A theoretical examination of the surprising emergence of software as a guidingmetaphor for our neoliberal world.
New media thrives on cycles of obsolescence and renewal: from celebrations ofcyber-everything to Y2K, from the dot-com bust to the next big things -- mobile mobs, Web 3.0, cloudcomputing. In Programmed Visions, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun argues that these cyclesresult in part from the ways in which new media encapsulates a logic of programmability. New mediaproliferates "programmed visions," which seek to shape and predict -- even embody -- afuture based on past data. These programmed visions have also made computers, based on metaphor,metaphors for metaphor itself, for a general logic of substitutability.
Chunargues that the clarity offered by software as metaphor should make us pause, because software alsoengenders a profound sense of ignorance: who knows what lurks behind our smiling interfaces, behindthe objects we click and manipulate? The combination of what can be seen and not seen, known(knowable) and not known -- its separation of interface from algorithm and software from hardware --makes it a powerful metaphor for everything we believe is invisible yet generates visible, logicaleffects, from genetics to the invisible hand of the market, from ideology to culture.
