I gave a talk at 4S in Washington DC this fall entitled, “Software/Code is Society Made Malleable.” It was a riff off of an essay by Bruno Latour titled, “Technology is Society Made Durable.” In that talk I was exploring the shifting field of technology as numerous devices integrate hardware/firmware. I’ve put the abstract of that talk at the bottom of the post. The gist of the talk, which was actually delivered using the Nintendo DS Emulator and slides developed with the DS Homebrew Toolchain, looked at several particular issues as they relate to how user/consumer/players are dominated (literally) under the shifting field of technology as it swerves with cultural and political-economic change. Certainly the iPhone falls into this category as well, but so does my Television, which can automatically update itself over my home network.
I recently noticed that direct contradictions often emerge when you watch these arenas long enough. First Sony says they will not remove a feature from users Playstation 3 consoles. Within less than a year, they’ve changed their mind, demanding that users install an update that removes features from their device, or it will largely cease to function. Now for the kicker, if PS3 tech savvy individuals figure out a way to install the updated firmware and restore those capabilities that were taken from them, they stand the possibility of being pursued for criminal activity.
Or, as I concluded the paper:
Thus, it is the possibility for shift, change, and swerve that makes technologies capable of being part of hegemonic discourse. Their adjustment to users and appropriations over time is precisely what makes them difficult and different. “Domination” becomes less about stationary stability and instead about stability over time and shifting fields of user activity. “At an accelerating pace in the twentieth century, the ruling relations come to form hyper-realities that can be operated and acted in rather than merely written and read” (Smith 1999, p. 84). Malleability seems the key to durability and domination.
Here is the abstract for the 4S talk:
This paper seeks to think through the consequences of software/code intertwined with silicon/hardware in as a means of understanding what Barnes and Latour refer to as “domination” amongst the technologized social order (Latour 1991). Based on participant observation amongst amateur and hobbyist videogame developers over nearly five years, this essay examines the role that software/code plays in rendering “malleable” wholes. Put another way, this essay grapples with what Dorothy Smith refers to as “ruling relations” or how the local is regulated by the extra-local (1999) through constant shifting fields of software/code. It is postulated that software/code’s ability to shift and adjust over time is precisely what is necessary for the state or systems of control or domination to persist; it is foundational to the hegemonic negotiation. Specific cases surrounding homebrew development amongst Sony’s Playstation Portable (PSP) and the Nintendo DS (“dual screen”) are used as particular examples as to how ruling relations are maintained despite and in spite of a shifting socio-technical landscape. These two handheld computing devices offer a productive lens for understanding how software/code and silicon/hardware are put at play, where differing “hegemonic projects” (Omi and Winant 1994) push and pull one another in sometimes surprising ways.