“The Case for Software Criticism”:
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—in theory, at least, if it existed—is a focused interrogation of a single work.
But perhaps that’s why software criticism is needed more than ever in the midst of the brinkmanship between the two worlds. Software criticism may be one of the ways to inch toward an armistice. In the demonology of some media outlets, “software engineer” occupies the same rank as “investment banker,” and in certain circles in the Bay Area, the word “journalist” is uttered like a slur. But that both sides are engaged in a shady enterprise is a corrosive belief.
And surely we can use some exciting prose! Burn that copy of On Writing Well and help yourself with some Nabokov soup. Exorcize the kind of homogenizing language that abound in the rationalist blogosphere written by Scott Alexander wannabes and avoid sounding as if the text were generated by a language model trained on VC tweets. Self-medicate with William H. Gass, luxuriate in Lydia Davis, mainline on Martin Amis, hallucinate with Geoff Dyer, get drunk on Peter Schjeldahl, and detoxify with the sobering yet adrenalizing prose of Parul Sehgal. Anything goes. Well, everything except the Zinsser-ized, over-sanitized—hence sterilized—technical prose, because we aren’t writing a damn README here.
So if grape juice and cars and buildings merit critical analysis for their complexity and design, shouldn’t a piece of modern software qualify as an object of criticism too?
The critic will anatomize the subject from several angles. Befitting the hybrid artifact that is software, the critic will adopt disciplinary anarchy, toggling between the commonsensical to the technical to the historical to the philosophical.
A software critic could stand anywhere in the spectrum ranging from technological enthusiasm to optimism to skepticism to pessimism but need to avoid extreme ends, meaning they should deftly sail between the Scylla of tech utopianism and the Charybdis of Luddism, in order to invite all kinds of readers and avoid setting off ideological alarms.
Technical expertise helps, but what’s needed is technical literacy.