A guide to techno-galactic software observation
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> I am less interested in the critical practice of reflection, of showing once-again
> that the emperor has no clothes, than in finding a way to _diffract_ critical inquiry
> in order to make difference patterns in a more worldly way.
> [@haraway:1996:witness]
% p429, Haraway, modest witness, 1996 from: http://observatory.constantvzw.org/etherdump/friday.md.diff.html
The techno-galactic software survival guide that you are holding right now was collectively produced as an outcome of the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory. This guide proposes several ways to achieve critical distance from the seemingly endless software systems that surround us. It offers practical and fantastical tools for the tactical (mis)use of software, empowering/enabling users to resist embedded paradigms and assumptions. It is a collection of methods for approaching software, experiencing its myths and realities, its risks and benefits.
With the rise of online services, software use has been increasingly knitted into production, while suggesting that these roles constitute separate realms. This has an effect on the way software is used and produced, and radically alters its operative role in society. The shifts ripple across galaxies, through social structures, working conditions and personal relations, resulting in a profusion of apparatuses aspiring to be seamless while optimizing and monetizing individual and collective flows of information in line with the interests of a handful of actors. The diffusion of software services affects the personal, in the form of intensified identity shaping and self-management. It also affects the public, as more and more libraries, universities and public infrastructures as well as the management of public life rely on "solutions" provided by private companies. Centralizing data flows in the clouds, services blur the last traces of the thin line that separates bio- from necro-politics.
Given how fast these changes resonate and reproduce, there is a growing urgency to engage in a critique of software that goes beyond taking a distance, and that deals with the fact that we are inevitably already entangled. How can we interact, intervene, respond and think with software? What approaches can allow us to recognize the agency of different actors, their ways of functioning and their politics? What methods of observation enable critical inquiry and affirmative discord? What techniques can we apply to resurface software where it has melted into the infrastructure and into the everyday? How can we remember that software is always at work, especially where it is designed to disappear into the background?
We took on the term of observation for a number of reasons. We regard observation as a way to approach software, as one way to organize engagement with its implications. Observation, and the enabling of observation through intensive data-centric feedback mechanisms, is part of the cybernetic principles that underpin present day software production. Our aim was to scrutinize this methodology in its many manifestations, including in "observatories" -- high cost infrastructures [testing infrastructures?] of observation troubled by colonial, imperial traditions and their problematic divisions of nature and culture -- with the hope of opening up questions about who gets to observe software (and how) and who is being observed by software (and with what impact)? It is a question of power, one that we answer, at least in part, with critical play.
We adopted the term techno-galactic to match the advertised capability of "scaling up to the universe" that comes in contemporary paradigms of computation, and to address different scales of software communities and related political economies that involve and require observation.
Drawing on theories of software and computation developed in academia and elsewhere, we grounded our methods in hands-on exercises and experiments that you now can try at home. This Guide to Techno-Galactic Software Observation offers methods developed in and inspired by the context of software production, hacker culture, software studies, computer science research, Free Software communities, privacy activism, and artistic practice. It invites you to experiment with ways to stay with the trouble of software.
## The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory
In the summer of 2017, around thirty people gathered in Brussels to explore practices of proximate critique with and of software in the context of a worksession entitled "Techno-Galactic Software Observatory"[REF:worksessions]. The worksession called for software-curious people of all kinds to ask questions about software. The intuition behind such a call was that different types of engagement requires a heterogeneous group of participants with different levels of expertise, skill and background. During three sessions of two days, participants collectively inspected the space-time of computation and probed the universe of hardware-software separations through excursions, exercises and conversations. They tried out various perspectives and methods to look at the larger picture of software as a concept, as a practice, and as a set of techniques.
The first two days of The Techno-Galactic Software Observatory included visits to the Musée de l'Informatique Pionnière en Belgique [REF:NAM-IP] in Namur and the Computermuseum KULeuven. In the surrounding of these collections of historical ’numerical artefacts’, we started viewing software in a long-term context. It offered us the occasion to reflect on the conditions of its appearance, and allowed us to take on current-day questions from a genealogical perspective. What is software? How did it appear as a concept, in what industrial and governmental circumstances? What happens to the material conditions of its production (minerals, factory labor, hardware) when it evaporates into a cloud?
The second two days we focused on the space-time dimension of IT development. The way computer programs and operating systems are manufactured changed tremendously through time, and so did its production times and places. From military labs via the mega-corporation cubicles to the open-space freelancer utopia, what ruptures and continuities can be traced in the production, deployment, maintenance and destruction of software? From time-sharing to user-space partitions and containerization, what separations were and are at work? Where and when is software made today?
## The Walk-in Clinic
The last two days at the Techno-galactic software observatory were dedicated to observation and its consequences. The development of software encompasses a series of practices whose evocative names are increasingly familiar: feedback, report, probe, audit, inspect, scan, diagnose, explore, test ... What are the systems of knowledge and power within which these activities take place, and what other types of observation are possible? As a practical set for our investigations, we set up a walk-in clinic on the 25th floor of the World Trade Center, where users and developers could arrive with software-questions of all kinds.
_Do you suffer from the disappearance of your software into the cloud, feel oppressed by unequal user privilege, or experience the torment of software-ransom of any sort? Bring your devices and interfaces to the World Trade Center! With the help of a clear and in-depth session, at the Techno-Galactic Walk-In Clinic we guarantee immediate results.
The Walk-In Clinic provides free hands-on observations to software curious people of all kinds. A wide range of professional and amateur practitioners will provide you with Software-as-a-Critique-as-a-Service on the spot. Available services range from immediate interface critique, collaborative code inspection, data dowsing, various forms of network analyses, unusability testing, identification of unknown viruses, risk assessment, opening of black-boxes and more. Free software observations provided. Last intake at 16:45._
(invitation to the Walk-In Clinic, June 2017)
% R E F E R E N C E S
% [REF:NAM-IP] http://www.nam-ip.be/
% [REF:computermuseum] http://www.etwie.be/database/actor/computermuseum-ku-leuven
% [REF:worksessions] Worksessions are intensive transdisciplinary moments, organised twice a year by Constant. They aim to provide conditions for participants with different experiences and capabilities to temporarily link their practice and to develop ideas, prototypes and research projects together. For the worksessions, primarily Free, Libre and Open Source software is used and material that is available under
On the following pages: Software as a Critique as a Service (SaaCaaS) Directory and intake forms for Software Curious People (SCP).
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% SHOW: http://observatory.constantvzw.org/documents/scprecord_FINAL.pdf
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