The graphical user interface conceals code so completely that software becomes an invisible medium.

Evidence

When critics have periodized the cultural production of the present, they have most frequently looked to the advent of so-called new media and the associated “revolution” beginning in the 1990s. … The pivotal event in this revolution is the occlusion of code. Long before the rise of “social” media, our quotidian interaction with mainframe computing was radicalized by the rise of the user interface. Interface is here understood as the dissemblance of material relations; thus does theorist Wendy Chun directly analogize software to Althusser’s famous definition of ideology as the imaginary relation of individuals to their real conditions of existence. The symbolic operations that structure the conditions of circulation-forward capitalism—namely, computer code—are vanishing mediators, leaving us in an imaginary mirror hall of rippleless icons. Early commercial and consumer computing in the 1970s and ’80s averted this obscurity: users directly encountered and executed coding and code functions. Boot up. PR#6. RUN. B Load, C Load. The personal computer was not simply “a device for consuming media” but a “fixture in the home for work” that essentially presumed individuals would become programmers. However, after the rise of the graphic user interface, game designer and author Ian Bogost has argued, users no longer interact with computational media at the level of the symbolic; instead, we click folders on tidy desktops. As a range of contemporary scholars have shown, the ubiquity of these interactions makes this front only more Delphic. Zara Dinnen observes, “When code is working properly, we don’t see it … if source code has been written effectively, it effaces itself.” Similarly, in the ultimate media theory of immediacy, Alexander Galloway diagnoses: “Software is the medium that is not a medium.” — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 74

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘interface’ as the dissemblance of material relations and grounds immediacy’s technological basis in code occlusion.
• XREF: Chun’s analogy of software to Althusser’s ideology dovetails with the reader’s Jameson framework since Jameson is the American carrier of Althusserian structural causality.