Mythological discourse is conventionally understood to be concerned with form over content abstract types over concrete instances. Roland Barthes (1972, 143) has argued that myths' abstraction lets them function as "depoliticized speech": by tying together timeless cosmic orders and ordinary historical experience, myths naturalize the archetypes and structures they contain, giving historical contingencies "a natural and eternal justification, ... a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact." In computer science, abstraction is also a central practice and value, which identifies underlying coherence by disregarding details considered extraneous. To suggest that collaborative filtering and prehistoric ant trails are the same kind of thing requires just such an abstraction, shedding the many features that might distinguish them in favor of a timeless, underlying unity. Critics of computer science have, echoing Barthes, suggested that this commitment to abstraction has made the field "antipolitical" -- aggressively dismissive of historic particularity [...]

We can think of these myths as scaling devices. They establish the scope of discussion, indicating that we are not talking about minor acts of coding but about enduring problems of existence. If the ordinary work of programming seems boring -- like staying put all day and typing -- these stories reimagine telling computers what to do as transformative action on the largest possible scale. As the linguistic anthropologist Judith Irvine (2016, 228) argues, "scale-climbing" is an ideological operation: by claiming the broader view, people try to encompass one another within their own explanatory frameworks (see Gal and Irvine 1995). Epochal software stories set human species-being within a computational frame, recasting practically all social activities as precursors to their narrators' technological projects. David Golumbia, in The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009), has adapted a term from the philosophy of mind -- "computationalism" -- to describe this expansionist tendency in the rhetoric of computing, which enables software to alternately lay claim to the future and the past: new companies figure themselves as both innovators and inheritors of timeless truths.

Identifying these myths as myths is a first step toward reimagining our situation, making received wisdom contestable by reinstalling it in historical time (see Bowker 1994). We can locate overload in concrete situations, with all the particularities that abstraction scrapes away. But we can also analyze how the myth works, as a story that is intellectually productive and world-enframing for the people who tell it. In anthropological terms, we can take myths not as falsehoods to be disproved but as keys to their tellers' cosmology: their worldview, their sense of the order of things, their background theory of society and of existence more generally.