Software as Hermeneutics

This book claims that continental philosophy gives us a new understanding ofdigital technology, and software in particular; its main thesis being that softwareis like a text, so it involves a hermeneutic process. A hermeneutic understandingof software allows us to explain those aspects of software that escape a strictlytechnical definition, such as the relationship with the user, the human being, andthe social and cultural transformations that software produces. The startingpoint of the book is the fracture between living experience and the code. In thefirst chapter, the author argues that the code is the origin of the digital experience,while remaining hidden, invisible. The second chapter explores how the softwarecan be seen as a text in Ricoeur's sense. Before being an algorithm, code orproblem solving, software is an act of interpretation. The third chapter connectssoftware to the history of writing, following Kittler's suggestions.The fourth chapter unifies the two parts of the book, the historical and the theoretical, from a Kantian perspective. The central thesis is that software is a form of reflective judgment, namely, digital reflective judgement.