Radical Software

__ TUESDAY, AUG 27 __

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, AUG 29 __

• Project 1 Assignment: Browser extension, Disrupting web norms
• Project 1, Introduction: Browser extensions and HTTP

__ TUESDAY, SEP 3 __

Readings: (Please always consult the syllabus for weekly readings and page numbers.)

• Matthew Fuller, Software Studies: A Lexicon, Introduction and "Source Code"
• Rory Solomon, "Last In, First Out: Network Archaeology of/as the Stack," Amodern 2
• Friedrich Kittler, "There is No Software," ctheory.net, 1995
• Benjamin Bratton, "On the Nomos of the Cloud: The Stack, Deep Address, Integral Geography," available as a lecture video on YouTube (The lecture itself starts at 6min 45sec ((direct link here) and you can watch until the Q&A at 1hour 1min 45sec
• Bruce Sterling with Jon Lebkowsky on WELL.com, "State of the World 2013". This is an archive of an email-based conversation. I recommend scrolling down and reading item #8, "Stacks," but you might be interested in the rest of the exchange.

Optional:

• Rita Raley, "Code.surface || Code.depth," UC Santa Barbara, 2006. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3197s6zp
• Metahaven interview with Benjamin Bratton, "The Cloud, the State, and the Stack: Metahaven in Conversation with Benjamin Bratton"

Examples:

• My demonstration of the call stack using p5.js

__ THURSDAY, SEP 5 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 1: Getting started with browser extensions

__ TUESDAY, SEP 10 __

Readings:

• Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies, Introduction, chapter 10 ("Radical Technologies"), and conclusion
• 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.
• (Optional.) This little bit of background on Schumpeter and his idea of "creative destruction" might 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).
• Karl Marx, "Fragment on Machines", from the Grundrisse

Optional:

• Tim Wu, The Master Switch (Not included in our Google Drive, but should be easily findable. Ask me if you're interested.)
• 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

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"?
• The Maintainers

__ THURSDAY, SEP 12 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 2: CSS and text modification with a browser extension

__ TUESDAY, SEP 17 __

Readings:

• Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction, Introduction and chapter 2 "Shell Shocked: My Journey of Disillusionment", PDF
• Angwin, Larson, Mattu, and Kirchner, "Machine Bias" (on COMPAS), Pro Publica, May 2016. Online at ProPublica.org, and PDF
• Angwin & Mattu, "Amazon Says It Puts Customers First. But Its Pricing Algorithm Doesn’t" Pro Publica, September 2016. Online at ProPublica.org, and PDF
• Joy Buolamwini & Timnit Gebru, "Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification", Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:1–15, 2018

Examples:

• Algorithmic Justice League, ajl.org

__ THURSDAY, SEP 19 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 3: User options

__ TUESDAY, SEP 24 __

Readings:

• (Moved here since we skipped it in week 3.) Karl Marx, "Fragment on Machines", from the Grundrisse
• Maurice Block, "Radicalism", from John Joseph Lalor, Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and of the Political History of the United States, 1899
• Raymond Williams, entries on "Radical," "Anarchism," "Reform," "Communism," "Socialism," "Liberalism, from Keywords, 1976 (New edition 2015)
• Donella Meadows, "Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System"
• On the wisdom in taking a markedly non-radical approach to software: Joel Spolsky, "Things You Should Never Do, Part I", available online at Joel On Software

Optional:

• (Bumped to optional to accommodate the Marx text this week.) Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven, "The importance of the radical imagination in dark times", from The Radical Imagination: Social Movement Research in the Age of Austerity, 2014
• Bill Rankin, creator of radicalcartography.net, interview with Laura Kurgan, "Seeing Cities, Guernica magazine.

__ THURSDAY, SEP 26 __

• Today we were visited by Tench Cholnoky (tenchc.rodeo) who shared two browser extension projects: Web Scramblyfier and an in-progress browser history palimpsest. (No technical tutorial today.)

__ TUESDAY, OCT 1 __

Readings:

• Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, 1973, Chapter 1, on "direct action"
• Andreas Malm, How to Blow up a Pipeline, Chapter 3, "Fighting Despair"
• Brian Merchant, Blood in the Machine, 2023, Introduction (PDF pages 26-32). Unfortunately this is a PDF of the ePub version, so there are no page numbers within the text, so let's go by PDF page numbers.)
• Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Revenge of the Luddites", New Yorker, October 2023, on Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. Online, and PDF

Optional:

• Brian Merchant's blog for this book
• Saul Alinsky, "Of Means and Ends," from Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971
• Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg, pgs 1-55

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Tabi Cass, Google Will Eat Itself
• Liv Beruti, Obfuscation by Brunton & Nissenbaum, the TrackMeNot browser plugin, and the Tor browser

__ THURSDAY, OCT 3 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 4: Miscellaneous additional techniques

__ TUESDAY, OCT 8 __

Readings:

• Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, 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

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Faye (Stop SESTA/FOSTA)
• Grace (Right-to-repair movement, and The Maintainers)

Other 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, OCT 10 __

• Project 1 due for in-class presentation

__ TUESDAY & THURSDAY, OCT 15 & 17 __

No regular class this week

Instead of our regularly scheduled class sessions this week we will have one-on-one advising conversations. These will primarily be via Zoom though I would be happy to meet in-person if you wish.

Please add your name to the sign-up sheet.

__ TUESDAY, OCT 22 __

Readings:

• Tim Jordan, " Online Direct Action: Hacktivism and Radical Democracy", from Radical Democracy and the Internet Interrogating Theory and Practice, 2007
• Gabriella Coleman, " Hacker", Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, 2014
• Gabriella Coleman, "Our Weirdness is Free," 2012. This piece is available as a multimedia publication on the Triple Canopy website, and in a PDF of a more traditional format

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.
• 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.

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Jonah Winchell, Cult of the Dead Cow & Back Orifice
• Di Murray, Kevin Poulsen

Other 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, OCT 24 __

Introduction to the final project (Project 3)

To prepare for our conversation, please review the following material:

• Read through this syllabus for Paul Soulellis's class "Urgentcraft: Radical Publishing During Crisis"
• Items from this issue of APRIA journal:
  • Mainly: Florian Cramer, What Is Urgent Publishing?, 2021
  • If you have time, also: Labor Neunzehn's "Reframe the Network"
  • And Paul Soulellis's "Urgent Publishing After the Artist's Book
• KUNCI Study Forum's "Tools for Radical Study: A Collection of Manuals", MARCH journal, March 2024; also available as a PDF on their website, and archived in our class Google Drive. This is pretty long. Let's focus on the intro (PDF pages 9-15).

__ TUESDAY, OCT 29 __

Readings:

• McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto. Manifesto items [001] - [023] ("Abstraction") and [071- 088] ("Hacking"), or if you can, all of [001] - [088]
• Joss Hands, "Platform Communism", Culture Machine, vol 14, 2013

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Lily Henry, the work of Stephanie Dinkins, and specifically "Not The Only One (N'TOO)"
• Maya Scott, on Matthew Mitchell & "CryptoHarlem"

Other examples:

• Platform Cooperativism Consortium, (platform.coop)
• Algorithmic Justice League, ajl.org

__ THURSDAY, OCT 31 __

• Project 2 Assignment: Keyboard injection attack

__ TUESDAY, NOV 5 __

Readings:

• Chelsea Manning, README.txt, chapters 8, 9, 10, and 15.

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Catalina Balladares, Guccifer (and Guccifer 2.0!)
• Fiona, Wikileaks

Other examples:

• Edward Snowden
• USB dead drops (For example: Patrick Quinn, SURVANT USB Dead Drop, 2014)

__ THURSDAY, NOV 7 __

• In class work on the USB Rubbery Ducky and Project 2

__ TUESDAY, NOV 12 __

Readings:

• Chelsea Manning, README.txt, chapters 8, 9, 10, and 15.

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Tommaso Lo Monaco, Open-source libraries (LibGen, Sci-Hub, Anna's Archive, etc)
• Roger Yan, Peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster, etc, mainly focusing on BitTorrent)

Other examples:

• Aaron Swartz:
• Sci-hub, by Alexandra Elbakya
• Library Genesis (libgen.is)
• 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, NOV 14 __

• Project 2, Technical tutorial

__ TUESDAY, NOV 19 __

Readings:

• Christina Dunbar-Hester, Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures, chapter 1 (Introduction) & chatper 2 ("History, Heresy, and Hacking")

An assortment of texts about the language of hacking

Please read the Rosenblatt and Kolakowski pieces as they're short articles. Then take a skim through the discussions in both GitHub links. Then please read the three Schlesinger pieces which are all also quite short. The piece by Easter offers an academic discussion about Schlesinger case and is a really fascinating read, but more than we can manage this week. Similarly the Eglash piece offers an academic discussion about the "master" and "slave" terminology. Feel free to skim the Easter and Eglash texts.

• Seth Rosenblatt, "Block/Allow: The Changing Face of Hacker Linguistics", 2020, available at darkreading.com
• Nick Kolakowski, "Developers Debate Deleting ‘Master’ and ‘Slave’ Code Terminology", 2020, available at dice.com
• GitHub: Replace "master" and "slave" terms in Redis, 2016
• GitHub: Eliminate master terminology, 2020
• Ari Schlesinger, "Feminism and Programming Languages", Nov 2013. This article has been taken down from its original location but thankfully can be found in the Internet archive here.
• Ari Schlesinger, "A Feminist && A Programmer", Dec 2013. This article has also been taken down from its original location but can also be found in the Internet Archive here.
• Ari Schlesinger, "A Feminist Programming Language?", Jul 2014
• Brandee Easter, " Feminist_brevity_in_light_of_masculine_long-windedness: code, space, and online misogyny", 2018
• Ron Eglash, "Broken Metaphor: The Master Slave Analogy", 2007

Optional background on prefigurative politics:

• Lara Monticelli, ed., The Future Is Now: An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics, 2022, Available online from our library
• Raekstad & Gradin, Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today, Polity Press, 2019. Unfortunately the only digital copy that I can find of this is an ePub, available here

Optional, about the Blackbird web browser:

• André Brock, "Beyond the pale: The Blackbird web browser’s critical reception"

Optional, on "computational citizenship" and alternative history of the internet:

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

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Nicole Richards (pushed to next week)

Examples:

• Corresponding with the Dunbar-Hester reading, we have the collection of projects listed here: Servers: From autonomous servers to feminist servers
• 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.
• Galloway & Thacker, “Notes for a liberated computer language,” a kind of glossary from The Exploit
• American Artist, "Black GUI"
• The Blackbird web browser

Corresponding with the optional Rankin text are these two examples:

• Oregon Trail
• The PLATO instructional platform

__ THURSDAY, NOV 21 __

• Project 2 work share / presentations

__ TUESDAY, NOV 26 __

Readings:

• Marisa Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country, excerpts
• Arturo Escobar, interview in Design and Solidarity: Conversations on Collective Futures, and/or excerpts from Designs for the Pluriverse

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Paulina (Pushed to next week)

Other examples:

• List of projects: From autonomous servers to feminist servers
• Lori Emerson's, "Other networks"
• NYC Mesh
• Items from this database

__ THURSDAY, NOV 28 __

• No class! Have a restful break.

__ TUESDAY, DEC 3 __

Readings:

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

Profiles in radical software presentations:

• Paulina

__ THURSDAY, DEC 5 __

• Final project work

__ TUESDAY, DEC 10 __

Collaborative project work

__ THURSDAY, DEC 12 __

Class will meet at Woodbine, "a volunteer-run experimental hub in Ridgewood, Queens."

Located at 585 Woodward Avenue. Best way to get there is probably to take the M train to Seneca Avenue and walk about 7 minutes.

We will start at 12:20pm and end at 1:30pm to accommodate travel time for folks with class immediately before and/or after.