Computer Programming as Cultural Practice

This review reconceptualizes computer programming as a cultural practice rather than neutral technical work, synthesizing anthropological scholarship on coding, software development, and computational expertise as social activities embedded in global political economies. Three tensions animate this literature. First, despite meritocratic claims, supposedly objective technical evaluations reproduce hierarchies of race, gender, nation, and class. Second, although coding promises borderless geographies—from Silicon Valley corporations to Indian IT workers, Chinese makers, and Brazilian fab labs—tech work organizes bodies differentially through nationality, currency access, and racialized embodiment. Third, even when claiming craft autonomy, programmers increasingly work as contingent contractors, privatizing economic risk. As artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted tools emerge, the resulting transformations intensify rather than resolve these contradictions, demanding ethnographic attention to whose code work matters and under what conditions. This review also demonstrates how coding logics extend beyond software to inform analytical vocabularies scholars mobilize to theorize distributed agency, layered systems, and automated governance—showing how programming shapes the very frameworks we use to interpret contemporary capitalism.