Computing Cultures: Historical and Philosophical Perspective

Digital machines of the 20th century were inspired by the biological individual, replacing the cultural and social image of machines from the 19th century with a mental solipsistic one. However, the growing cultural import of computing practices has become ever more pressing with the spectacular deployment of computers in all the dimensions of social life. Not only have cultural phenomena increasingly become the object of computational analysis, but computational practices have also proved inseparable from the cultural environment in which they evolve. Computing cultures thus extend the boundaries of our different cultural environments, as well as those of computational practices.

Under the title “Computing Cultures”, this special issue critically addresses the entanglement of computing practices with the main cultural challenges our epoch is facing. The global and collective nature of such problems (such as climate change, global pandemics, systemic inequalities, resurgence of totalitarianism, and others) requires a comprehensive perspective on computing, where social and cultural aspects occupy a central position. For those reasons, thinking about machines asks today for an interdisciplinary approach, where art is as necessary as engineering, anthropological insights as important as psychological models, and the critical perspectives of history and philosophy as decisive as the axioms and theorems of theoretical computer science.

For more than a decade, the “History and Philosophy of Computing” Conference (HaPoC) has been contributing to building such an interdisciplinary community and environment. This special issue of Minds and Machines follows the 6th edition of HaPoC, hosted at the ETH Turing Centre in Zurich in October 2021. It was open both to authors of contributions to HaPoC-6, who were encouraged to submit a full paper based on their presentations, and to submissions outside the Conference.