My argument would be that while the timing is different, programming might not be all the different from other professions in its claims to exclusive mastery based on knowledge of protocols shorn of certain material and practical dimensions. In this regard, is it all that different from architecture? What might need explaining is rather how software intervened in, and transforms, all the professions. Most of them have been redefined as kinds of information-work. In many cases this can lead to deskilling and casualization, on the one hand; and to the circling of the wagons around certain higher-order, but information-based, functions on the other. It is not that programming is an example of “neoliberalism,” so much as that neoliberalism has become a catch-all term for a collection of symptoms of the role of computing in its current form in the production of information as a control layer.

Hence my problem with the ambiguity in formulations such as this: “Software becomes axiomatic. As a first principle, it fastens in place a certain neoliberal logic of cause and effect, based on the erasure of execution and the privileging of programming” (49). What if it is not that software enables neoliberalism, but rather that neoliberalism is just a rather inaccurate way of describing a software-centric mode of production? The invisible machine joins the list of other invisible operators: slaves, women, workers. They don’t need to be all that visible so long as they do what they’re told. They need only to be seen to do what they are supposed to do. Invisibility is the other side of power.13 To the extent that software has power or is power, it isn’t an imaginary fetish.