Despite their seeming relegation to the digital world, code and software can have material, large-scale, and even violent effects. In just one example, the NotPetya ransomware paralyzed one-fifth of world maritime trade in 2017. Mechanicity is a philosophical investigation of what happens when the force of language merges with material force, and what this means for the great ideas of politics: political action, international anarchy, and the very concept of sovereign state.

In this book, Vic Castro returns to Thomas Hobbes’s idea of the mechanical as a force both determinate and unruly, just like machines and software, and examines the human body—both in Hobbes’s political philosophy and in mishaps of genetic code—as that which brings together language and materiality in political society. To develop the framework of mechanicity, Castro also revives the Copenhagen School’s poststructuralist realism, the Derridian approach to traditional International Relations, and particularly actor-network theory (ANT). Using the case studies on Apple’s 2016 encrypted iPhone and NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, Mechanicity shows how software is not just constrained to immaterial cyberspace; it also reshapes the physical world and the politics possible therein.

Vic Castro is a Postdoc at the Copenhagen Business School.