laws of hospitality

Hospitality is the defining ethical predicament of networked life, as it describes the difficulties surrounding “what it is that turns up, what comes our way by e-mail or the Internet.”[15] Life in a networked society means that terms such as place, home, host, and guest are thrown into question.

Arriving in the Domodedovo Airport or Red Square or other public spaces, the suicide bomber takes advantage of the hospitable infrastructures of networked life. But this “black widow” perished due to this same structure of hospitality. This bombing is particularly instructive given this book’s discussion of hospitality and software. The bomber’s payload was detonated by a spam message from a cell phone provider. That text message, arriving on her phone through a hospitable network, arrived because she had connected herself to that network and, therefore, had welcomed the message.

Ethical programs are enacted constantly, by both humans and computational machines, and software studies presents a set of terms and concepts for making sense of those programs.

they are not always the result of deliberation

This predicament, which is entirely unavoidable, refigures ethics as something beyond individual choice. Yes, I make decisions about who or what might enter my home, who or what has access to my Twitter feed, but this only happens in the face of an ever-present exposedness to others. Prior to the large-scale availability of networked computational devices, Levinas described the relation that defines networked life. Levinas likens this predicament to that of the hostage, and he suggests that if “we” as humans share anything at all, it is this experience of being held hostage by another that resists representation, that arrives over and beyond our attempts to make sense of that other.