Once the code leaves the fingers of the programmer, it can circulate amidst machines and other programmers.  As Jeremy Douglass has demonstrated it also circulates to readers beyond the sphere of the project development.  Code is read in court rooms, on new programs, in classrooms, and in the wild of the Internet.   The code, in these cases, is often decontextualized in the service of a larger point.   Of course, the code also circulates with the software that it produces.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool has circulated as software even before it completed through what Ricardo Dominguez has called "speculative deployments."  When the political pundits went up in arms about the use of this device, they had already rendered the code operational, rhetorically speaking.  Whether or not they are referring to specific lines of code, they are reacting to the imagined execution of this code, so their reactions become a part of the larger cultural context of the code. On the other hand, code is often perceived as a mathematical notation ripped from its social context.  Like the border, in that case, code becomes a sign of pure process. 

Reading code against the reception of the software attempts to identify the complex contexts in which code is imbricated.

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