Austin Wade Smith — Feral Computing (2022)
Smith develops the concept of feral computing: software, algorithms, and computational processes that have escaped or been released from their original institutional design context and now operate in the wild — developing emergent behaviors, being maintained by communities with different values than their creators, or running autonomously without any maintainer.
The essay draws on the analogy of feral animals (domesticated creatures that have returned to the wild and adapted to autonomous survival) to think about what it means for computational systems to develop their own “habits,” accumulate their own communities of use, and resist being recaptured by institutional control. Feral computing is not a failure mode but a design aspiration: software that can sustain itself outside institutional dependency.
Smith’s companion concept of undualing — the practice of reanimating plural lifeworlds against forces of singularization — connects feral computing to a broader political ontology of multiplicity against monoculture.
For OM: feral computing resonates with the extitutional walkaway test applied to software: code that can be abandoned by its creators without loss to its underlying protocol. It also connects to the posthuman thesis — computing that escapes the humanist frame and develops its own agencies.