How code shapes power and inequality across technology, governance, and global political economies.
Code—whether software routines, legal frameworks, or informal social norms—shapes the world around us in profound and often invisible ways. In Just Code, editors Jeffrey R. Yost and Gerardo Con Díaz bring together a diverse group of scholars to examine how different forms of code both structure and reinforce power dynamics across societies.
From algorithmic bias in artificial intelligence to global labor practices, this collection uncovers the hidden mechanisms by which code perpetuates inequality and injustice. It explores connections among technology, governance, and socioeconomic systems to reveal how code is both a tool of control and a product of the power structures it enables. Contributors analyze topics such as platform economies, algorithmic collusion, and labor practices in the tech industry, as well as how systems of representation and communication encode biases that amplify racial, gendered, and economic inequalities. These essays provide a critical lens for understanding how code intersects with politics and global cultures of technology production and use.
By broadening the concept of ""code"" to include legal, social, and cultural systems, this collection challenges readers to see beyond the technical and interrogate the structures of power embedded in every layer of modern life. Just Code introduces a new framework for understanding the relationships among information technologies, systemic inequities, and the political economies that sustain them.
Encoding an Analytic, by Gerardo Con Díaz and Jeffrey R. Yost Part I: How Does Code Become Both a Subject and a Means of Governance? 1. Delivering Solidarity: Platform Architecture and Collective Contention in China's Platform Economy, by Ya-Wen Lei 2. Consent Code and Default Dramas, by Meg Leta Jones 3. ""A Mirror, Not a Glass Door"": Legal Code and Software Code in Practice, by Justin Petelka, Megan Finn, Janaki Srinivasan, Elisa Oreglia, and A. Janani 4. Algorithmic Collusion, Modern Monopolies, and Their Market Power, by Hamid Ekiba 5. Reopening the Politics of Openness in the Age of Cloud Computing: Reflections on Recent FOSS Relicensing, by Shun-Ling Chen 6. The Great eBook Conspiracy: Pricing, Strategy, and the Archives for Business History, by Gerardo Con Díaz Part II: How Does Code Become Infused with Social Values, Assumptions, and Biases? 7. The Standard Head, by Stephanie Dick 8. Spanning Space and Time Barriers: Computerized Conferencing, Disability, and Citizenship, by Elizabeth R. Petrick 9. Pushing Fintech: Testing Financial Inclusion among ""Rural"" Women in Peru, by Mariel Garcia Llorens 10. Corporate Culture Made Material: Ephemera and in/equity at Control Data Corporation, 1957–1975, by Elizabeth Semler 11. Reassessing the Iconic and Unbundling the Ironic: IBM System Engineering, Gender, and Antitrust, by Jeffrey R. Yost 12. Y2K and the Politics of Labor, by Dylan Mulvin Part III: What Does It Mean, to Grapple with Code? 13. From Programming to Platform Expertise: Technical Reformers and the Reinvention of Institutions, by Shreeharsh Kelkar 14. Computers as Colonizers: British Computing Companies and Indian Technological Resistance, 1955–1975, by Mar Hicks 15. The Mask of Humanity: Manipulation and Psychopathy at the Human-Computer Interface, by Jennifer Karns Alexander 16. Cryptography Goes Public: Contesting the Meaning of a New Field in the 1970s US, by Gili Vidan 17. Water Data at the Confluence: A Study of the National Indian Youth Council's 1976 Anti-Colonial Environmental Impact Statement, by Theodora Dryer 18. Nodes and Codes: Iterating with the State in México, by Héctor Beltrán Epilogue: Artificial Intelligence: Braiding Irony, Paradox, and Possibility, by Jeffrey R. Yost Contributors
Jeffrey R. Yost is the director of the Charles Babbage Institute for Computing, Information, and Culture and a research professor in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine Program at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of Making IT Work: A History of the Computer Services Industry. Gerardo Con Díaz is an associate professor of science and technology studies at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Everyone Breaks These Laws: How Copyrights Made the Online World.
