Before majoring in Communication, and currently media studies, I was on track to be a software engineer. I took the Introduction to Computer Science in community college and walked out after the first 30 minutes. We were given an assignment to write code according to basic functions listed on a sheet handed to us. As soon as I saw the visual renderings of symbols and their varying permutations, I thought to myself, “I don’t want to think of my computer this way,” and excused myself from class, and a lucrative career path. So, I anticipate a lengthy response because I may feel compelled to use this as an opportunity to convince myself that the decision was the right, or at least better, one.
Safe to say that I relived those 30 minutes while reading the pieces about coding: Mackenzie’s, Galloway’s, and Chun’s selections—more so with Mackenzie and Galloway. I’m oversimplifying their pieces, but Mackenzie and Galloway both shared a preoccupation—I think Chun would call it an obsession—in justifying/rationalizing/affirming software, like Linux, as “culture-objects,” determinative of a “new” new media studies; Chun called it “software studies.” However, I wish to respond mostly on Mackenzie’s piece, because of personally using custom firmware (Unix-based) for video game consoles provided by various Homebrew communities, and how I felt that these “alternative uses” of software were a bit too understated.
Mackenzie’s fascination with Linux derives from its associations as a “free software or ‘Open Source Software’”—unlike Mackenzie, Chun distinguishes between the two—, in which the OS is taken up in a variety of different contexts: financial market speculation, software development, corporate software production. For Mackenzie, the interest lies in understanding Linux’s efficacy as a technical object with respect to its variability across these fields. So, he concludes that Linux’s technical “performance”, which emerged in the cultural imaginary as “unbreakable”, free, and accessible, must be appropriately understood in terms of Butler’s conceptualization of performativity. Chun sharply notes the enlightenment rhetoric imbued within abstracted definitions of openly accessible and free software liberating software’s essence/being from corporate domination among other things. This narrativization of software as such echoes last week’s discussion of the formal idealization/idolization of “new media”.
Thus, I was unconvinced of his application of performativity determining Linux as a cultural object premised on “the performativity of circulation” encoded within itself, generating “cultures of circulation” like Sony’s releasing of a Linux OS for its PS2 console in 2002. What I am convinced of, however, is that there might be cultural and political implications beyond the source code of the Linux OS based on the uses and practices around the Linux OS and other derived versions. If Mackenzie suggests that the Linux’s “self-reflexive use of reference that enacts the act that it represents” (Mackenzie 73) determines a self-citational performativity obverse of this technical performance, I would rather side with Chun’s understanding of performative code premised on the “community…that enables such utterances to be repeated and executed, that one joins through such citation.” (Chun 322) That is, I cannot come to terms with a performative utterance solely contingent on the “sovereign subject” (Linux OS) that does not reference a “community with a history of speakers”, or programmers engaging with Linux OS and its iterations, or derivatives.
I hope what is written on the blog stays on the blog, but I confess that I am obsessed with “jailbreaking” video game consoles in order to “pirate”/download games from Japan that I did not want to pay ridiculous shipping for, in addition to modifying--"modding"--other games. Nevertheless, my first “hacked” console was the PSP, in which the system’s software (PlayStation Portable system software) is within the “Unix-like” OS family—Linux falls under the same category. A modded PSP uses custom firmware, iterations of PSP system software, that allows for “unauthorized” code to be run on the console, such as “homebrew” applications (Japanese RPGs). Programmers noticed opportunities for exploits within certain system software updates and took those windows to design derivative PSP system softwares, resulting in many CFWs. One of the more interesting things, from having kept up with these communities, is the cat-and-mouse game between official system software updates, released by Sony, and the CFW updates or downgrades, distributed by the Homebrew community. For example, Sony presented “carrots” in the forms of a “web browser” addition to the console's feature and new file compatibilities--among other features--, during one of the PSP software updates, enticing users into updating their consoles into patching the CFW’s useless; the updated software patched over the holes, or exploits. Some CFWs responded differently, such as "downgrading" in order to avoid certain trojan files that would “brick” the console, effectively making the console unusable; the trojan file was literally called “Trojan.PSPBrick” (what a performative utterance).
Ultimately, my point is, along with Chun, to insist that software, while having its material constituents, seems to always-already be contingent on real social relations that should not be folded into “material givens.” (Chun 311). The cat and mouse game alone illuminate those relations, in addition to reflecting uneven power relations (Sony hired Symantec to code the trojan file). It seemed to me that Mackenzie’s preoccupation to cultural-ize the Linux kernel, the material essence of Linux, through performativity, double-downed on formalist concerns of software, such that there wasn’t space to address the communities and corporations that remediate software; “software in media res.” (Chun 324).
No comments:
Post a Comment