User:Andre Castro/Annotation/ProgramOrBeProgrammed

Program or Be Programmed - Douglas Rushkoff

Douglas Rushkoff's book title - Program or Be Programmed - makes clear from the very start the author's argument. In the "highly programmed landscape ahead, you will either create the software or you will be the software" (p.7).

In Rushkoff's prespective computers gave us the possibility to write and make public what we write, which we do on websites, blogs, social-networks, wikis and tweets. Never-the-less "the underlying capability of the computer era is actually programming"(p.13), and programming is something that very few of us do. Rushkoff does not fall into a dis-utopian and no-hope discourse about software and the web, which one often encounters (eg: Cyburbia). He simply states that the capacity, perhaps the most important, that computers offer us, to program them, is not being explored by most of us. The consequences of such delegation are that only few of us will be shaping the inner-workings of our world, or as put by Rushkoff's: "Only by understanding the biases of the media through which we engage with the world can we differentiate between what we intend, and what the machines we are using intend of us - whether they or their programmers even know it"(p.21).

Questions/Notes

Rushkoff's vision of the near future, makes me ask why does code occupy such a relevant position that it can/will influence our lives so much? Why does it seem to possess magic powers over our lives and reality? (answer: Hayles and Cramer)

Why is that software seems to posses, at its very core, the possibility for being programming, for someone to start building him/herself bits of software? Couldn't that, for example, also happen with electronics, since it is also an omnipresent technology which is can become graspable? What does make software more prone to be understood and created by anyone? (Adrian Mackenzie and his analysis of free-software performativity might have a say here)

Rushkoff, D, (2010). Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age. New York: OR Books.