What is digital about abstraction?

2025-08-25

AI Summary

This paper investigates the dual material and social nature of “abstraction” in computing, challenging its conventional framing as a mere cognitive tool and instead positioning it as a constitutive organizational mechanism shaping software practice, technical architectures, and socio-technical relations. Drawing on historical analysis and social-technical systems theory, it examines case studies from operating systems, programming paradigms, and network protocols to demonstrate how abstraction—beyond modular design—historically reconfigures labor division, governance logics, and power distribution. The study innovatively theorizes abstraction as a critical power nexus within platform capitalism, open-source collaboration, and cloud infrastructure, elucidating its role in generating dependency structures, mediating control relations, and reproducing structural inequalities through socio-technical processes. By foregrounding abstraction’s generative and regulatory functions, the research advances understanding of digital infrastructure’s deep evolutionary logic and offers a novel analytical framework for critical technology studies.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Other Foundations of Human Computation & AI
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: (Computational) Cognitive Architectures
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Incentives in network design for Web infrastructures and ecosystems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures

Abstract

This chapter examines abstraction as a central principle of computing, not merely as a cognitive skill or epistemological category, but as a material and organizational practice that structures how software is built, used, and embedded in society. By tracing abstraction through historical developments in programming, operating systems, and networking, the text highlights its dual role in enabling modularity and layering while simultaneously shaping cultural, economic, and organizational forms. From open-source projects to platform capitalism and cloud infrastructures, abstraction emerges as both a technical device and a locus of power, producing dependencies and interdependencies that reconfigure labor, governance, and control in digital environments. The chapter argues for understanding abstraction as a socio-technical process whose effects extend far beyond efficiency or convenience, influencing how computing infrastructures evolve and how power relations crystallize around them.

Problem

• Examining abstraction as a material and organizational computing practice
• Analyzing abstraction's dual role in enabling modularity while shaping power structures
• Understanding abstraction as a socio-technical process reconfiguring digital power relations

Innovation

• Abstraction as material organizational practice
• Dual role enabling modularity layering
• Socio-technical process shaping power relations