On Reverse Engineering: Looking for the Cultural Work of EngineersThis essay responds to a feature in The Atlantic that sought to “reverse engineer” the weirdly precise micro-genre labels used by Netflix. While reverse engineering may be a useful strategy for figuring out how an existing technology works, it is less useful for telling us how it came to work that way. Along the way, I discuss structuralism, The Wizard of Oz, and a not-very-good Ben Affleck movie.