Radical Software

__ TUESDAY, 8/31 __

[Lecture slides, Zoom recording and a searchable transcript with timestamps. (Apologies for the poor quality of this recording. We'll figure out some better strategies for recording class sessions with Zoom as needed.)]

Optional background readings (We’ll revisit two of these)

• "Radical", Encyclopædia Britannica, July 20, 1998,
• "The Conscience of a Hacker", (aka The Hacker Manifesto) January 8, 1986
• Julian Oliver, Gordan Savičić, and Danja Vasiliev, "The Critical Engineering Manifesto"

Examples

• Radical Software magazine, 1970-1974 Click on History and note the ties to The New School
• The Radical Software Group (R-S-G)
• The Radical Networks conference, in New York and Berlin

__ THURSDAY, 9/2 __

[Zoom recording (There appear to be some problems with this video, but if you download it to your computer and watch that way, it should work alright — at least it did for me as best as I could test), group chat log, and a searchable transcript with timestamps]

Due to flooding in New York City and significant public transportation problems, we are conducting class via Zoom today. Please click here to join our class Zoom meeting at 12pm. Stay safe everyone!

• Project 1 Assignment: Twitter bot, due September 30
• Project 1, Tutorial 1: Setting up your Twitter bot
• Additional tutorial: History and use of the command line (CLI). Video in two parts: Part 1, Part 2

__ TUESDAY, 9/7 __

[Lecture slides, Zoom recording (wtih subtitles), and searchable transcript with timestamps.]

Readings

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin, “Digital Media Archaeology: Interpreting Computational Processes”. In Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, 302–22, 2011
• Jacob Gaboury, "A Queer History of Computing: Part Three"
• Jacob Gaboury, "Critical Unmaking: Toward a Queer Computation" In The Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities, 483–91, 2018

Examples

• Nick Montfort's reimplementation of Strachey's Love Letters
• Noah Wardrip-Fruin gives a good description of Strachey's algorithm, but Wikipedia also offers a very succinct description of it, which may be helpful in thinking about your approach to project 1.
• the bodyfuck programming language, video demos: [1], [2]

Additional examples

• The ELIZA chatbot
• A web-based version of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes (Thousand Million Billion Poems)
• Other work on controlling computers through embodied movement:
  • Myron Krueger's "Videoplace"
  • Ursula Endlicher's "html movement library" and "html butoh" (requires Flash) with documentation on Vimeo here and here
  • the Nintendo Wii

__ TUESDAY, 9/14 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Marley Collins (Radical Software magazine, presentation)

Readings

• Selections from Matthew Fuller's Software Studies: A Lexicon: Introduction, "Algorithm," "Code," and "Programmability".
  Please note: I have included several other keyword chapters in case you are curious. (Highlighted in the table of contents.) They are all great, but we'll only have time to talk in class about the four listed here.
• Friedrich Kittler, "There is No Software", ctheory.net, 1995
• Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media, chapter 1. Please note: I have included the entire book here, but let's only focus on chapter 1 today.

__ TUESDAY, 9/21 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Magali Van Caloen (The Critical Engineering Manifesto, presentation)

Readings

(Please note: I marked the Khasnabish and Haiven text as optional and swapped it with the Newman text which I'd like to talk about in class instead. For one, the Newman is shorter, which will help because there's a lot listed here. Most of them are fairly short.)

• Maurice Block, "Radicalism", from John Joseph Lalor, Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, 1899. (Table of contents included for interest.)
• Saul Newman, "Anarchism", from Pugh, What is Radical Politics Today?, 2009
• (Optional.) Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven. Introductory chapter, from The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, 2014. Feel free to skip the section "Outline and preliminaries" and pick up on page 23 at "As might be evident from this overview ..."
• David Graeber, "Occupy Wall Street rediscovers the radical imagination", 2011 PDF and available online here: theguardian.com
• "Seeing Cities", Laura Kurgan in conversation with Bill Rankin, creator radicalcartography.net. In regards to preparing this text for class discussion, I'm really only interested in the first two interview questions, up to "radical content." But perhaps read from the beginning up to that point for context. I'm interested in thinking about what Rankin means by "radical" here in a context very different from software: maps.
• Donella Meadows, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System", 1997. PDF and available online here: donellameadows.org This might seem like a strange one to include because it is so far off from talking about software. But we could gain much by analyzing any radical software activism in terms of the various types of intervention outlined in this short essay.
• On the wisdom in taking a markedly non-radical approach to software: Joel Spolsky, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I" , available at joelonsoftware.com

Other additional texts

The previous time that I taught this class I received a request for other texts by David Graeber that I might recommend. Here are a few. This is only for general interest, as we won't be discussing them in class. But if you would be interested in discussing, reach out and I'd be glad to.

• Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, 2004
• "The New Anarchists", 2002
• Syllabus for "Direct Action and Radical Social Theory", Spring 2004

Examples

• Revisit The Critical Engineering Manifesto
• Radical Engineers – radicalengineers.com

__ THURSDAY, 9/23 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 4: Scheduling and publishing

__ TUESDAY, 9/28 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Leah Hughes (Slow Tech Movement, Are.na, and Low Tech Magazine's solar-powered website, presentation)
• Ysa Pisor (spacer.GIF, presentation)

Readings

• Joseph Schumpeter, "The Process of Creative Destruction", chapter 7 from part II of Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, 1942. This is one of the more difficult texts that we'll be reading this semester. I have included all of part II of this book. I recommend that you start by reading chapter 7 first, which is only 5 pages, and thinking carefully about that. Then if you still have steam, go back to the beginning of part II and see how much you can get through beyond that key chapter.
• This little bit of background on Schumpeter and his idea of "creative destruction" will probably help you make sense of the above: Sharon Reier, "Half a Century Later, Economist's 'Creative Destruction'; Theory Is Apt for the Internet Age", The New York Times, 2000: PDF, online (may require login).
• Lilly Irani, Introduction and "Can the Subaltern Innovate?" (chapter 7) from Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India, 2019
• (Optional.) Sheila Jasanoff, "A New Politics of Innovation", from Pugh, What is Radical Politics Today?, 2009
• (Optional.) Jonathan Sterne, "Out with the Trash: On the Future of New Media” — on planned obsolescence and so-called "e-waste"

Examples

• Browse the website for the Computer History Museum's permanent exhibition "Revolution"
  • From museum homepage: "Visit CHM to learn about the long history of technology and its revolutionary impact on the world." (Note: Copy on the museum homepage has changed to provide updates regarding the pandemic. If you'd like you see the quote that I'm referencing here, you can view the site in the Wayback Machine from January 2020.) What kind of revolution is this?
  • From the exhibition homepage: "The story of computing is epic. It’s driven by the human passion for tinkering, inventing and solving difficult problems where accidents and luck can be as important as brilliant engineering. Explore the revolution that has changed our world ..."
  • Note the sponsors at the bottom of the page: Intel, Intuit, and a large electronics big box store in California called Fry's
  • Does this exhibition include any examples of "radical software"? What does it mean to think about this history of business and technological innovation as a kind of "revolution"? ... as "creative destruction"?

__ THURSDAY, 9/30 __

• Due: Project 1 for in-class presentation

__ TUESDAY, 10/5 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Avery Murray-Gurney (Homebrew Computer Club, presentation)
• Leland Parker (FLOS: free/libre open source software, presentation)

Readings

• Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. I've included the whole book here, but please focus on chapters 1-2 (pages 13-41), 8 (125-141), and Epilogue (341-354).

Watch

• Fabrice Florin, "Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age", 1985, (the documentary in Google Drive, a bunch of B-roll from the event, the film hosted by filmaffinity.com, and the website for the film)
• (Optional.) Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017) Episode 1, episode 2, and episode 3

Examples

• Ted Nelson, "hypertext," Project Xanadu, and Computer Lib / Dream Machines
• The Homebrew Computer Club
• The open source software movement — sometimes called FLOSS, for Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, an acronym that I think is more common in Europe than the US.

  Examples here could include Linux, the GNU project, and the relationship between them; or key figures in the open source movement. But I suggest / request that we focus more on projects, collectives, and the community rather than the few key figures so frequently celebrated as solitary heroes. (To take one example, recent attention has been given to the many harms done to the open source and MIT communities by Richard Stallman [1], [2]. So rather than perpetuating the hagiography of such individuals, let's find some other examples to share and stories to tell.)

• The Berkeley Community Memory project

__ THURSDAY, 10/7 __

• Project 2 Assignment: Browser extension, due November 11
• Project 2, Tutorial 1: Getting started with browser extensions
• Project examples
  • Jailbreak the Patriarchy
  • Justin Blinder's ReThink and Dark Side of the Prism
  • Relay chat app
  • ShiftSpace. ShiftSpace was a browser plugin -based project that was active from around 2005-2010. Unfortunately the proejct is no longer active and the website is no longer running, but you can find bits of documentation about it scattered around on the web: Turbulence.org commissions program (scroll down for short text and two videos), co-creator Mushon Zer-Aviv's masters thesis statement, some background ideas in a blog post called "Control in Public Space", longer list of various blog posts by Mushon. Let's all make sure to read the Turbulence.org piece and consider the rest optional.
  • There's a lot to explain to get started with this one. If you'd like to read more documentation about browser extensions, I recommend starting with this guide to Chrome extensions, which I think is very useful.)

__ TUESDAY, 10/12 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Maya Hightower (Cult of the Dead Cow, presentation)
• Luke Shafer (Anonymous, presentation)

Readings

• Gabriella Coleman, "Hacker", Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, 2014
• Tim Jordan, "Online Direct Action: Hacktivism and Radical Democracy”
• Mckenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto. Please note: I've included the whole book, but please focus on manifesto items [001] - [023] ("Abstraction") and [071-088] ("Hacking"), or if you can, all of [001] - [088].
• (Optional.) Gabriella Coleman and Alex Golub, "Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism", 2008
• (Optional.) Gabriella Coleman, "our weirdness is free", Triple Canopy, 2012

Browse

• hackur.io is full of very short, concise blog posts that offer insightful musings on various aspects of hackerdom.

Watch

• Hackers, Iain Softley, 1995. I'll screen this for anyone who wishes to watch collectively: Sunday, Oct 10, 7pm, Zoom link
• A very short, sweet scene starring Julia Stiles from the kids' TV Show Ghostwriter. This great blog post offers some context and reflections on this clip: Parker Higgins, "Can You Jam with the Console Cowboys in Cyberspace?"
• (Optional.) WarGames, 1983
• (Optional.) Swordfish, 2001. This is actually a pretty terrible movie — rife with inaccuracies, gender stereotypes, and other Hollywood cliches — and I really don't recommend it.

Examples

• The Mentor, "The Conscience of a Hacker", Phrack magazine, 1986
• Interventions by Anonymous
• Cult of the Dead Cow's "Back Orifice" and "netbus"
• WikiLeaks
• Stuxnet??
• Vitaly Borker??

__ THURSDAY, 10/14 __

• Project 2, Tutorial 2: CSS and text modification with a browser extension

__ TUESDAY, 10/19 & THURSDAY, 10/21 __

Reminder: our regular classes will not meet this week in lieu of one-on-one advising sessions.

Please add yourself to the sign-up sheet

__ TUESDAY, 10/26 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Amaya Branche (CryptoHarlem, presentation)

Readings

• Charlton McIlwain, Black Software: The Internet and Racial Justice, from the AfroNet to Black Lives Matter, Introduction and chapters 1, 4, and optionally 5.
• André Brock, “Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception”, New Media & Society, 2011
• (Optional.) Tara McPherson, "U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: The Intertwining of Race and UNIX", from Race After the Internet, Lisa Nakamura and Peter A. Chow-White, eds. 2012.
• (Optional.) Ruha Benjamin, "Assessing risk, automating racism", Science, Oct 25, 2019: Vol. 366, Issue 6464, pp. 421-422.
• (Optional.) Ruha Benjamin, "Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society", video of a talk at Portland State University

Examples

• The Blackbird web browser
• American Artist, "Black GUI"
• Matthew Mitchell, "CryptoHarlem"
• AfroNet

__ THURSDAY, 10/28 __

• Project 2, tutorial 3: User options and additional HTML manipulation techniques in a browser extension

__ TUESDAY, 11/2 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Natalie Pierson (Notes toward a "Liberated Computer Language" from The Exploit, presentation)
• Ekin Turken (The Arabic programming language Alb, قلب, presentation)

Readings

• Ron Eglash, "Broken Metaphor: The Master Slave Analogy", 2007
• (Optional.) Seth Rosenblatt, "Block/Allow: The Changing Face of Hacker Linguistics" (Available at darkreading.com)
• Developers Debate Deleting ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ Code Terminology, 2020
• Github: Replace "master" and "slave" terms in Redis, 2016
• Github: Eliminate master terminology, 2020
• Ari Schlesinger, "Feminism and Programming Languages", Nov 2013
• Ari Schlesinger, "A Feminist & A Programmer", Dec 2013
• Ari Schlesinger, "A Feminist Programming Language?", Jul 2014
• Brandee Easter, " Feminist_brevity_in_light_of_masculine_long-windedness: code, space, and online misogyny", 2018

Examples

• Ramsey Nasser’s Alb (قلب) — You can learn more about Alb in the first episode of former student Caleb Stone's podcast: Artists and Hackers.
• Glossary from The Exploit: "Notes for a liberated computer language"

Optional second topic

In the interest of focusing on the above debates, we won't have time to get to this additional topic this week, so I'll post it here as optional for those interested in the idea of "computational citizenship":

• Joy Lisi Rankin, A People’s History of Computing in the United States, Introduction and chapter 1

Examples to go with Rankin reading:

• Oregon Trail
• PLATO

__ THURSDAY, 11/4 __

• Project 2, tutorial 4: Publishing an extension in the Chrome Web Store

__ TUESDAY, 11/9 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Tench Cholnoky (Low-power FM, presentation)

Readings

Normally the reading order doesn't matter too much, but in this case I strongly advise you to read the Enzensberger first, as the Baudrillard is a response. Each PDF here includes 1-2 pages of introduction and context. Feel free to read the intros or not as you wish.
• Hans Magnus Enzensberger, "Constituents of a Theory of Media"
• Jean Baudrillard, "Requiem for the Media”

Screenings

We started off class today with two media objects: an excerpt from Sidney Lumet's 1976 film "Network," and the opening joke from last weekend's "Weekend Update" segment on Saturday Night Live. The first serves as a kind of allegory for the sentiment at the time of these two articles about the collective yearning for two-way media technology in opposition to the one-way circulations of broadcast media. The second, 40 years later, serves as a kind of counter-point to that based on how the internet has unfolded in the ensuing decades.

• "Network" (Sidney Lumet, 1976). We watched the first minute for some contextual setup, then jumped to 42:25 - 44:45, and then to 52:30 - 57:40 for the iconic "mad as hell" scene. (Note, this is a .mkv file. You can use VLC media player to view it.)
• "Weekend Update" intro, Saturday Night Live, Nov 6, 2021.

Examples

• Low-power FM radio (LPFM)
• Graffiti Research Lab: Laser Tag project video documentation

__ THURSDAY, 11/11 __

• Due: Project 2 for in-class presentation

__ TUESDAY, 11/16 __

[Lecture slides]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Dayton Upchurch (Peer-to-peer networks, presentation)

Readings

• Brian Larkin, "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy", from Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria
• Colin Ward on "direct action": chapter 1 of Anarchy in Action, 1973, (pgs 21-30). I've included the whole book here, and the whole thing is great, but for our conversation I'm only asking you to focus on those 9 pages.
• Michel Bauwens, "The Political Economy of Peer Production", ctheory.net, 2005

Watch

• David Graeber on a new pirate book, shortly before he passed away

Examples

• Aaron Swartz:
  • "The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Swartz", Rolling Stone profile, 2013
  • "Aaron Swartz, Coder and Activist", Wired.com profile, 2013
  • It is also possible to look through his GitHub account, which is still up
  • And excerpts from his blog, aaronsw.com
• Sci-hub, by Alexandra Elbakyan — some background about it from theverge.com
• aaarg.fail (or whatever the URL is now – if it still exists! https://monoskop.org/Aaaaarg)
• The Anti-capitalist Software License
• Examples of so-called peer-to-peer software from Napster to BitTorrent

__ THURSDAY, 11/18 __

• We had a continuation of our Tuesday discussion today.

__ TUESDAY, 11/23 __

Lecture slides

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Sirneh Asangwe (Diaspora, presentation)

Readings

• Alex Galloway and Eugene Thacker, “Protocol and Counter-Protocol”, Ars Electronica, 2003
• Alex Galloway, Foreword and introduction from Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, 2004
• Primavera De Filippi, "It's Time to Take Mesh Networks Seriously (And Not Just for the Reasons You Think)", Wired.com, 2014
• Greta Byrum, "Building the People's Internet", 2019

Examples

• Radical Network conference, and the many examples presented and exhibited there
• Dweb conference
• Diaspora
  • IEEE Spectrum, "The Anti-Facebook", 2011
  • Sarah Mei, "Disalienation: Why Gender is a Text Field on Diaspora"
• Mastodon
• Eben Moglen's "Freedom Box"
• Mesh network examples including goTenna, FireChat, and libreRouter

__ THURSDAY, 11/25 __

• NO CLASS — Happy Thanksgiving!

__ TUESDAY, 11/30 __

[Zoom audio recording, searchable transcript with timestamps]

Profile in Radical Software Student Presentation

• Violette Hedo (Feminist Servers, presentation)
• Eli McGehee (Mesh networks, presentation)

Readings

• Christina Dunbar-Hester, Hacking Diversity, chapters 1 & 2 (introduction & "History, Heresy, and Hacking")
• Ben Tarnoff, "The Making of the Tech Worker Movement", Logic magazine, May 4, 2020
• (Optional.) Shannon Mattern, “Scaffolding, Hard and Soft: Critical and Generative Infrastructures,” 2018
• (Optional.) Shannon Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places journal, 2018

Examples

• Collection of projects listed here: Servers: From autonomous servers to feminist servers

__ THURSDAY, 12/2 __

We started off today completing a discussion of the readings from Tuesday. [Lecture slides, Zoom audio recording, searchable transcript with timestamps]

• ProjectTechnical unit 3: Packet sniffing experiments
• Technical unit 3, Tutorial 1: Introduction to network tools and network experimentation

__ TUESDAY, 12/7 __

[Lecture slides to come]

Readings

• Audre Lorde, "The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"

__ THURSDAY, 12/9 __

• Technical unit 3, Tutorial 2: Packet sniffing with tcpdump, Wireshark, and RSG's Carnivore; local area network experiments

__ TUESDAY, 12/14 __

Final presentations

Final paper presentation keywords: Please find your name here and add a few keywords that relate to what you will be sharing with the class about your final paper. I have also added a column for notes, and if you have any thoughts or suggestions about grouping ideas, for yourself or for others, please add them here.

Please prepare 2-4 slides. I think it would be good if you consider sharing the current event news item that you have found, although I don't think we need to consider this a strict requirement. Perhaps offer a brief summary of the thesis or argument that you are developing in your final paper, and think about how you are addressing the question from the assignment prompt: what is radical software? After all the ideas of this semester, what would you like to emphasize as a meaningful way to define this term?

We'll organize presentations in 4 groups each with 3-5 people. Each person will present for about 4 minutes, and we'll hold questions & discussion until the whole group presents. This will leave about 5 minutes of discussion per group.

I will form & post the groupings after everyone adds their keywords to the spreadsheet above. You do not need to coordinate with your group members at all, but if you wish to do so, that would be great. Perhaps you'd like to determine your presentation order or think about how your ideas interrelate in some way.

There will be pizza (Two Boots Joe's Pizza, 14th Street). Please feel free to bring anything to share with that if you'd like. We'll have to please try to be careful & concientious when removing masks to eat as we're in a pretty small classroom.