Analyzing the book Program or Be Programmed: Ten Commands for a Digital Age by Douglas Rushkoff

Computer literacy is a prerequisite to full participation in digital society. In Program or Be Programmed, Douglas Rushkoff explains why mere computer skills aren’t enough to become a shaper of the future we will live in, or even to influence the present shape of things as they are today. Our lives run in part according to processes and systems driven either wholly or in large part by the way in which software is designed. In both subtle and obvious ways, the choice architecture underpinning processes we participate in every day is guided by unseen hands that programmed how they would work. This happens every time an automated resume screening tool parses data and sifts through applicants before their submission makes contact with a human. It happens when the store of our choice (online or physical) decides what targeted discounts to pitch us for our next visit. It also happens when an algorithm determines search results or when its not-so-distant cousin offers up the next potential life partner or sex buddy via electronic matching services.

None of this is arguably good or bad, but someone’s deliberate thinking made it so. Programs function the way they do by someone’s design. Some of the consequences are intended, while a great many of them aren’t. We can either passively live at the mercy of these important, living operating systems or we can actively shape their design ourselves. But to shape them, we must learn to program or learn enough about programming to influence what gets programmed by others.

One step we can take besides sitting down to learn Python, C++, Swift, or Ruby (which certainly doesn’t hurt) is to study the values of the age of programming. By doing so, we can reset some of the terms by which we live our lives and determine the extent to which technology influences us, our habits, and our value systems. I’ll only focus on a couple here, but all ten of those Rushkoff discusses in Program or Be Programmed are worth considering.

Choice

Digital programs often force binary choices that implicitly limit choices where no such limitation truly exists. Rushkoff rightly points out that we often have a much broader array of choices than the program, bounded by the imaginary limits of its author, offers. And, even more powerfully, we have the power not to choose at all. We can decline a false choice about even such fundamental notions as race, gender, age, political affiliation, or religious belief. Our choices are of our own choosing and need not be determined by programming not of our own making.

Identity

Anonymity comes easy on the Internet. I can present the mask I want people to see. This can cut us off, Rushkoff warns, from being fully present in so much interaction that takes place via digital media. It’s easier to depersonalized and distance myself from the human impact when I don’t face the person. I must claim my identity and bear it openly for my digital communication to mean anything. “Nothing is perfect unless it is personal,” G.K. Chesterton once wrote in The Everlasting Man. Perhaps nothing is perfectly personal, but it must be personal to mean something.

Perhaps an Intention

Humans are the only creatures we know of that participate in their own evolution as a species. Can we do less than participate fully in the design of the programming that shapes the evolution of our culture? Can we do less than apply our personal understanding of the range of choices that ought to be part of the future humankind builds? Can we not see that to get on with programming ourselves is preferable to going along with the program?