Software-Making and Algorithmic Techniques

The third chapter builds on central ideas from Simondon’s work, such as the distinction between invention and concretization and the delineation of technical elements, individuals, and ensembles, to conceptualize algorithmic techniques as the central carriers of technicity and technical knowledge in the domain of software. In dialogue with the cultural techniques tradition, it addresses them as methods or heuristics for creating operation and behavior in computing and discusses how they are invented and stabilized. Algorithmic techniques, in this perspective, are at the same time material blocks of technicity, units of knowledge, vocabularies for expression in the medium of function, and constitutive elements of developers’ technical imaginaries.