Hidden in Plain-TeX: Investigating Minimal Computing Workflows

Drawing on software studies, data feminism, digital rhetoric studies, information science, and the history of computing, this paper foregrounds Markdown as a cultural object to analyze the social, cultural, and political pressures surrounding the digital humanities. Rather than beginning with contemporary discourse, it draws parallels between Markdown and Donald Knuth's TeX. From the 1970s to 1990s, academic researchers used TeX to construct plain-text scholarship in mathematics and the hard sciences to enhance typography. Most academics saw these concerns as holding marginal importance and quickly abandoned the approach for WYSIWYG word processors. Drawing on queer theorist Michael Warner, I argue that the community surrounding TeX responded reactionarily to these transformations by forming a counterpublic constituted through a circulation of texts bemoaning word processors . This counterpublic persisted well into the 2000s but only made headway amongst niche users. This plain-text focused counterpublic mutated in response to the neoliberalization of higher ed. Rather than viewing plain-text as sustainable scholarship, academic lifehacking and minimal computing embraced what David Golumbia calls computationalism, an ideological construct postulating social, political, economic, and cultural ills as cybernetic systems to be optimized — or hacked. Minimal computing’s fetishization and casting of plain-text as transformative mirrors similar discourses amongst older lifehacking enthusiasts. Although plain-text scholarship is not representative of minimal computing as a totality, minimal computing's emphasis on workflows leads to few of the supposed benefits advocates profess, and in many cases, worsens inequalities.