people
watching a computer. One holds that what it does
is determined by the hardware, that the mineral
architecture of computing is that which sets what
is possible. Another looks to the history of
languages. They say that software is determined
by the kinds of syntaxes buildable, by logical
structures that are available in each different
environment. The third works through a critique
of the political economy of software and suggests
that what is possible in software is engineered
by the relations of property embedded in and
circulating through it. This person might
emphasize the insights of the Free Software
movement. Lastly, the fourth figure suggests
that software can only be understood by an
analysis of the user interface, by an
ethnographic querying of the signifying processes
of the machine and of its uses. What people do
with it is what establishes its quality of
freedom. Whilst these figures do not exist in
any 'clean' sense, they do represent existing
tendencies in the understanding of software and
also divisions of labour in its production.
In an aside in a classic essay in the
Actor-Network tradition, a current in sociology
emphasizing the interaction of elements in
socio-technical assemblages, Madeleine Akrich
describes the possibilities for developing an
analysis of the car. She suggests that such a
study has its natural scale. Doubtless it could
be satisfying to paint on a broad canvas,
starting with nuts and bolts, pistons and cracks,
cogs and fan belts, and moving on to voting
systems, the strategies of large industrial
groups, the definition of the family, and the
physics of solids... ...On what grounds would
the analyst stop - apart from the arbitrary one
of lassitude? Quite apart from the indefinite
amount of time such a study would take, there is
also the question as to whether it would be
interesting. Mapping the way in which every part
of such a complex technical object simultaneously
embodies and measures relations amongst
'heterogeneous elements' might be even more
draining in the case of software.
Do we need to make this voyage through boredom?
What would it involve? A phrase which has passed
into the everyday understanding of computing,
