ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to identify how technoliberals argue, through strategies of effacement and strategies of code-ification, as a first step in denaturalizing their assumptions and instigating alternative possibilities for contemporary digital culture. Technoliberals believe that information severely attenuates, or even replaces, the role of argumentation by assuming the flow of data will naturally illuminate the obvious judgment. Strategies of code-ification refer to how, in making certain principles of argument more durable through code, technoliberals have turned modern techniques of argumentation into technologies of argumentation. Replicating assumptions associated with early liberalism’s marketplace of ideas, technoliberalism assumes that, since internetworked technologies operate on a level playing field, the emergence of certain technologies and habits is natural and ideal. The conceit of technoliberalism suggests the long overdue potential for scholars in argumentation studies to intervene in larger conversations stimulated by software studies and digital culture more broadly.
