About Code
I often find discussions of "code" by non-programmers vexing.
What I'm missing here is when did code take us so-called "unawares".
Watch out for code, it will creep up on you and strangle you in your sleep. It will murder your children and then eat your steak. "CODE coming to a theater, a car, an airport, a playground, a mall, a doctor's office, a restaurant..."
"Near you", but we never get to say "near you" because code is so many places. I was aggravated to read so many articles with the same perspective on code, outsiders, and alarmist. To read all of these articles about code and its creeping into every aspect of everyday life is astonishing or new... how? Why don't we talk about resistors or silicon chips or the wheel? None of these articles are from the perspective of the programmer, a programmer... any programmer. So they apply Foucault's bio power to code, talk about disciplining bodies, about power and it's mechanisms. This much we should know about Foucault's writings, "Where there is power, there is always resistance, and the two things are coextensive: "As soon as there is a power relation, there is a possibility of resistance. We can never be ensnared by power: we can always modify its grip in determinate conditions and according to a precise strategy." (Abnormal, "Course Context" by Marchetti and Salomoni). Some of these resistances are already familiar to us, like cheat codes in games or maybe that person that doesn't turn off his or her phone when the airplane takes off.
These surveys of the "landscape" are hegemonic at best, towing the line of government, consider Graham's mention of biometrics from the elite to "mass usage" making tracking "much easier simply because they are subjects attempting to travel ... without their associated data..."(567) This is a massive undertaking as soon as he touches on illegal migrants, the can of worms tipped over here is illegal flows of people - sovereignty. This is an up and coming issue in political science the question is "how large is the illegal economy?" for people trying to come into the country illegally, most of them are not taking planes, for those that are taking planes they can likely afford to have the biometric data can be created for them, states are implicit in the underground economy. So where does that leave us? Where are the legal challenges introduced in this article, citing 9/11 doesn't mean we burn the constitution, that grants a right to privacy. Business travelers choose to give that up, but this article implicitly contends it can be imposed. Flying certainly posts a number of logistic issues; space travel is completely overlooked in Dodge and Kitchin's article. And we think so little of hardware in all of the articles unless they are CCTV cameras or cell phones. What is device less code? Speech? There is clearly a fascination with the thing that can't be seen, the exotic.
Software programming is not "little understood" as Thrift and French say in their article, it's simply understood by those who need to understand it, clearly they lack the need. (324) The Automatic Production of Space was a long article and wasted a significant portion of my time. Why are we hatin' on code?