thesis/chapters/02_backdoors.md

2. Documentation as a backdoor

- when the entry points are blocked one has to search for backdoors
- little context for backdoors

- not only to participate in the making of software
- but also to inject values,

Here documentation is seen as a surface that could host principles in close contact with algorithms, letting them entangle and shape each other. A way to orientate our instruments towards "non-extractive relationships, but in the meantime, being accountable for the ones they are complicit with." (A Wishlist for Trans*feminist Servers, 2022)

- a way to transform coding contingencies? see introduction / move it here?
- programming as a way of sharing context
- what is contingent in this context? (meaning slightly out of reach)
- materiality? text editors? popular languages? economics?
- what can be changed?

- to expose people usually out of reach to different contexts
- literacy and exposition to certain concepts
- care vs attention economy

If we follow mainstream narratives, programming strives to be purely technical. Immaculate from the sin of politics. It's not rare to read comments online from users that demand to keep politics out from code repositories. Faithful to the western tradition of separate fields of study, coding wants just to be coding. All about performance and speed, new updates and features. A space where all problems are mechanical and can be solved.

But it wouldn't be fair to think that programmers simply don't care. Sometimes it's just a matter of being exposed to certain ways of thinking. Before the bachelor at the Accademy of Fine Arts for example, I've never been exposed to the writings of Donna Haraway, and I had no idea that concepts from feminism could have been so relevant also for me.

if you cite Haraway better explain why it's important for you etc

Ellen Ullman is a programmer and writer, one of the few women working as developer in the Silicon Valley during the 80s and 90s. The combination of coming from the humanities, being a self-taught programmer, and especially being a woman made her the archetypical outsider in the IT industry. At the same time, this very position granted her a unique ethnographic perspective, capable of looking critically at this environment, both from the inside and from the outside. In more than one passage for example, she laments the general lack of literacy between many of her coworkers.

Here code documentation could work as a backdoor: hacking its way to people that have never been exposed to certain topics. A way to offer an entry points to other worlds, and ground political choices into technical details.

from reaching a public to creating a public

politics of participation and representation

from the trans*feminists servers manifesto to the queer motto api to the 360 degrees of proximity

rethink participation in coding practice through a femminist perspective is not just swapping who can participate and who can not. doing so would just replicate current forms of exclusion.

the trans*femminist servers manifesto engage with a more messy entangled complex way of understanding participation and technology a way that open up for plurality, for instability, for safety, for situatedness

1

these principles are reflected in the documentation of the queer motto api, that question the idea of software as a smooth service always available, with a motto generator that sometimes refuses to work, needs to REST or take a nap, or strikes to celebrate particular days such as the 8th march

by publishing in the form of an API, ok what is an api in 2 words no meme of restaurant the project engage by nature with other projects, such as the transmediale website, that uses it to display one random motto every day.

who wants to integrate the queer motto api services needs to come at terms with the condition offered from the readme

the readme of the API offer an understanding of the various technical process involved in the classic idea of software-as-service, but re - narrating them from a feminist perspective

errors, service availability, consent and refusal, tokenism, all the terms neutralized by the normativity of everyday tech are here reactivated as powerful narrative devices

2

from the discussion about accessibility in p5js to alt-text as poetry

create / claim new spaces for participation, validate participation

aesthetic practices - hello worlding

adjust re-enchanting ?

Reenchanting code cannot be just a process of rebranding. Cannot be just a matter of changing the visual identity of the documentation, or washing it green or pink or black, or to capitalize on the inclusion of minorities.

Re-enchanting code means to create new narrations around software. As the artist James Bridle writes trying to untangle the complex social and environmental implications of digital computation: "Technology is not mere tool making and tool use: it is the making of metaphors". (James Bridle, 2018) These metaphors, like code documentation, influence the way we think and use our tools.

• Example: Master-slave examples on version control software documentation. See [BitKeeper](https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/blob/master/doc/HOWTO. ask#L223)
• Example: The military term deploy adopted by CI/CD systems such as the one on GitLab.
• Example: The naming of group of servers as fleet on AWS documentation, a term referring to naval formation, again with military connotation.

These metaphors orient code in the world. They reinforce, highlight and validate certain practices. A fleet implies centralized control, a swarm implies direct influences between participants, a federation implies certain degrees of independence, etc.

Nanni Moretti was slapping people in the face to remark the importance of words and their usage. In the movie Palombella Rossa, the main character suffered from memory loss after a car accident, and every dialogue was a precious handhold to find back his lost identity. His struggle was less concerning the correct usage of italian language, and more connected to the conceiled history in every word. A missing link between literal meaning of a term, and its broader traditions of uses, misuses, and transformations. The difference between talking and talking within a context.

To re-enchant code then means not only to find & replace terms throughout the documentation, but to re-trace genealogies, to intercept and re-orient narrations, and offer a redemption arc to those projects that were abandoned. To re-enchant code means to coat new systems of meanings around it.

uxn ecosystem: re reading esolangs, plan-9, and virtual machines through the ecological lens

A good example is the work of documentation around the Uxn ecosystem, a personal computing stack initiated by the 100 Rabbits collective.

To meet their needs for a portable and lightweight infrastructure, and reduce the energy consumption of their digital tools (in order to live and work on a wind & solar powered sailboat)

The two of them live on a sailboat since, mostly offline and mostly offgrid.

To meet their needs for a portable and lightweight infrastructure they progressively moved away from the industry-standard toolchain

towards a self hosted, self developed, personal computing stack

... Weathering software winter --> plan-9 and esolangs seen through the lens of permacomputing

as reported in weathering software winter this years long reserach (and life project) worked as backward exploration of what was left behind by so called progress

the search to rethink personal computing from an ecological perspective touches on several projects left at the margin of tech culture

to finally settle on the idea of virtual machine and emulation with uxn and the varvara computer

in the unx documentation plan-9 and several esoteric programming languages work as lore and in this way are reactivated as ground for experimenting alternatives to face the ecological disaster

the screenless office read through tiger dingsun's chimeric worlding

the screenless office by brendan howell is a project to re imagine computing away from the visual interface of the screen
screen seen as catalyst of capitalism

tiger dingsun chimeric worlding is a text on graphic design used for worldbuilding
since special issue 16 i started versioning that text replacing graphic design with other practice / surfaces (ex: API as worldbuilding)
version it again for code documentation as worldbuilding

weave the two together with the main concept of worldbuilding as a way to create alternative to capitalism

aesthetic programming as a bridge between software studies and creative coding

Aesthetic Programming - A Handbook of Software Studies, by Winnie Soon and Geoff Cox is an example on how to weave together these different discourses. The book explains the basic concepts of programming: it starts from variables and loops, to arrive at more complex topics such as machine learning or speech recognition. The technical curriculum offered is in line with other similar resources that target non-engineers. What's different here is a commitment to critically enquiry themes such as colonialism, racism, gender and sexuality, capitalism and class, and how are they embedded in code.

Soon and Cox prepared these lessons for students enrolled in a design institution, and curated the pubblication addressing a public somehow familiar with the discourses around software studies. Thanks to the vantage point of writing documentation for beginners, they could be super explicit and go all out with generous amount of references.

[ fade out towards outro ]

it could be nice to have a small glossary / way to situate / elaborate on these terms:
(or even better to use them to organize the chapter and the examples)

coding contingencies    context around code, either intentional or contingent
political aesthetic     political choices that inform technical choices
worlding                aesthetic practices that create narrations around code

would it make sense then to move here the coding contingencies section from the intro?
end elaborate on that a little

• queer technologies?

2.2 Technical is political

2.3 Hello Worlding

reclaim         take back
reenchant       intercept
reassure        keep going

reclaim         renegotiate, recuperate, remember, refuse, reactivate
reenchant       redirect, rebirth, reboot, rebrand, redeem
reassure        refrain, refresh, regret, reaffirm, register, readme

reclaim

There seems to be a risk in reducing sociality around software to a conflict between "friends and foes": a risk to reproduce forms of exclusion and violence typical of the IT world. To just swap good and bad, and offer clean solutions.

Try instead to apply Chantal Mouffle's concept of agonistic politics to software development, intended as struggle between different hegemonic projects. But maybe is to much of a stretch

How can documentation create new spaces around code? Where new spaces means spaces for who are excluded.

Think about the works around queerying technologies, from Zach Blass to Trans\*feminist servers, to Queerying UNIX, to 360 degrees of proximity, the Queer motto API.

Think about projects related to accessibility, and space built by and for people with diverse ability. Alt-text poetry could be a good starting point.

Think about the efforts to create safe spaces to learn.