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.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Encoding an Analytic
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
Ya-Wen Lei
2. Consent Code and Default Dramas
Meg Leta Jones
3. A Mirror, Not a Glass Door: Legal Code and Software Code in Practice
Justin Petelka, Megan Finn, Janaki Srinivasan, Elisa Oreglia, and A. P. Janani
4. Algorithmic Collusion, Modern Monopolies, and Their Market Power
Hamid R. Ekbia
5. Reopening the Politics of Openness in the Age of Cloud Computing: Reflections on Recent FOSS Relicensing
Shun-Ling Chen
6. The Great E-book Conspiracy
Gerardo Con Díaz
Part II. How does code become infused with social values, assumptions, and biases?
7. The Standard Head
Stephanie Dick
8. Spanning Space and Time Barriers: Computerized Conferencing, Disability, and Citizenship
Elizabeth Petrick
9. Pushing Fintech: Testing Mobile Money, Financial Inclusion, and "Rural Women" in Peru
Mariel García Llorens
10. Corporate Culture Made Material: Ephemera and In/equity at Control Data Corporation, 1957–1975
Elizabeth Semler
11. Reassessing the Iconic and Unbundling the Ironic: IBM System Engineering, Gender, and Antitrust
Jeffrey R. Yost
12. Y2K and the Politics of Labor
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
Shreeharsh Kelkar
14. Computers as Colonizers: British Computing Companies and Indian Technological Resistance, 1955–1975
Mar Hicks
15. The Mask of Humanity: Manipulation and Psychopathy at the Human-Computer Interface
Jennifer Alexander
16. Cryptography Goes Public: Contesting the Meaning of a New Field in the 1970s United States
Gili Vidan
17. Nodes and Codes: Iterating with the State in México
Héctor Beltrán
Epilogue: Artificial Intelligence—Braiding Irony, Paradox, and Possibility
Jeffrey R. Yost and Gerardo Con Díaz
Contributors
Index
