We’re All (Folk) Programmers
How to make software work for us
The internet today feels like many corporate walled gardens, but it hasn’t always been like this. Spencer Chang encourages us to imagine a programmable web and make software work for us.
—Tianyu Fang, Reboot Editorial Board
We’re All (Folk) Programmers
My first memory of the Internet involves sneaking onto my family’s shared computer to play a video game my older brother had downloaded. It featured a “matchmaking” system to pair you with other people to play against, but at the time, I just thought I was playing against different computers.
It wasn’t until someone cracked a joke in the chat one day that I considered the possibility that I was playing with other people. That joke, a simple message in a chat, changed me. The game wasn’t designed for sharing jokes—it was a high-fantasy fiction about different races embroiled in eternal conflict—yet we joked around, complained about our real lives, and had fun all the same. Not long after I was promptly removed from the computer when my laughing and excited yelling gave me away.
Most of us share some part of this memory in our first Internet encounters: when we first met and exchanged words with someone else online, when we realized for the first time that we weren’t alone out here.
Early internet nostalgia is on the rise, longing for collective spaces long dead, from GeoCities and Stumbleupon to Tumblr and Runescape. In these “good old days,” the Internet felt less like a monolithic skyscraper and more like a series of neighborhoods, each with its distinct vibe. We miss when it was fun.
Our longing isn’t surprising given that the Internet doesn’t look too hopeful these days. Every month there seems to be another obituary for an internet “public square” dismantled by private interventions. Companies are cracking down on the open internet, AI startups are harvesting our data to automate our livelihoods, and the spaces we’ve hung out in for years are kicking us out and changing the rules by the day. The Internet, now, feels like monopolized app stores, devices that slowly die and can’t be repaired, and pages crammed with content perfected for machines rather than people. New platforms promise a wonderful new world to users and, once it has them, slowly die.
How can we hope for anything different? And yet, without realizing it, many of us are already pushing for the kind of Internet we dream of when we change everyday software to fit our needs. Like software engineers program by writing code, we are folk programming when we repurpose software, through their given interfaces, to address our problems and desires.
In contrast to fine art created for aesthetic value, folk art emerges from cultural significance and needs. Folklore encompasses emergent practices and traditions, passed down person-to-person within communities, as opposed to “high culture” which is universal and prescriptive, passed down through formal education.
Most of our everyday knowledge of how to use computers can be considered folklore. We learn how to Google things by watching others and trial and error rather than formal training. Folk programming is the kind of (re)programming we learn through our active use of the Internet and software. As we use the Internet and learn how it works, we’re constantly changing software to work for us (and in doing so, make it feel more like us, too). If you’ve ever used an app outside of its intended purpose, you are a folk programmer. We are all already programming, all the time, and we have the power to not only gesture at our dreams of what the Internet could be but also push those dreams towards reality.
If you were active in a certain region of YouTube in the mid-2010s, you might have stumbled upon a strange-looking video in your recommendations sidebar. If you were curious enough to click, you would have discovered thousands of intimate personal stories shared in the comments section, while Nintendo video game music looped in the background. Eventually, you might have felt compelled to share a “checkpoint” of your own, joining this niche internet community.
The “Internet Checkpoint” was a phenomenon of YouTube commenters “checkpointing” where they were in life in the comments sections of a set of ethereal music videos. For 9+ years, millions wandered into these videos through algorithmic fate, and hundreds of thousands would continue the practice, leading to over 70,000 comments on the largest video.
In May 2020, in the aftermath of protests across the U.S. over the killing of George Floyd, the Dallas Police Department put out a call on social media for tips leading to the arrest of protesters on their new app, iWatch Dallas. If you were reviewing these tips, you would have found your inbox overwhelmed with thousands of submissions mere hours after posting. However, instead of actual tips, most would have contained random content ranging from K-pop fancams (handheld videos of K-pop idols performing) to how-to guides for making scrambled eggs and growing potatoes. The app was taken down shortly after due to “technical difficulties”, presumably from the flood of (mis)use.
At first glance, these two examples seem completely unrelated. The Checkpoint is a story of how users converted the comments section into a space for intimate sharing, while the flooding of a police tip app is a story of subversive political action. However, they share the same origins, emerging from the actions of, at first, a few, and then, a community, deciding that they could repurpose technology towards a desire and/or cause that they care about.
While folk programming takes place in digital environments, its effects extend into the physical world, from creating communal space to subverting institutional and algorithmic control.
If the algorithm turns against us, we find ways around it, inventing new language forms to avoid demonetization and circumvent government censorship. When Waze started redirecting drivers into local streets and overwhelming their space, neighbors submitted false traffic reports and kept the app open on their phones to mimic congestion.
Once the situation is dire, we turn to actively adversarial options. When Reddit shut off API access to third parties, moderators across the ecosystem programmed their subreddits to be private, cutting off the company’s advertising exposure, while others restricted traditional content (like only allowing pictures of John Oliver). Many not only deleted all their content but also made sure that the last record Reddit had of it was a middle finger back at them. And to fight back against countries with limited freedom of the press, the team behind The Uncensored Library created a library of banned texts inside Minecraft to bypass state censorship.
By co-opting technological mediums outside of their intended ends, folk programming often works in spite of those intended ends or its platform’s aims.
Unfortunately, folk programming isn’t inherently good because humans ultimately use it toward human ends. Some have used the same power to spread hate and troll.
When someone has been blocked on all forms of social media, they can still find ways to harass their target through Venmo requests and bank transfers. The same keyword squatting BLM supporters used to drown out “#whitelivesmatter” has infamously been used by QAnon to lure people into their conspiracy videos. The crowdsourced nature of Google Maps can be hijacked to write a love letter under the guise of a new restaurant or label the White House with a racist slur. I experienced this firsthand when the small (we)bsite my friend and I made, dedicated to showcasing everyday dreams for the Internet and full of intimate letters from random visitors, was vandalized by a single actor flooding it with hate speech.
In a world where we’re bound by invisible oppressive structures, whether algorithms or platform rules, folk programming offers a channel for collective action to not only protest but also fight against these conditions. As there will always be some who use this power for hateful reasons, each act of tenderness and sharing space we choose to make becomes essential.
Repurposing digital spaces doesn’t have to be widespread or even public to be folk programming. Each act of folk programming, from starting the Internet Checkpoint to derailing iWatch Dallas, started from a single person planting the seed for using technology in a new way.
Co-opting technology on niche apps and websites and in group chats with friends also carries the same seed of potential for transformative societal change. Simple (and often seemingly silly) acts of molding environments to better fit personal needs are radical exercises in taking agency over technology in service of the fuzzy “future” we care about. They train us to view technology as something we can actively shape, not just a phenomenon we’re subjected to.
The Checkpoint is but one example of people repurposing comment sections into their own particular social networks. Amazon reviews of a Tuscan Milk product are now a space for inventive fiction, a Billie Eilish remix video was repurposed into someone’s journal for a year, and music videos become sites to share memories.
From using Discord as a journaling app to weaving in Word and painting in Excel to selling homecooked goods on Facebook Marketplace, we always find ways to make software work for us, often in a way that’s considered “wrong” relative to what it was designed or marketed for. My friend in a trip planning group chat added plane emojis to people’s nicknames to track who had booked their flights. Instead of something more “correct” like using a poll, creating a separate spreadsheet, or even using an app designed for group travel, they reprogrammed our names into a status tracker, which was far more convenient and precisely solved our needs. We form desire paths even in digital space.
The “doc web” refers to the networked set of public documents and spreadsheets that people publish to the Internet. Often, these are made to act as “pop-up” social media around personal desires, molding tools for productivity into gathering spaces and homes. We create escape rooms, host parties, make games, and hang out. Other times, we leverage their utility for personal archives, collecting texts we want to say to our ex, reviewing how cold libraries are, and re-creating the Victorian language of flowers.
Programs designed for productivity are reprogrammed into gathering places and personal archives while spaces designed to maximize entertainment and ad revenue are converted into intimate communities. There’s no program we can’t repurpose towards the behaviors we care about.
Regardless of whether we’re given the agency, let alone the permission, to do so, we stretch the limits of the software we use to fit our imaginations and hopes, and in doing so, choose what we want our software to be for. Ultimately, our efforts leave behind a tangible, human legacy that extends far beyond the realms of the digital object they originate from.
If someone could plant the initial seed for the “Internet Checkpoint” by chance, what would the Internet look like if we were all trying to plant seeds for communal action as we wandered it? How diverse, handmade, and wild might the web be if we worked together to push the bounds of how much we can reshape our everyday technology?
In The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Ursula Le Guin proposes the gathering bag as the first “cultural device,” in its ability to enable people to do the very “human thing” of “put[ting] something you want, because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful, into a bag, or a basket, or a bit of rolled bark or leaf, or a net woven of your own hair, or what have you, and then take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people.” In her view, fiction is a mechanism for arranging everything you’ve gathered in a way that tells a story.
Programming is similar to writing a story. In both, you string words together, and if you do it enough times in the right order with an appropriate style, the combinations of letters turn into a life of their own. But while stories create worlds that must be accessed on a page, programs encode stories into the fabric of our digital realities. Programming is an act of realized fiction. And by folk programming, we are encoding the stories of our dreams into our technological environments.
We’re all technological beings now; we already know the feeling we want from computers. Our everyday programming shows us that we can not only create the kinds of Internet and software we want but also that we already have immense power to do so. With our foraged trinkets and knick-knacks (the comments we write and images we share), we tell the stories of the places we’ve turned into homes, the people we’ve shared with, and ultimately, ourselves—who we are and what we care about. And as we’ve seen, folk programming shows that who we are and what we care about is a complex answer, running the spectrum of human desire. We are people who like to imagine, to love, to make funny jokes and share what’s hurting us and wonder at how amazing people are. We want things we can easily change, we want to make things that make people smile, and we really want to feel that we’re not alone.
That means that even when platforms are actively hostile or controlling, we will find ways to make the Internet feel like ours. We are already shaping it into one of carrier bags, rather than cash bags. And any time we take action on it, we are imbuing a tiny piece of our lives within. Every “review is a kind of memoir,” every comment is a kind of diary entry, and every message is the seed of a revolution. The next time you feel hopeless about the Internet, remember that you have the power to co-opt, repurpose, and reprogram software to tell our stories. And then plant a seed of possibility for the Internet you miss and wish for. It might be our best chance at saving it.
Spencer Chang is an internet artist and engineer stewarding computers as playgrounds for communal possibilities.
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🌀 microdoses
Evgeny Morozov has a new podcast series. “It’s all here: Cold War psychiatry, Maoism, LSD, the Rockefellers, Scientology, CIA’s forays into extrasensory perception, and even the advent of tech libertarianism.” Check out A Sense of Rebellion.
Daniel Bessner on Larry David.
- interviews Thomas S. Mullaney on his new book, The Chinese Computer: A Global History of the Information Age.
💝 closing note
Do you want to write about the forgotten history of a technology? Send me an email: tianyu at joinreboot.org.
—Tian & Reboot team
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I love this essay. I am founder of LearnerShape (https://learnershape.com), which aims to use AI and other tech to enable apps that address particular learning needs (as an alternative to big platforms). The ethos of what we are doing is similar to your thinking on folk programming.