Unruly Bodies of Code in Time

Abstract

This chapter examines how debates about the (im)materiality of software comes to inhabit the practices of software engineering work who manage the temporality of obsolescence and its entanglement with their own careers, language proficiencies, and expertise during the lifetimes of systems they develop or maintain. It describes how bodies of code endure materially in ways that exceed their formal understanding, revealing how the hardwiring of temporality into digital systems takes place through a moral economy of software work that devalues of code as it ages and obsolesces. The habitus of the programmer is set within a disciplinary regime that sustains the imaginary of software as immaterial, infinitely flexible and malleable in spite of routine encounters with its material recalcitrance.