From the preface:
What is the fate of the regime of computation? A global
techno-culture inscribed by the terrorism of the code or an
emergent age of networked individualism driven onwards by the
ecstatic visions of augmented reality, mobility, and connectivity?
When the regime of computation suddenly slams into the
real world of globalization, when code is forced to tangle with the
always messy world of blown away referential values -- the real
world of gender trouble, stormy challenges to the big signifiers of
race, class and ethnicity -- we finally know that we are living in
the beginning days of something radically new, namely a culture
of code drift.
All the pure signs are present in code drift, from the
radiating positivity of the terrorism of the code to the
irrepressible creativity of augmented reality. How could they not
be? The formal structure of all programming language also
carries within itself traces of the modernist episteme with its
endless variations of the supposedly counter-languages of form
and syntax. So too, code drift is most certainly always framed by
the politics of the pure signs of these the most computational of
all times: pure cybernetic terrorism, pure mobile contingency. But
for all that, when the language of the code follows its fatal, but no
less inevitable, passage across the real world of globalization,
when form is deeply inflected with the syntax of the human, non-
human, and post-human, we are suddenly propelled into a new
era of indeterminate trajectories, unpredictable inflections,
strange complexities...