Coded vanilla : logistical media and the determination of action

This essay sets out to explore the production of a seamless, standardized world as both fantasy and material condition. Central to such an account is the implementation and use of (enterprise resource planning) ERP systems, but also their economy within organizations that find supplementary lines of income generation through the mining of data. The distinction between implementation and economy registers in both organizational techniques and methods of analysis. The study of implementation lends itself to ethnographies of organizational cultures, and this has largely been the case in research on ERPs in university settings. A study of the economy of ERP systems, for the purpose of the argument I develop here, is more interested in how the technical parameters of software determine organizational practices and financial transactions within a logistical paradigm. While not exclusive of issues around implementation, the term economy marks a difference of method from ethnographic approaches, which analyze the implementation of ERP systems in institutions from the perspective of users and stakeholders. A study of the economy of enterprise systems points instead to the program-ming of measure, calculation, and decision that, due to the constraints of parameters, determine the production of subjectivity and circuits of movement. This does not mean that there is no resistance to ERP systems in workplace settings, nor does it mean that enterprise software is immune from computational errors or problems associated with implementation. It rather points to the indifference of enterprise systems and algorithmic architectures more broadly: operating below the threshold of perception, we have no idea of the time and force of algorithmic action. Software coupled with infrastructure determines our situation. And while both are heavily engineered and seemingly constrain, even repress, any possibility for action outside of parameters, they nonetheless present new sites of struggle against practices of extraction. A politics of alternatives remains possible despite the seeming impossibility and futility of such work. Less clear is whether alternative politics correspond with a life free of algorithmic determination. To develop this line of argument, the essay presents a series of vignettes that register the operation and transformative effect of enterprise software systems on the economy of data and governance of labor. The essay tracks the inception and governance of ERP systems within universities, then moves to finance capitalism and gamification to extend the analysis of logistical software and infrastructure as key apparatuses that govern culture, society, and economy within the historical present.