Software Criticism As Art Criticism
Software Criticism As Art Criticism
Introducing… The Palo Alto Review of Software
Software has been eating the world for 13 years now. It has transformed everything from the mundane to the sacred: from how we buy things to how we meet life partners.
Historically, the approach to changing the world with art was by changing minds first: artists influence the people who change the world. The software approach is the opposite. Code changes the fabric of society directly, which then changes minds. Through software, anyone can impact culture.
If you wanted to start a revolution of hospitality, where regular people would open up their homes and lives to strangers, you wouldn’t just start an art movement—you’d found Airbnb. If you have a thesis about intelligence as an emergent property of simple functions, you don’t just write a white paper—you build OpenAI.
If objects become Art when they (1) are beautiful, (2) shape how we see our shared culture and (3) impact how we view and theorize about our ideal culture, then Software is Art.
Creatives have always used art to express their ideas. If you lived in Shakespearean times, to change the culture you should have been a playwright. If you lived in the 70s, you should have been a rockstar. Today, you should write software.
Even if you haven’t read any Shakespeare, his work still impacts your life. He invented words you use all the time and his plays are touchstones for many cultural references.
If you don’t use X (formerly Twitter) or TikTok, your cultural reality is still inescapably influenced by these platforms. We can’t help but breathe in software-native culture1.
Software shapes culture. In fact, today, software is the primary shaper of culture.
Reviewers & Critics_
We critique art because we acknowledge that art is consequential. Good Art matters. The ideas explored in a great novel have the power to change individuals and cultures. Recognizing this power, we interrogate and critique texts to understand how to orient ourselves with respect to the ideas.
Now, since software is an artform which shapes culture, we might think that software should also be an object of critique.
In Disney’s 2007 film Ratatouille (pictured above), food critic Anton Ego describes what he sees as the job of a critic: judging others - often negatively - and risking little. We might instead remark that perhaps what makes this role tiresome is that he’s actually not describing a critic, but instead a reviewer. It is true that the work of the reviewer is easy. The work of the critic is not so easy.
In literature, there’s a sharp distinction between reviews and critiques:
⭐ Firstly, there’s the Amazon review. The review may share a few facts about the book, but the main focus is giving a star rating and explaining whether you should buy the book. It is, in principle, possible for these reviews to take a broader view. But in practice, The Medium is The Message - the focus of the review is analyzing the book as an object of consumption and determining if the product is worth your money.
📖 Secondly, there’s the literary critique. These can be found in literary magazines like The New York Review of Books or The Paris Review, written by other authors or literature experts. They often focus on artistic merit, contextual significance and comparisons against the work’s cultural background. Good literary critiques can be literary works in their own right.
Left: Amazon review page; Right: New York Review of Books
We don't critique software like we critique literature.
Now don’t get me wrong, there have been many words written about technology, but they’re mostly like the Amazon reviews: go to The Verge and they’ll tell you whether to download a given app; hit up Marques Brownlee’s (excellent) YouTube channel and you’ll hear if he recommends purchasing. They’re consumer reviews.
We have the New York Review of Books, why not the Palo Alto Review of Software?
The Palo Alto Review of Software2 is a journal for writing about software that focuses on criticism not reviews. Where reviews focus on the value for consumers, criticism is mostly aimed at other creators. Good criticism focuses on the design of the software rather than overtly flattering or denigrating a company (as in a puff piece or exposé).
Note that though we’re talking about “criticism” - this doesn't mean it's negative. Some critiqued software will be bad. That's fine. We’re not writing Amazon reviews so we won't be handing out 1-star ratings. But we will unequivocally say when a product fails to excite us. Or indeed, when it actively frustrates us.
Ideally, good critique will highlight socially interesting software design decisions and influence others to improve upon great work. Critique isn’t a dirty word, it’s in aid of progress. Thoughtful, good-faith critique is collaboration.
Writing About Technology
Some technology writing does exist but a lot of it is, well… bad. There are lots of reviewers, lots of haters, but few critics.
A particularly egregious example comes from a recent article in the New York Times about the xz-saga of March 2024. The xz-saga was an open-source attack which almost exposed every single computer in the world to the attackers - a very big deal! Here’s a segment from the New York Times’ resident technology journalist’s coverage:
In other words, the primary reporter for technology at the nation’s most trusted paper can’t - and doesn’t want to - explain basic facts about his subject3.
Can you imagine this happening for any other artform? Would the New York Times’ resident jazz columnist say that syncopation (a rhythm that lands off the beat) is super boring and complex and something they couldn’t understand? Or the rock music expert say that they couldn’t explain what a Vox AC30 (a guitar amp with a distinctive British, overdriven sound) was? I think not.
So yes, writing about software exists. But this is not the type of critique we’re seeking4. Let’s explore what better criticism could look like through important criticism of early punk in the 60s and TikTok in 2020.
Towards Better Criticism_
Punk Rock & TikTok
In 1967, the fledgling punk rock scene was widely derided.
Music writer Lester Bangs was an early supporter of bands like The Velvet Underground, praising their uncompromising art rock sound, avant-garde sensibilities and abrasive yet emotionally rich lyrics.
He writes:
Lou Reed [Velvet Underground frontman] is my own hero principally because he stands for all the [wildest] things that I could ever possibly conceive of.
When Bangs wrote, “This ain't just noise, kids, it's the goddamn revolution”, it wasn’t literally true at the time. The Velvet Underground were but a blip on the radar.
There’s an old joke about The Velvet Underground in music circles: not that many people listened to them but everyone who did started bands. Their outsized influence on the direction of music relative to their (at the time) modest fanbase is wild. The Velvet Underground are often described as proto-punk due to the punk scene they heavily inspired and Bangs would later declare that “Modern music starts with the Velvets”.
If Lester Bangs wasn’t around, The Velvet Underground would still have existed. But they wouldn’t be The Velvet Underground, not in the sense of what that name means to us. A world in which Bangs didn’t champion them, mediating and interpreting their work, would be a world with very different popular music, even now.
Here the critique of Lester Bangs directly contributed to catalyzing the rise of the punk rock scene.
The first truly great piece of Software Criticism I read was
's 2020 essay series about TikTok. In the opening post, Wei writes:How did an app designed by two guys in Shanghai [manage] to run circles around U.S. video apps from YouTube to Facebook to Instagram to Snapchat, becoming the most fertile source for meme origination, mutation, and dissemination in a culture so different from the one in which it was built?
[...] The rise of TikTok updated my thinking. It turns out that in some categories, a machine learning algorithm significantly responsive and accurate can pierce the veil of cultural ignorance. Today, sometimes culture can be abstracted.
The series is a thoughtful and precise exposition of why TikTok works at a technical and a cultural level, released back when this was highly non-obvious to US companies who had been caught flat-footed. Wei’s insight that not only is the algorithm important, but that the true power is in a user interface which rapidly feeds the algorithm lots of real-time user preference data, is still under-appreciated. ‘Did the user enjoy or like or swipe away’ happens in mere seconds on TikTok. Most people treat TikTok’s algorithm as purely a feat of Machine Learning when, arguably, it is equally a feat of product design.
Like with Lester Bangs, without Wei TikTok would undoubtedly still exist. But the further impact on software-native culture and product building likely wouldn’t be as great.
Wei’s criticism allows us to see the magic of TikTok: to hold it in our hands and examine it. This is the value of good software criticism - only once you’ve bottled the magic can you start to sprinkle it into your own craft.
Engineers create something from nothing - they are alchemists creating magic. The good critic turns that magic into something legible that can be taken up by other alchemists for later discoveries.
What is Good Software Criticism?
Criticism is not simply mere reaction. In critical practice, criticism engages with a work in its cultural context and advances a thesis which influences the way we view the objects of critique. This criticism can address literature, buildings, albums, or indeed applications. Here then, good software criticism is a focused and contextualized interrogation of a product which helps us to understand our own human experience.
Software is Malleable
Software has an interesting property as an object of critique: it’s malleable.
If we note that a painting would better achieve its goals with a cedar instead of a maple tree in the background, we’re not realistically expecting that to change. Paintings are static artifacts.
But software is inherently dynamic. The product is infinitely updateable and remixable. Aspirational software critiques can be acted upon.
Humans shape software and then, in turn, software shapes us. If we’re co-evolving with our tools, then, through both building and critiquing software, we have the chance to reshape our own co-evolution.
Criticism Elevates
Good software criticism can do 3 things:
1️⃣ Criticism can help an indie product reach more people. Some software, like art, is difficult to grasp at first or doesn’t have the organic public impact that it deserves. A good critic joining the dots can help you really connect to the work and is a service for the public.
2️⃣ Other creatives can be inspired to join a scene through criticism which relates the work to them. As with the Velvet Underground, exposure and exploration through criticism allows other creators to use and remix the core ideas to create new things. Progress in software isn't zero sum so everyone benefits from the field leveling up their craft. This is even more true if the products have integrations with each other or contribute to the open-source ecosystem. Here criticism is a service for the scene of builders.
3️⃣ In theory, art criticism could influence the direction of a work of art but, in practice, this is difficult because most art isn't as malleable as software. The art critic can at best influence future work. In software though, critique can directly influence future versions of the work itself. Criticism is a service for the creator of the critiqued.
In other words, criticism elevates art. It increases the public perception of great but lesser-known works, catalyzes the scene of contemporaries and allows individual works to improve by incorporating critical feedback.
The Software Critic’s Questions
We are critiquing software design and, as Steve Jobs said, “design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” So if software is art, it’s not only visual art.
Software is both experiential art and conceptual art - the magic is the user experience and the ideas which become possible through using the software.
There are, then, two core questions a software critic is interested in:
The experiential question: How well does the software do the thing we know we want? How magical is it?
The conceptual question: How does it bring forth a new paradigm and enable us to imagine new things? How much does it enhance possibility?
Inspiring Criticism: For Builders, By Builders_
Who can be a software critic? To answer this question requires some Ratatouille-style equity: Not everyone can be a great software critic, but a great software critic can come from anywhere. Software critics could be product people, engineers, designers, sociologists, innovation historians - each can share an appealing and useful reflection on a software product.
Critics should be technical; they must have built software before. They needn’t have a PhD in Computer Science Theory though - the best critics are practical people5.
We should note that software criticism is likely a niche format like art criticism. Unless you’re a product person, engineer or scholar, you probably won’t read the Palo Alto Review, just like you probably don’t read the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism unless you’re an artist or a philosopher of art. But if there’s a lesson from the Devil Wears Prada’s Cerulean sweater monologue, it’s that everyone is a downstream beneficiary of cultural criticism.
If you wear clothes, you’ve been impacted by art criticism. If you use a phone, you’ll be impacted by software criticism.
Criticism For Progress
As tech has grown from a small group of hobbyists to a large and powerful industry, software has come under fire. We do need to accelerate technology, make no mistake about it. But we also need to bring the world with us for the journey - not kicking and screaming, but with awe and wonder. We want to contextualize software. We need a reverence for software as something designed by humans to be both beautiful and useful; a reverence for software as an object of both art and progress.
Software doesn’t need legitimizing; it’s already shaping the world.
It doesn’t need defending; some of the most powerful companies in the world have their DNA written in code.
Software needs eroticizing; it needs us to see it as an object of beauty as well as progress.
On this Substack, we’ll be sharing Updates highlighting Software Criticism and publishing regular Issues containing original Software Criticism.
If you want to come along for the ride, there are three main ways:
1️⃣ Firstly, subscribe to be notified of new posts:
2️⃣ Secondly, share this essay with your interested friends:
3️⃣ Thirdly, if you feel inspired, you can write in with some criticism you’ve seen on the web you’d love us to feature or send us a pitch for a critique you’d be interested in publishing with us. You can reply to this email to reach us:
We’re excited to be the home of Software Criticism: for builders, by builders.
Perhaps you think this is unfair, it’s not the platform but the people using the platform who are making culture here. To some extent that’s true, but if the Medium really is the Message, then we must credit the platform for the cultural shift.
This publication!
In this case the journalist could have simply said that it’s a database which many companies such as Facebook, Spotify etc. use to store data for their applications. Computer scientist Michael Stonebraker got a Turing Award (the Computer Science Nobel Prize) for creating PostgreSQL in 2014; it’s a very important piece of software.
More generally perhaps we’d be interested to see a story about how relational databases changed how we relate not just to data but also to each other. Open source database software is an unsung marvel.
Incidentally some people who I'd love to see do software criticism from varying backgrounds are:
- - founder turned UX consultant
- - author and Silicon Valley public intellectual
Olivia Kan-Sperling - Paris Review columnist who previously wrote a dissertation on analysing code through the lens of Foucault
- - tech writer and possibly the first self-proclaimed software critic
- - Airbnb Product Manager turned newsletter writer
- - Venture Capitalist and arguably inventor of the modern web browser
Kevin Kelly - Founder and former Editor at Wired
- - Amazon engineer & writer
If you’re reading this, likely you!