Hannah Arendt (1998 [1958]) _The Human Condition_, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Hannah Arendt's _The Human Condition_ (of 1958) is a controversial text that tries to understand the human capacity for action in the world, underpinned by a sympathy with participatory democracy and grassroots citizen councils (such as the one that arose during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956). The human capacity to act is enduring, as demonstrated even under the most difficult and repressive circumstances. Central to the recognition of the centrality of action to politics is its distinction from work and labour. The human activities of work and labour are more settings for politics rather than politics in itself, and this has been largely overlooked in political philosophy according to Arendt. The three intersecting areas of labour, work, and action need to be distinguished to understand the human condition: labour understood as relating to biological life of the human animal; work, relating to the building of artificial objects; and action, relating to what she refers to as the plurality of distinct human individuals. 
'Action, the only activity that goes o directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world. While all aspects of the human condition are somehow related to politics, this plurality is specifically _the_ condition [...] of all political life.' (1998: 7) 

Indeed all human activities are conditioned by society but Arendt stresses that 'it is only action that cannot even be imagined outside the society of men. [...] and only action is entirely dependent upon the constant presence of others' (1998: 22-3). Action together with being, is thoroughly political according to Aristotle, and quite distinct from the social that is not a specifically human condition but more generally related to other animals too (note: Lost in translation from Greek to Latin, the terms 'political' and 'social become confused and somewhat interchangeable, Arendt 1998: 23). That the social now constitutes the public organisation of the life process appears to occlude a deeper understanding of the political (perhaps this is no where as evident as in social media where human activities have become almost entirely codified). Even labour is made better in the public realm: 
'Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required, and this presence needs the formality of the public, constituted by one's peers, it cannot be the casual, familiar presence of one's equals or inferiors.' (Arendt 1998: 49; excellence in this sense comes close to virtuosity, or _virtus_ in Latin, requiring a public to distinguish one over the other.)
The public realm is the place for excellence, or ethical action.

Concerning human activities, two in particular were taken to be political in Greek thought, 'and to constitute what Aristotle called the _bios politikos_, namely action (_praxis_) and speech (_lexis_), out of which rises the realm of human affairs [...] from which everything merely necessary or useful is strictly excluded' (1998: 25). In this way, the political realm is constituted by action and speech, and outside the sphere of violence which remains mute. In Aristotle, it is only _nous_, the capacity for contemplation that cannot be rendered in speech, beyond the capacity for _logos_ related to speech or reason. The public sphere (_polis_) relates to this, as the sphere of freedom (whereas the private sphere of the household related to life). The public realm was distinguished from the private realm in its understanding of equality: from a realm of equals to the inequality of the household. The logic of this relies on an understanding that the ruler of the household could be equal amongst peers whereas those not equal could not become part of the public realm at all (and of course, slaves were not able to enter public life). In this sense, 'to be free meant to be free from the inequality present in rulership and to move in a sphere where neither rule nor being ruled existed' (Arendt 1998: 33). Of course this is far from a modern understanding of the differences between public and private realms or of equality. Despite the distinctions making little sense anymore, Arendt agrees with the Greek understanding that a life outside of the common is 'idiotic' (derived from _idion_, life spent in the privacy of 'one's own', 1998: 38). 

Arendt maintains that a fundamental condition of politics is the ability of plural human actors to interact and create something anew - political action as 'doing'. As such, human action is both contingent and unpredictable. In describing political action as doing, rather than making (more in tune with 'work'), she is breaking from the orthodox Marxist conception that humans can make their own history. Instead she offers a more unpredictable and contingent description of human capacities. To Arendt, Marx understands history in terms of processes of production and consumption close to animal life - more labour than work - and therefore history is understood as a collective life-process (more in tune with the Aristotlelian term 'bios politikos'). But unlike Marx who would tend towards a view that history is an inevitable process, Arendt takes it to be a process related to the contingent human action (rather like Roy Bhasker's 'transformative agency'). In other words, humans are creatures who act, and in doing so set off a train of events - for better or worse, thus necessitating an engagement with the relationship between action and responsibility - or 'ethical action'. There is some hope in the recognition that humans are able to intervene and interrupt a chain of events set in motion by previous actions. Yet, unpredictability of action is coupled with unpredictability of effects. 

An example of this is a situation where artificial machines possess the ability to do thinking and speaking. 
'If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not s much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.' (Arendt 1998: 3)

This is political for Arendt, not so much for the lack of social responsibility and the application of ideas, but in as much as it concerns speech. And she distrusts science as a context where 'speech has lost its power', where a language of mathematical symbols have replicated spoken statements but cannot be translated back to speech (1998: 4). To Arendt, whatever can be known or experienced can only make sense in relation to speech, and the human capacity for thought and thoughtlessness (itself subordinate to speech and action). Her proposal: 'it is nothing more than to think what we are doing' (1998: 5). My proposal is to think what we are doing when coding whilst remain attentive to how coding as doing might retain qualities of speech and action, and hence excellence in the public realm or common.