I agree that an API is a boundary, and that boundaries can be political, but the boundary = politics argument seems like it dilutes what it means to be politica

I agree that an API is a boundary, and that boundaries can be political, but the boundary = politics argument seems like it dilutes what it means to be political. In a way, you can describe almost any person-to-person interaction as political (there are always subtleties and unspoken motives), but I'm not sure that's useful. To me politics specifically suggests covert social games under the cover of more formal interactions. Most API's though, I think, exist for pretty straightforward reasons. Yeah it's a boundary between groups, but that doesn't mean much more than that, boundaries make a lot of logistical sense. For instance, at work we're putting an API into our product so that people can develop plugins. Is that political? I guess you could argue that it creates a dynamic of "us" (the developers) and "them" (3rd party developers), but being that this is a corporate entity, that already existed. The only thing the API does is create an explicit agreement of what we will provide and what we won't. I hesitate to say that's political though, because there's realistically no back and forth negotiating or games being played. The API is what it is, and people can take it or leave it. Is that really political? The boundary already existed, the API is just the "formalization" of that.