The Gentrification of Code: Forced Obsolescence and the Political Economy of Complexity in Open Source Software

Guest lecture presented on 19 May 2026 in Department III: Media and Information Society

Presentation at Guest lecture presented on 19 May 2026 in Department III: Media and Information Society

This presentation argues that modern software complexity should be written as a social history of computation. Taking JavaScript’s evolution from a small scripting language into a standards-driven, package-saturated, toolchain-dependent ecosystem, and reading it against Oberon’s deliberately bounded world at ETH Zurich, it proposes that complexity is not merely a technical attribute of code but a historical regime that organizes participation, legibility, temporality, and governance.

What appears as openness in contemporary software often masks a stratified order in which source remains visible while the costs of understanding, updating, securing, and maintaining systems rise. The presentation calls this process the gentrification of code: not to collapse software into urban history, but to identify a patterned condition in which formal access persists as meaningful participation becomes harder to sustain.

The history of computing, on this account, should move beyond machines, inventors, and innovation toward the unequal distribution of technical authority, maintenance labor, classification power, and the right to remain competent in a changing software world.