THE CASE FOR SOFTWARE CRITICISM

Software may be the defining cultural artifact of our age. It's time to build a culture of critical analysis around it

- SHEON HAN

HERE'S A QUICK typology of tech journalism today: news reporting ("Amazon Announces Layoffs Affecting 18,000 Employees"), gadget reviews, company and founder profiles, opinion essays (Zeynep Tufekci et al.), investigative work ("The Uber Files"), industry digests (TechCrunch), personal blogs, Substacks, and if you're feeling generous-Hacker News comments and GitHub "issues." It's an incomplete catalog, but you get the idea. Yet surveying this landscape reveals a curious lacuna: software criticism.

To be clear: Technology criticism is nothing new. Depending on who you ask, it goes way back to Lewis Mumford, Herbert Marcuse, Martin Heidegger, and Marshall McLuhan. More recently, I assume you've at least heard of popular books like The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and The Attention Merchants and may even be familiar with technology critics like Jaron Lanier, Evgeny Morozov, and Ellen Ullman. Or Fred Turner, Gabriella Coleman, and Sherry Turkle, to name a few from the academic flank.

But software criticism is not the same as technology criticism. A work of software criticism is to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" what a New York Times book review is to Virginia Woolf's "Modern Fiction." The latter is a more synoptic assessment of the field, while the former is a focused interrogation of a single work.

So where are software critics? Like the rise of novels in the 18th and 19th centuries or jazz in the 1920s, isn't software a defining artifact of our time? How in Turing's name hasn't a culture of software criticism emerged?