Up until this point, my dissertation has been conceived as a theoretical undertaking which will result in a monograph, as is the fashion in the North American humanities. 1 This may yet be the case; but I have decided that I would be remiss not to incorporate the software work and maintenance that is increasingly a core aspect of my labour and headspace. Thus I did some work remapping the structure of my dissertation this week. The first three chapters will still proffer a conceptual and critical history of the relation between computer science and capital, the topic on which I settled several years ago. I now intend to also add three more chapters to the dissertation as a whole which frame and reflect on three software systems I have built throughout my PhD.
These three projects will likely be: Rheo, Karaji, and the new project that I refer to in the intro above. Each of these systems will be something that I intend to use daily, as I currently use Rheo for all my writing, website maintenance, and slide decks. Each of these systems will also, I hope, be a serious open source software used by a non-trivial number of people, although maximizing the raw headcount of users is not their driving force. What I hope these systems will collectively demonstrate is a style of software that tugs against capital’s capricious nature, and therefore materializes in a different way the thrust of the theoretical argument I will make against a culture of computing that does not attend to how the value it produces in the world is disfigured by capital’s unconsciously installed drives, desires, and motive forces.