archive-101

This project and the corresponding text emerged from a research trip to the United States, aimed at investigating the historical origins and cultural embedding of computational systems. During my visit in March 2025, Highway 101 was my daily route from Daly City to what is considered the epicenter of contemporary technology: Silicon Valley. The stretch of highway leading out of San Francisco, and back into the city, was flooded with strange, uncanny billboards advertising AI products and tools in ways often incomprehensible to the average user. The artwork retraces this route as a video installation, using an automated script to capture and compile all the advertisements. As viewers are immersed in the infrastructural environment, the application also loops through time, tracing the emergence and transformation of this mediated space. The collected material is stored in a database, which includes both visual scrapings and associated metadata. The work reveals how billboards targeting developers shape those who design the interpretive conditions for computation, while also showing that software plays an active role in constructing contemporary reality, rather than merely reflecting it. As an artist, designer, and researcher who engages with code and technological frameworks in both artistic and commercial work, I found the ads particularly thought-provoking. The work must be understood as a process of sensemaking – an attempt to work through the confusion these advertisements provoked during my stay. The following text combines documentation of a cultural phenomenon with theoretical analysis of how it might function within a system of mutual influence. While I cannot definitively prove causal relationships, I argue for plausible mechanisms through which these advertisements both shape and reflect the ideological conditions of technological development. They simultaneously influence the conditions of computation while also serving as symptoms of the broader techno-capitalist landscape.

Programma -> Développer

In the past, developers were known as programmers. ^[1] These programmers were predominantly women with the technical knowledge to rewire machines to perform specific calculations. Back then, programming could be considered as creating an ordered set of instructions. This set of instructions was called a program. What was initially performed manually by plugging patch cords, later developed into an executable process that could be saved on punch cards or in software files, as we know them today.

By the early 1970s, programming was no longer considered a female activity but the act of programming a computer and using a computer was still one and the same activity. This shift in staffing can be traced back to a series of changes closely related to the development of the digital computer. The 1968 and 1969 NATO Software Engineering Conferences held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, deliberately and provocatively coined the field as part of the engineering profession, which may have played a role in shifting the workforce from a female-dominated to a male-dominated field. ^[2]

The emergence of the separation between those who use computers and those who program them was about to happen in 1973 at Xerox PARC, where the idea of a computer that could be operated through a graphical user interface emerged alongside the broader commercialization of computing and the development of packaged software for business use. ^[3]
This later led to the development of machines that allowed users to interact with computers without knowing any programming languages, gradually strengthening the dichotomy between those who program computers and those who "simply" use them.

Many of the key ideas behind Silicon Valley and also behind what it means to be a programmer originated from this time where the roles of the user and the programmer were still closer together. Founded in 1975 in Menlo Park, California, the Homebrew Computer Club sparked the ideas behind personal computing and thus also exemplified the power programmers can have. It was an informal group of electronic enthusiasts and hobbyists driven by technical curiosity, invested in building and programming their own computers and sharing that knowledge in a newsletter. This newsletter can be considered one of the most influential forces in the culture of Silicon Valley, as many key figures from this group went on to shape the valley's development. ^[4] It demonstrates that from the beginning on, programmer weren't just implementers but inventors reshaping society.

The shift from the computer for scientific, academic and military use to personal use also involved a change in terminology. From the 1990s onward, as personal computers became more widely adopted, the term programmer was substituted by the term developer. The Ancient Greek programma, ^[5] meaning a written public notice, slowly evolved into the French développer ^[6], derived from the Old French desveloper meaning to unwrap or unfold. Just as film is developed in photography to make hidden images visible, developers emerged as those who can turn computational potential into concrete reality. Although the terms programmer and developer are sometimes used interchangeably, the term software developer usually implies someone who is involved in the design, creation and refinement of software, rather than just writing instructions. Contemporary interpretations of what is means to be a developer are often still tied to this identity of inventor-creators who don't just write code, but shape the technological landscape that defines our world.

Recursive Ontologies

From the beginning, developer communities were shaped by cultural artifacts, sometimes creating their own distinct culture. The Jargon File, for example, is a glossary originating from MIT in the 1970s that contains words such as foo and bar, as well as many other terms from the field of hacker slang. ^[7] While foo and bar act as placeholder variables, they have no other purpose. They can be seen as a cultural convention of a linguistic community that merely reflects shared practices.

While these artifacts reveal interesting aspects of developer culture, they alone do not fully describe the computational potential to transform ideas into tangible reality. To grasp the true world-making capabilities of software, we must examine how cultural embedding operates at a more fundamental level. Rather, the world-making abilities of developers revolve around a recursive process of software development and use. Firstly, the act of programming does hot happen in a vacuum. Conditions such as “complex interactions involving the commodity production, organizational life, technoscientific knowledges and enterprises, the organization of work, manifold identities and geo-political-technological zones of contact” ^[8] all influence how developers work and the worldviews they incorporate into software. Software is shaped by the broader context it is situated in.

The desktop metaphor of folders and a trash can, which is still visible on every non-mobile computer, originated because, at the time, computers were considered office devices.

“Every user's initial view of Star is the Desktop, which resembles the top of an office desk, together with surrounding furniture and equipment. It represents a working environment [...]. On the screen are displayed pictures of familiar office objects, such as documents, folders, file drawers, [...].” ^[9]

It thus resembled a desk, where things get done using file folders containing documents that can be manipulated. Today, the distinctive paper-crumpling sound that plays when emptying the trash on a Mac computer serves as an auditory reminder of the bygone era of desktop computers, which were once exclusively found in offices.

This influence extends even to the fundamental technical decisions programmers made when choosing object-oriented programming as Word's underlying architecture. This choice breaks writing into discrete, manipulable objects (paragraphs, fonts, tables), thereby shaping how users conceptualize and interact with written language itself. ^[11]

"Code created is the manifestation of a system of thought—an expression of how the world can be captured, represented, processed, and modeled computationally with the outcome subsequently doing work in the world. Programming then fundamentally seeks to capture and enact knowledge about the world—practices, ideas, measurements, locations, equations, and images—in order to augment, mediate, and regulate people’s lives. Software has, at a fundamental level, an ontological power, it is able to realize whole systems of thought (algorithms and capta) with respect to specific domains." ^[12]

In my previous work, I elaborated further on this process using the example of Amazon's logistical algorithms and their impact on space and human labor, predominantly by shifting them towards Eastern Europe due to value extraction in contemporary platform capitalism. ^[13]

However Kitchin and Dodge also note, that "just as software comes from diverse threads, software’s effect in the world is not deterministic or universal. Rather, software as an actant, like people as actors, functions within diversely produced social, cultural, economic, and political contexts. The effects of software unfold in multiple ways in many milieus. ^[14]

This leaves room for concepts that acknowledge the circular causality through which users and interfaces mutually constitute one another. As Lasse Scherffig argues in 'There Is No Interface Without a User', software only becomes culturally meaningful through use, interpretation and appropriation. ^[15]
Users don't merely consume software; they also complete its cultural meaning through vernacular practices. As Olia Lialina would argue, this includes workarounds and misuses that developers never anticipated. ^[16]
Nonetheless, it can be concluded that software possesses secondary agency. As Kitchin and Dodge argue, "it augments, supplements, mediates, and regulates our lives and opens up new possibilities—but not in a deterministic way." ^[17] This agency is enabled by its creators (programmers, designers, companies) who make decisions about code and architecture, while its non-deterministic nature stems from operating within diverse social, cultural, economic, and political contexts, as well as being constantly reinterpreted and challenged by users through vernacular practices. ^[18]

Ask Your Developer

With his memorable talk at the 1999 NET Conference, Steve Ballmer opened a new era in which developers were positioned at the strategic core of platform dominance. The enthusiastic CEO, clad in a blue business shirt, was drenched in sweat and pure energy while aggressively clapping and yelling the chant like repetition of "developers developers developers" as the key for industry transformation and success. ^[19]

This was an attempt to energize his supporters and give his company an advantage during a period of intense speculation. The whole scene can be viewed as a marketing performance during the dot.com bubble's gold rush of attention, investment and confidence, before it burst. Ballmer's recognition of the influence of developers has proven to be remarkably accurate, though it has evolved into something far more complex and consequential than he could have anticipated. What began as a strategic insight into platform adoption has become a reality in which developers can be seen as situated actors that wield power over the technological infrastructure that shapes our world. In his 2011 blog post, "Why Software Is Eating the World" the venture capitalist Marc Andreessens argues, that we're witnessing a fundamental economic transformation where software companies are disrupting and taking over traditional industries across the economy. ^[20]
While there have been several critiques on his view, especially because it leaves out the material conditions software operates on, this influential essay is placing developers at the forefront of economic destiny. Within this development of software becoming a major economic branch, developers have evolved from being mere executors of pre-defined tasks devised by managers to becoming more autonomous subjects who influence purchasing decisions regarding technological infrastructure. Stack Overflow maintains a section on its advertising platform about how to reach and engage developers. A resource on developer influence and marketing tips explains the increasing importance of engaging developers in the purchasing decision-making processes. ^[21]

"Developers are increasingly regarded as visionaries and architects of digital transformation as opposed to executors of a pre-defined plan delivered by centralized IT leadership." ^[22]

This trend is also reflected in the developer surveys conducted by Stack Overflow, an annual questionnaire in which developers worldwide share insights about their experiences, tools and technologies. The question about purchase influence was first added to the 2020 survey, with around 57% of respondents having some or a great deal of influence. ^[23] This figure has now increased to around 62% in 2024. ^[24]

The blurring of the line between developers and decision makers has given rise to a new marketing field called Business-to-Developers (B2D), which often implements programs known as Developer Relations (DevRel). DevRel encompasses the practices of companies that build developer-facing software, aiming to engage with and promote their products to their primary audience: developers. The idea really gained importance under the name DevRel during the 2010s. Google Trends data shows an increase in searches for the term from around 2016 onward, with a further growth spurt beginning in December 2021. ^[25] The latest peak is probably due to the realization that developers have an increasingly significant influence over purchasing decisions.

The first evidence of billboards specifically targeting developers in the Bay Area dates back to around 2015, when the term "DevRel" started to gain popularity. In a Medium article, user Khoja Sahil shares their experiences of a 12-hour stay in Silicon Valley in 2016, including the billboards. ^[26]

"Unless you're a designer or a developer, the billboards are pure gibberish." ^[27]

This correlates somehow with my experience in March 2025, as I've noted in my diary entries of the trip. Interestingly the ad shown in the blog post is one of a San Francisco based cloud communications company called Twilio. The company is known for their activities in the field of developer relations, and in this case displaying the slogan: "ask your developer". The company's founder and CEO, Jeff Lawson, released a book in 2021 whose title was inspired by this very billboard. "Ask Your Developer: How to Harness The Power of Software Developers And Win in The 21th Century". ^[28] According to Lawson, he came up with the 'crazy' idea for a marketing slogan after the whole team had struggled for weeks to find one for their $500,000 billboard. Remarkably, the idea originated from TV ads for drugs or medicines that always have to display a pharmaceutical disclaimer. Lawson describes this situation as follows:

“Why don’t we just say, ‘Ask your developer,’” [...] You know, like those ads on TV where they say, ‘Ask your doctor if this medication is right for you.’ We’re saying, ‘Ask your developer if Twilio is right for you.’” ^[29]

Although this is intended as a humorous marketing slogan, it reveals something about the mindset behind it. The developer is being compared to a doctor who can recommend a product, but who is also aware of the risks and side effects. This establishes the developer as a trustworthy and credible source. This trust is reflected in todays aforementioned trend of giving developers a greater influence over technology purchases. While most developers have technical expertise, they are usually not trained to recognize ideological assumptions embedded in technical choices or question the neutrality of computational abstractions. It can be difficult for the average developer to see the bigger picture of the commitments embedded in the systems they build.

Gibberish Fraud

It can currently be observed that the aforementioned developer-facing billboards, which emerged around 2016, are increasingly focusing on technologies susceptible to the field of "artificial intelligence". The phenomenon can be seen as a culmination of the two concepts at hand. First, the mere function of developers as purchasing agents that maintain the flow of venture capital. Second, developers' ability to transform ideological concepts into cultural practices, through software. As Cate Crawford notes already now, “AI systems both reflect and produce social relations and understandings of the world.” ^[30]While this work will not cover what these social relations actually look like, it is widely accepted that they reflect white, male and colonial/imperialist traditions, manifesting in structures of discrimination, exploitation and surveillance. ^{[31] [32] [33]}
Since contemporary capitalism relies on commodification processes that reproduce these power structures, I argue that the current AI hype represents an emergent convergence where capital flows and ideological reproduction mutually reinforce each other, embedding these traditional hierarchies into new technological forms.

Emily Bender and Alex Hanna's book 'The AI Con' refers to AI being a 'con' as in 'confidence game' or fraud. ^[34] The book's website describes how AI hype "twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines." ^[35] This critique draws on a long tradition of deceptive automata, where inventors and showmen created elaborate mechanical illusions that appeared to demonstrate artificial intelligence while concealing human operators or clever tricks behind the spectacle – most famously exemplified by the Mechanical Turk.

Consequently Bender and Hanna identify AI, as mainly a marketing term, in the sense of a branding strategy that obscures what these technologies actually are and do. ^[36]
I argue, that the billboards along Highway 101 act along this incentive. They serve as marketing object, in a classical sense, while at the same time their incomprehensibility for non-techies emphasizes the exclusivity of technical knowledge and reinforces developers' position as the essential intermediaries between AI capital and broader society. Developers aren't just being marketed APIs with the hope of in-cooperation in their companies products, they're being recruited as cultural agents who will normalize the fraud of AI integration into everyday life. Just like Microsoft Word stripped away more creative styles of writing by cluttering the user with templates of office boredom, we're entering another phase of standardization and commodification under the guise of efficiency and enhancement. This time heavily based on concepts such as massive data extraction and comprehensive surveillance. The following is a brief examination of three patterns found in advertisements along the 101 Highway that emphasize these dynamics of developer recruitment and cultural manipulation in contemporary techno-capitalism.

Emily Bender and Alex Hanna challenge some of the core beliefs that have emerged alongside the hype surrounding AI. One such belief is the idea that AI and the corresponding software are inevitable. This idea is reinforced by overly enthusiastic AI proponents, as well as by those who view AI as the downfall of humanity. The idea is that AI and related technology will happen, it will be powerful, and those who don't use it will be left behind. ^[37] Bender and Hanna connect this with the feeling of fear of missing out (FOMO). ^[36] The idea of inevitability is a form of technological determinism that Adrian Daub captures under the term 'narratives of historical inevitability' to explain how responsibility is set aside. ^[39] "If it was fated to happen anyway, is it really their fault?"^[40] For the developer this means that they have to adopt the trendy technology while also getting convoyed a sense of non-responsibility. While the concept of compulsive adoption is barefaced positioned on the billboards the idea of non-responsibility is further subliminally mediated through the aesthetics of inevitability.

Not everyone understands the content of the ads. Although around 23% of people in San Francisco work in tech, ^[41] the highest percentage worldwide, this still leaves a majority of 77% who encounter these billboards as incomprehensible artifacts. This incomprehensibility is a tool that reinforces insider exclusivity. Silicon Valley has a long tradition of positioning outsiders as cultural heroes. It's the stories about college dropouts who disrupted entire industries or garage-based startups that toppled corporate giants. Whether or not those stories about bottom up success from the garage to the successful company are true, this outlaw mythology creates a paradox: while celebrating anti-establishment rebellion, it simultaneously constructs its own elite insider culture. Adrian Daub has extensively theorized this in 'What Tech Calls Thinking'. ^[42]
This culture of exclusivity leads to billboards possessing almost meme-like aesthetics, with some actually resembling well-known internet memes. The technical jargon on the billboards along the Highway 101 functions as a form of semiotic gatekeeping, empowering those who "get it" and excluding those who don't.

What else can be observed on the billboards is a tactic of anthropomorphism that is widely spread within the language of the AI hype. Francis Hunger analyzes in his working paper 'Unhype Artificial 'Intelligence'! A proposal to replace the deceiving terminology of AI' how the use of anthropomorphizing language is fueling AI hype. Hunger argues that terms like 'intelligence', 'learning', and 'neural networks' create the illusion that AI systems possess human-like cognitive abilities, when they are actually performing statistical pattern recognition. ^[43] This anthropomorphic language doesn't just describe technology, it shapes how we as society, but also developers think about and engage with these systems. The Highway 101 billboards extend this anthropomorphic manipulation into the visual realm. While this three examples only capture some of the phenomena at play, there are expected to be more mechanisms at play, that represent the white, male and colonial tradition that is encapsulated in contemporary techno capitalism. Just to mention one more example being pointed out by Daub, another billboard from 2018, this time on Interstate 80, that is showcasing internalized sexism with the slogan "GRAB 2019 BY THE DATA". ^{[44] [45]}

Resisting Determinism

The billboards have to be understood as a complex interplay of several concepts at hand. They reflect that the current boom around AI is mainly a marketing concept as theorized by Bender and Hanna. Consequently it finds it ideal form of expression in the marketing infrastructure itself. They have a message to their target group, which is closely related to concepts influencing society as a whole. The billboards clearly reinforce the idea that people outside Silicon Valley's tech elite do not belong, while making developers feel special for understanding the 'future'. They convey the concepts of inevitability and anthropomorphism, that became internalized into the ideology of AI, to frame technology as compulsory and naturally intelligent rather than constructed. The billboards on highway 101 represent a culmination of the developer marketing and empowerment trend, paired with prevailing narratives on AI - recognizing them as the key decision-makers who will determine which AI technologies get adopted and integrated into the systems that increasingly govern our world.

What can be observed is a feedback loop where marketing shapes the worldview of those who then embed those ideas into software. Which is then shaping wider society through it's use. It is important to recognize that the world-making abilities of developers revolve around a recursive process of software development and use. It would be a fallacy to deem technological fate as set in stone. While the billboards on highway 101 represent the apex of developer-targeted marketing and AI-bullshit, companies betting hundreds of thousands of dollars hoping that developers will serve as reliable intermediaries for technological adoption, we shouldn't forget about the user. Developers aren't the final authorities of an AI product's cultural meaning, users complete that meaning through their vernacular practices, regardless of what developers intended when they integrated these tools. The future does not belongs to those who can afford highway 101 billboards, but to those who critically engage with tools by exploring, misusing and breaking them on an everyday basis and as part of a creative practice.

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