Paper Short Abstract:

Coders returning to their childhood village navigate an ironic relationship with digital infrastructure that enables their return yet changes their community. This paper explores how, through ‘refactoring’, they make careful interventions in village life to contest techno-dystopian imaginaries.

Paper Abstract:

This paper examines the digital imaginaries among a group of remote working software developers who have returned to their childhood village in rural western Norway. Inspired by nostalgia for the close-knit community of their youth and a desire to provide a similar upbringing for their children, this return is fraught with irony: the same technologies that facilitate their livelihood also appear to threaten the sense of community they seek to recapture.

The village, like many rural areas, has become increasingly dependent on ‘global’ social media platforms for social organisation. This dependency is accentuated by the village’s rugged and obstructive topography, where the fjord and mountains impede spontaneous encounters, thereby reinforcing the need for deliberate interaction. As a result, villagers rely heavily on digital techniques to maintain relationships and gather together. However, users complain of the technologies’ often inimical design; and developers with practical insight lament at the area’s dependence on imperfect and partial digital tools. In knowing how these tools are made, these developers possess a powerful idea: that things could be made different.

This places returning software developers within a dialectic between two imaginaries: one that is in correspondence with their practical engagement writing, refactoring, and deploying code; and a second that grows out of their nostalgic and actual relationships to the people, history, and autonomy of this rural community threatened by grand technological trajectories. I suggest that ‘refactoring’ – a skilled programming technique emphasising iterative, testable changes to minimise risk – captures how this dialectic is being operationalised.