Research

My dissertation, ‘Software Complexity: Towards a Distributed Governance of a Production System’, examines the causes and effects of software complexity across technical systems and organisations. Specifically, it aims at establishing software as a queer performative phenomenon which acts as an interface between the domain of market exchange and the sphere of organisational culture. I use an interdisciplinary approach that combines cultural studies’ compositional methodology, organisational topology design paradigm and the diffractive epistemological view. I discovered that complexity is often caused by ‘software capitalism’ – a valorisation regime that perceives every firm primarily as a technology firm and creates profits by keeping its software in a state of perpetual disrepair. I conclude that the application of queer theory in software studies opens a possibility of complexity as an affirmative, rather than antagonistic relation, and allows us to give a critical presentation of the software capitalism valorisation mechanisms. While the Marxist research programme and the operations research in the sphere of professional software production largely coincide in the outlook on technology as a means to an end, my research opens a conversation about a more-than-human representation of the space of production that sees the negotiation of shared meanings topologically and immanently, rather than based on the dominant hierarchies, pre-existing assumptions or external evaluation.