Elise’s parenthetical statement about how the caller “sounds” is a kind of “if-then” statement, a fork-in-the-road moment in the discussion where the caller decides which path might work best. Procedural arguments in the form of phone-banking scripts were distributed by the campaign, but Obama volunteers were not rigid, unwavering machines. They did not always execute the campaign’s code, or at least not in the way that we normally imagine the process of execution.[57] They interpreted it, changed it, and made it their own.

Bogost argues that processes can have complex relationships to ideologies and cultures: “Processes like military interrogation and customer relations are cultural. We tend to think of them as flexible and porous, but they are crafted from a multitude of protracted, intersecting cultural processes.”

The fact that the player must feed his character to continue playing does draw attention to the limited material conditions the game provides for satisfying that need, subtly exposing the fact that problems of obesity and malnutrition in poor communities can partly be attributed to the relative ease and affordability of fast food.

the ubiquity of software, a relatively new medium of expression as compared to text or speech, asks us to consider the role of rules and processes in digital environments.

By tracking the arguments embedded in the Obama campaign’s software and its phone-banking scripts, we can gain a more complete picture of its complex, conflicting, and contradictory messages, and we can see how contemporary campaigns must continually engage the complexities of a hospitable network.

How does the administrating entity of a network balance freedom with control?

my focus in this chapter will be to explore how procedures, computational and otherwise, express arguments and how they shape and constrain writing and political action.