Cargo Cult Software

Definition

Cargo cult software describes software and software features that are designed to function like other software systems, but with none of the inherent functionality of those interfaces.

For instance, a company may copy a user interface from Apple just because it is successful, without implementing any of the interactions or design consistency anywhere else in their application. The number of people hiring web developers with the intent of having them program the next Facebook is another example. It is the development of something without understanding the underlying intent or purpose of a current system.

Where the metaphor comes from

The metaphor entered technical usage through Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech commencement address, "Cargo Cult Science," which described research that follows the outward forms of scientific method while missing the thing that makes it work. Steve McConnell applied it to software directly in "Cargo Cult Software Engineering," IEEE Software, 2000, distinguishing organizations that follow a process because they understand what it achieves from those that follow it because successful organizations do.

Cargo cult programming, describes code included because it appeared in a working example, retained without any understanding of what it does.

What Cargo Cults Actually Were

The account of tribes worshipping objects that fell from the sky and attempting to recreate them is a popular notion, but is actually inaccurate.

The term first appeared in print in November 1945, at the end of the Pacific War. Anthropologists adopted the neologism to label Melanesian social movements that had come to their attention during the colonial era, which began in the region in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with post-war movements.

The term named was an organized social movement of Melanesian villagers pursuing cargo through renewed or invented ritual action intended to induce ancestral spirits or other powerful beings to provide. These were millenarian and revitalization movements arising in the wake of Western colonization, a southwest Pacific instance of a form common throughout the colonial world.

Not all of them were religious. The Maasina Rule in the Solomon Islands was a secular organization that challenged colonial power through activism and negotiation with the British authorities.

Why the term is disputed

Lamont Lindstrom's Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond (University of Hawai'i Press, 1993) is the standard reference on the concept's own history. His argument is that cargo cult is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring, and that like culture, worldview, and ethnicity, its usage proliferated and migrated into popular culture, where it is now applied to an astonishing roll-call of people.

The critical point is who benefits from the framing. Cargo cult discourse legitimises the accumulative practices of the powerful while rendering the aspirations and demands of their followers immoral, greedy, superstitious, or backward. For anthropologists, this step was first taken by colonial administrators who were threatened by indigenous movements questioning the inequalities of the colonial system.

The term has largely fallen out of favor and is seldom used by anthropologists now, though the metaphorical sense remains widespread in popular commentary, resting on a stereotype of cargo cultists as primitive and confused people using irrational means to pursue rational ends. Few new groups matching the term have emerged since the 1970s, and some surviving movements became indigenous churches and political parties.

Lindstrom's further move was to turn the category around. Western materialism, belief in UFOs, the quest for economic recovery in post-war Germany, shopping, and the search for eternal love have all been described as Western forms of cargo cult. His account of the marketplace, where one may never stop shopping and is never fully satisfied, is a description of desire rather than of Melanesia.

The consequence for the software term

The software usage is still useful, and it needs a different justification than the one usually given.

What it accurately describes is the copying of form without function, which is a real and common failure. What it inaccurately implies is that the original cargo cults were an instance of that failure. They were not. They were coherent responses by people who could see enormous quantities of manufactured goods arriving for others and not for them, and who reasoned about the mechanism using the explanatory resources available to them.

If anything the analogy runs backwards. A team that copies an interface without understanding it has access to the documentation, the source, the research, and the people who built it, and declines to use any of it. The Melanesian villagers had none of that and were reasoning from what they could observe.

Related Reading

• Collaborative Reality
• User experience design
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Frictional Surfaces
• Code Bubbles
• Myth of the Hero
• Emic Approach
• Etic Approach
• Actual behavior
• Material Culture and Technology in Everyday Life: Ethnographic Approaches
• The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual
• Cyborgs and Citadels
• Simulacra and Simulation
• Consuming Life
• Conspicuous Consumption
• We Have Never Been Modern

Key texts

• Lindstrom, Lamont. Cargo Cult: Strange Stories of Desire from Melanesia and Beyond. University of Hawai'i Press, 1993. Open access.
• Worsley, Peter. The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia. MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.
• Jebens, Holger, ed. Cargo, Cult, and Culture Critique. University of Hawai'i Press, 2004.
• Feynman, Richard. "Cargo Cult Science." Caltech commencement address, 1974. Published in Engineering and Science.
• McConnell, Steve. "Cargo Cult Software Engineering." IEEE Software, 2000.

External Links

• Cargo Cult, Lindstrom, full text, open access
• Cargo cults, Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology