“Creating the new tag ‘feminism‘ requires at least 150 reputation. Try something from the existing tags list instead.“
Stackoverflow.com is one of the most frequented internet forums for questions about programming languages and computer technology. Google referred me to the site for the first time some years ago when I was once again stuck on a coding problem. While I was clicking through questions and answers about Javascript and HTML, I noticed the category Hot Network Questions, which presented the best questions from all the forum entries on the right-hand side of the screen.
"Why was Sauron preparing for war instead of trying to find the ring?“
"Does academia have a lazy work culture?“
"How to respond to a sexual harrassment claim made against you?“
The questions seemed so arbitrary and at the same time so specific that I became less and less interested in my Javascript problems and more and more interested in the hot network queries. I wanted to get involved and, above all, I wanted to understand how Stackoverflow works, as a community of programmers and as a structure, as an automaton that generates answers to questions that are by far not as clearly answerable as the multi-tongued apparatus would suggest.
Automated Communication
The paradigm of programmability determines the codes of conduct of Stackoverflow and generates a communication structure in which answers to a conversation are not ordered chronologically, but according to their supposed value. True to the logic of the Computational Universe (N. Katherine Hayles), not only numbers can be sorted along a scale from 0 to 100, from good to bad, but all kinds of other complex elements, such as the contributions in a conversation. The obsessive attempt to classify and automate human communication leads to regular overload, to stackoverflow, as the name of the forum anticipates in unintentional self-awareness.
Lisa Rein a.k.a. Hysterical Pixel is an artist-researcher-designer based in Berlin. Their work ponders questions of digital media infrastructures, codes, languages, and emancipatory practices. With artistic and scientific means, they contribute to digital feminist practices and discourses, within and outside of the institution. Currently, they are researching the performativity of algorithmic face recognition systems.
