Radical Software

__ THURSDAY, JAN 22 __

Optional background readings: (We’ll revisit two of these later in the semester)

• "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

__ TUESDAY, JAN 27 __

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Alex B, Berkeley Community Memory. Slide presentation [Thanks, Alex!]

__ THURSDAY, JAN 29 __

• Project 1 kick off.
• Rory will be absent this day. Jonah will convene class, and we will be joined by students sharing examples of Project 1 work from past classes.
• Video lecture describing the first project. And here is a searchable text transcript of the class. (If you are trying to look for a topic, you can search in the transcript for keywords and then jump the video to that timestamp.)

• Project 1 Assignment: Browser extension, Disrupting web norms. (Hard copy to be distributed in class as well.)
• Project 1, Intro and background

__ TUESDAY, FEB 3 __

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Anneke, Julian Oliver's Pink Cell Tower. Slide presentation [Thanks, Anneke]

Rory's Slide presentation

__ THURSDAY, FEB 5 __

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

__ TUESDAY, FEB 10 __

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Audrey Yip, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Level of Confidence

Rory's Slide presentation

__ THURSDAY, FEB 12 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 2: Page content modification with a browser extension

__ TUESDAY, FEB 17 & THURSDAY, FEB 19 __

Instead ofour regularly scheduled class sessions this week we will have one-on-one advising conversations. The meetings will be on Thursday and Friday. 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, FEB 24 __

Readings:

• (Possibly revisit here, depending on how much time we had to discuss during 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.

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Lillian Boutin, RightToRepair.org and The Maintainers. Slide presentation [Thanks, Lillian!]

__ THURSDAY, FEB 26 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 3: Adding user options
• Zoom recording of today's class for anyone who missed. And here is a searchable text transcript of the class. (If you are trying to look for a topic, you can search in the transcript for keywords and then jump the video to that timestamp.)

__ TUESDAY, MAR 3 __

Readings:

• Colin Ward, Anarchy in Action, 1973, Chapter 1 (pages 21-30), on "direct action"
• Gavin Mueller, Breaking Things at Work: The Luddites Are Right about Why You Hate Your Job, 2021, PDF (introduction, chps 1 & 4)

Optional:

• 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.)
• Brian Merchant's blog for this book
• Sheelah Kolhatkar, "Revenge of the Luddites", New Yorker, October 2023, on Brian Merchant's Blood in the Machine. Online, and PDF
• Saul Alinsky, "Of Means and Ends," from Rules for Radicals: A Practical Primer for Realistic Radicals, 1971

Examples:

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Matthew Poisson, the Nightshade "AI poisoning" utility

__ THURSDAY, MAR 5 __

• Project 1, Tutorial 4: Other miscellaneous browser extension techniques, including creating a popup. (If you are interested in how to publish your extension in the Chrome Web Store, please reach out and we can discuss.)

__ TUESDAY, MAR 10 __

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

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 right-to-repair movement, and The Maintainers
• The Berkeley Community Memory project

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Sonya Perez

__ THURSDAY, MAR 12 __

• Project 1 due for in-class presentation

__ TUESDAY, MAR 17 & THURSDAY, MAR 19 __

__ TUESDAY, MAR 24 __

Readings:

• 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

Optional readings:

• Tim Jordan, " Online Direct Action: Hacktivism and Radical Democracy", from Radical Democracy and the Internet Interrogating Theory and Practice, 2007
• Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg, pgs 1-55

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.

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Jess

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
• Kevin Poulsen
• Kevin Mitnick
• Stuxnet??
• Vitaly Borker??

__ THURSDAY, MAR 26 __

Extended discussion from Tuesday of texts and film for this week (Zoom class)

__ TUESDAY, MAR 31 __

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Renata

Examples:

• Platform Cooperativism Consortium, (platform.coop)
• Algorithmic Justice League, ajl.org
• Matthew Mitchell, "CryptoHarlem"

__ THURSDAY, APR 2 __

• Project 2 Assignment: Keyboard injection attack, Hardware attacks, and "OpSec"
• Project 2, Tutorial 1: Working with the Hak5 Rubber Ducky

__ TUESDAY, APR 7 __

Readings:

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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• To come

Examples:

• Edward Snowden
• Wikileaks
• Guccifer (and Guccifer 2.0)
• USB dead drops (For example: Patrick Quinn, SURVANT USB Dead Drop, 2014)

__ THURSDAY, APR 9 __

• Continued work on Project 2, Tutorial 1

__ TUESDAY, APR 14 __

Readings:

• Martin Paul Eve, Warez, chapter 1, "Original Pirate Material"
• Brian Larkin, "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy", from Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban Culture in Nigeria

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Sophia Dombrowski

Examples:

• Aaron Swartz:
• Sci-hub, by Alexandra Elbakya
• Library Genesis (libgen.is)
• Anna's Archive
• 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, APR 16 __

• Project 2, Review of the basics
• Continued work on Project 2, Tutorial 1

__ TUESDAY, APR 21 __

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. And this article (formerly on femtechnet.org) has also been recently taken down, but can also be found archived here.
• 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

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• To come

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, APR 23 __

• Project 2, Tutorial 2

__ TUESDAY, APR 28 __

Readings:

• Ben Tarnoff and Moira Weigel, "Silicon Valley Workers Have Had Enough", New York Times, Jan. 26, 2021. Available online (gift link), and as a PDF here.
• Greta Byrum, "Building the People's Internet", Urban Omnibus, Oct 02, 2019. Available online, and as a PDF here.
• (Optional.) Marisa Duarte, Network Sovereignty: Building the Internet Across Indian Country, excerpts
• (Optional.) Arturo Escobar, interview in Design and Solidarity: Conversations on Collective Futures, and/or excerpts from Designs for the Pluriverse

Discussion leader & profiles in radical software presentations:

• Leah Loesser and Zach Rand

Examples:

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

__ THURSDAY, APR 30 __

• Project 2 work share / presentations

__ TUESDAY, MAY 5 __

Readings:

• Audre Lorde, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House"
• Tara Tarakiyee, "On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: 'The Master's Tools' in Tech Discourse", March 28, 2026

__ THURSDAY, MAY 7 __

• Final paper discussion & review

__ TUESDAY, MAY 12 __

Possibly holding class somewhere off campus if there is interest ... (Ridgewood Commons, Prime Produce, Index Space, Eyebeam, Sunview Luncheonette, or elsewhere ...)