In this circuit, Bourdieu identifies a crucial nexus of power. The cultural legitimacy of any sort of regular exercise of power depends on how it can structure a part of society into its own shape, according to its own program, and on its ability to then reproduce itself formally and institutionally. For Bourdieu, that reproduction decodes dynamics of social class, and certain patterns of cultural capital — access, expertise, and information — replicate themselves over generations. The sociological tradition from which Bourdieu worked understood technology as only enabling or reflective of more essential social dynamics, whereas my own would situate as being indissoluble from the genesis of complex material cultures ( “ social ” and otherwise). Today the reflexively reinforcing circuits of habitus are not only organized by software; they are also physically composed of software, literally built out of software-mediated interactions. In the activation on ambient interfacial fields of everyday life, software participates on both the habit and habitat sides of the equation. As computation becomes an increasingly generic property of objects, software envelops us with no greater novelty than electricity did decades before. In the interface ’ s predefined terms of action — the dispositions of inhabitation that it presents, on a screen or through an object — software affords a reproducible form of habit, inhabitation, and practice. Between Users, differential access to certain interfaces in certain combinations comes to define their individuated biographies within the wider production and reproduction of social capital and as a function of the interfacial regimes that both consolidate and disseminate power. The Interface layer of The Stack, especially as habitat, is a medium of cultural, technical, symbolic, and economic capital at once. As played out every second, from Bangalore to Boston, software acumen is also access to the dispositions of practice it embodies, which in turn compose access to the frames of reproductive capital-formations they afford.
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