Bitwise
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The conservative propensity is to conserve, to not destroy, and, therefore, to not replace, even (within limits) by something more valuable. A conservative can believe that what rises from the ashes is the greatest building ever and that it was right to build it, yet still feel distraught that the old building was destroyed.
I was granted an opportunity to be an agent of the technological change that we are currently undertaking, and I greatly enjoyed it. I took it as a refuge from the irrational complications and irregularities that computers ignore. Those irregularities—whether in spoken language or in literature or in my own children—nonetheless hold deep and complex meaning for me. I do not wish for them to be lost in a steamroller of standardization. Computers will not grasp these depths of meaning for decades, perhaps centuries. I desire for those edifices of art and feeling to be preserved in the intervening years. I believe in their benefit to humanity and in their innate positive value. My faith is that we need our unqualified nuances and irregularities to elude code and ontology. We need them to be recognized and given meaning by the world, however computationalized it becomes.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful for the insight and support that so many have provided me over my life. I am fortunate to have known all those below.
My teachers: Cathy Fiore, John Clyman, Jim Holland, James Parkman, Doug Biedenweg, Tony Hodgin, Tom Generous, David Doster, William Flesch, John Crowley, Heinrich von Staden, David Pears, Derk Pereboom, Paolo Mancosu, Stanley Eisenstat, Zhong Shao, Edmund L. Epstein, Galen Strawson, David Rosenthal, David Carr. I learned more from you than you know.
My friends and colleagues who enriched my time at Google and Microsoft: Chris Pirich, Jonathan Forbes, William Lai, Bama Rao, Kara Lewis, Chris Mitchell, Yikang Xu, David Anson, Lan Tang, Richard Chung, Niniane Wang, Larry Greenfield, Arup Mukherjee, Joanna Kulik, Daniel Dalitz, Debby Wallach, Peter Weinberger, Bill Coughran.
Fellow writers whose existence encourages me: Jessie Ferguson, Paul Kerschen, Ray Davis, Juliet Clark, Kathryn Hume, Annie Kim, Lisa Samuels, Peli Grietzer, Susan Bernofsky, Stephen Dixon, and László Krasznahorkai.
For intense debate and engagement with my inchoate ideas: James Grimmelmann, Josh Harrison, Adam Elkus, Brett Fujioka, Josephine Wolff, Joel Hernandez, John Emerson, Natasha Singer, Frank Pasquale, Cosma Shalizi, Henry Farrell, Meredith L. Patterson.
For necessary support in the wild world of publishing: Alexander Provan, Sam Frank, Dan Visel, Keith Gessen, Marco Roth, Carla Blumenkranz, Dayna Tortorici, Jessica Winter, Laura Helmuth, Jill Schoolman, Harry Siegel.
Friends old and new: Laura Skorina, Harrison Hung, Gabriella Gruder-Poni, Jaya Kasibhatla, Seo-Young Chu, Cary Franklin, Cori Gabbard, Kaveri Nair, Lauren Gabriele, Chris Hardgrove, Anna Medvedovsky, Noémie Elhadad, Mercedes Armillas, Jenny Chisnell, Anastasia Senenko, Mary McMullen, Eleanor Sarasohn, Jannon Stein, Hari Khalsa, Kelly Molloy, Florence Liu, Blakely Phillips, Erica Weitzman, Simona Sivkoff, Tal Corem, Katie Sigelman, Scott Brown, Maria Schurr, Leigh Fullmer, Sophie Rollins, Lauren Moos, Sara Plourde, Stephen Lavelle, Sonya Mann, Heather Day-Richter, Cynthia Campos, Eireene Nealand, Juliet O’Keefe, Yi Shi.
Cognitive expertise: Stan Smith, Angelica Kaner, Trip Quillman, Ken Corbett, Ron Winchel, Virginia Goldner.
For musical sustenance in a time of need: Peggy Sartoris-Belacqua, Henry Hughes, and Jon Abbey.
For encouragement above and beyond: Jordan Ellenberg, Scott Aaronson.
For the crucial support in this book’s existence: Sarah Burnes, Dan Frank, Maria Goldverg, Nora Reichard, Daniel Seidel.
For their generosity in allowing their work to be used: Richard McGuire, Brecht Evens, Tim Denee, Matt Jones, Craig VanGrasstek.
And of course to my family, who made me who I am. Nina, this book would not exist without your unceasing support and insight.
The writing of this book was supported by a fellowship from New America. They have not exerted any undue influence over its contents.
NOTES
1 LOGO AND LOVE
I found particular pleasure: Papert, 1980, vi–vii.
We walk through the world: Reichenbach, 1938.
Roger Cramton attributes it: Cramton, 1986.
“With the accessibility of music”: Cope, 2003.
COUT gequ $FDED: Shepherd.
He was a one-man: Auerbach, “A Delville of a Tolkar: Martin Gardner’s ‘Undiluted Hocus-Pocus,’ ” 2013.
Georges Perec’s mighty Life: Mathews & Brotchie, 2005.
Perec used (and abused) Graeco-Latin squares: Bellos, 1993, 596–608.
Perec, unable to construct squares: Ibid., 420.
“perhaps the greatest 20th century novel”: Knuth, n.d.
The modern sense of the term “heuristic”: Pólya, 1957.
“The one sort are above all”: Poincaré, 1907, 15–21.
Seventy years later: Kac, 1985, xxv.
“Without bias”: Gigerenzer, Hertwig, & Pachur, 2011.
One version: Gilbert, 1955.
“Stoner looked across”: Williams J., 1965.
2 CHAT WARS
“In Cyberspace”: Hansell, 1999.
Despite Microsoft’s notorious: Auerbach, “Tales of an Ex–Microsoft Manager,” 2013.
Following the far less popular Lisa: Pang.
More significantly: Rosenoer, 1997, 49–53.
“Almost all the similarities”: Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 1994.
“I don’t want to be remembered”: Bank, 2001.
“Anyone who has had the misfortune”: Truesdell, 1984, 629.
I built this feature: Auerbach, “I Built That ‘So-and-So Is Typing’ Feature in Chat,” 2014.
“Mr. Smith”: Chappell, 2008.
When Windows architect: Mazarakis & Shontell, 2017.
3 BINARIES
“Our ordinary habits”: Naur, 1990.
“starry dance”: Milton, Paradise Lost, III.579–81.
“Without any information”: Smullyan, 1978, 65.
“The letters on a computer screen”: Associated Press, 1999.
“Those who say mathematics”: Ramsey, 1931.
“To say of what is”: Aristotle, 1908, 1011b25.
“Mathematicians are therefore mystified”: Rota, 1997/2008, 93.
“Truth, in Plato’s system”: Friedlander, 1969, 227.
“Truth happens”: James, 1907.
“We feel that there is an inner kinship”: Carnap, 1967/2003, xviii.
“If we translate ‘scientific outlook’ ”: Musil, 1995.
“We are unable clearly”: Wittgenstein, 1960, 25.
We invent and create: Auerbach, “The Limits of Language,” 2015.
INTERLUDE: FOREIGN TONGUES
“Deeply lost”: Kafka, 1971.
“Speech then is not”: Kleist, 1997/2004, 408–9.
“While LiveJournal”: Patterson, 2013.
“I find in writers”: Diderot, 2006, 49.
4 NAMING OF PARTS
That is, one’s gender: World Health Organization, 2015.
If, as the World Health Organization states: Ibid.
“In some sciences”: Lichtenberg, 2012.
The MBTI publisher: Winterhalter, 2014.
Read enough of this bombast: “Well-Known Rationals,” n.d.
5 SELF-APPROXIMATIONS
“Putting facts”: Sapolsky, 2017.
the “Big Five”: Spielman, 2016, 391.
the Big Five model: McCrae & Costa, 2003.
“Most constructs”: Nettle, 2007, 10, 39.
“Ashton’s model basically divides”: McCrae, Cambridge Handbook of Personality Psychology, 2009.
“It would be indeed unusual”: Lem, 2013.
“The business mode
l”: Frances, 2013.
“Take the case of Dr. Joseph”: Angell, 2009.
“We saw DSM-IV”: Frances, 2013.
“Boys who were born”: Morrow et al., 2012.
As family therapist: Lipuscek, 2016.
Are mania, depression: Shorter, 2015, 167–70.
“The right goal”: Frances, 2013.
“As documented”: Schatzberg, Scully Jr., Kupfer, & Regier, 2009.
“Our immediate task”: Regier, Narrow, Kuhl, & Kupfer, 2009.
“The challenge for DSM-V”: Carpenter, 2009.
“a new set of advantages”: Helzer, Kraemer, & Krueger, 2006.
“Perhaps the greatest”: Ibid.
“Consistency in the collection”: Ibid.
“a direct, dimensional reflection”: Ibid.
Psychotherapist Gary Greenberg’s account: Greenberg, 2013.
“While DSM has been described”: Insel, 2013.
“There’s no reality”: Greenberg, 2013.
6 GAMES COMPUTERS PLAY
“What is it that you see”: Pagels, 1988.
The Minneapa fanzine’s: Peterson, Playing at the World, 2012.
“will insist upon everything”: Ibid.
As the hobbyist: Rossiter, 2012, 61.
dipsomania: Gygax, 1979.
“Schizophrenia”: Ibid.
“Essential D&D”: Kruger, 2016.
“to discover a persona”: Peterson, Playing at the World, 2012.
“When an individual”: Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, 1956.
“A dozen tries later”: Aaron, 1985.
“Suppose that a crisis”: Crawford, 1986/2014.
Dwarf Fortress’s realistic: StarkRavingMad, 2007.
A procedurally generated: Sankis, 2007.
“To begin with, all”: StarkRavingMad, 2007.
“Once, a town’s executioner”: Dale, 2014.
“Do we do law”: Fenlon, 2016.
“I added taverns”: Ibid.
“There are so many interlocking systems”: Ibid.
“Every program”: Perlis, 1982.
“use the rules only”: Kruger, 2016.
INTERLUDE: ADVENTURES WITH TEXT
I remember Balance of Power: Auerbach, “The Hardest Computer Game of All Time,” 2014.
You begin to approach: Moriarty, 1986.
“Without puzzles”: Nelson, 2001, 382.
examine machine: Ibid.
Some authors: Maher, 2014.
7 BIG DATA
“Simple models”: Halevy, Norvig, & Pereira, 2009.
In 2016, “best mesothelioma lawyer”: Lake, 2016.
Google had hoped: Grimmelmann, “Hail and Farewell to the Google Books Case,” 2016, and Grimmelmann, “Eight Years Later, the Google Books Fight Lumbers On,” 2013.
This cutoff coincides: Carlisle, 2014.
“All that it is given”: Borges, 1999.
“[The Company’s] silent functioning”: Ibid.
The guidelines, it turned out: “Trending Review Guidelines,” 2016.
Mathematician Godfrey: Hardy, 1940/2005, 1.
“But is not the position”: Ibid., 41.
“Judged by all”: Ibid., 49.
“I had been calling them”: Gell-Mann, “Naming Quarks,” 1997.
“Joyce built his house”: Glasheen, 1977, xi–xiii.
8 PROGRAMMING MY CHILD
“When adults at 4 months”: Reddy, 2008.
“Adjustment to objective reality”: Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1986, 37.
“For example, preschoolers”: Gelman, S., 2003, 122.
“Essentialism is not”: Ibid., 295.
“[A child] begins to find”: Peirce, 1868.
Physicist Juan Roederer: Roederer, 2005.
The rhetoric around: Shapiro & Forrest, 2016.
“It may very well be”: Shanon, 2003.
“MDMA administration”: Danforth et al., 2015.
“Why is the mind”: McCulloch, 1951/1988.
“We don’t need something more”: Gell-Mann, Nature Conformable to Herself, 2010, 381.
As Susan Gelman found: Gelman, S., 2003, 31–33.
“thought becomes verbal”: Vygotsky, Thought and Language, 1986, 83.
“The meaningful word”: Vygotsky, The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Problems of General Psychology, 1987, 285.
9 BIG HUMAN
“Technology’s primary effect”: Toyama, 2015.
Beginning in 2000: Woods, 2016.
At the time of the September 11 attacks: Johnston & Lewis, 2002.
“Alexander wants”: Harris, 2013.
“Two engineers”: Gellman & Soltani, 2013.
A 2010 Washington Post: Ibid., and Kaplan, 2016, 152–57.
Later documents leaked: Auerbach, “MUSCULAR ’Roid Rage!,” 2013.
A 2010 UK report: “The Digint Programme,” 2016.
“Alexander asked”: Bamford, 2016.
“In a top-secret memo”: Ibid.
Consumer profiling: Singer, “Mapping, and Sharing, the Consumer Genome,” 2012, and Turow, 2012.
1. Location: Dewey, 2016; Escobar, 2017.
The link took me: Alciné, 2015.
One user posted a photo: Griffin, 2015.
“Certain offensive search terms”: Fitzpatrick, 2015.
In practice, this equated: Sullivan, 2015.
“the angle θ”: Wu & Zhang, 2016.
A substantial portion: Open Science Collaboration, 2015.
“Although criminals”: Wu & Zhang, 2016.
“Relatively little study”: Ibid.
“By definition, of course”: Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity, 1963.
The field of “sentiment analysis”: Grohol, 2014.
Facebook backed off tracking efforts: Auerbach, “You Are What You Click,” 2013.
“Rule 4. Fancy algorithms”: Pike, 1989.
“Bad programmers worry”: Torvalds, 2006.
“Facebook researchers started”: Frier, 2016.
Wired cheerfully observed: Gonzalez, 2015.
“The full list included”: Zolli, 2015.
“It’s not about being”: Ibid.
EPILOGUE: THE REDUCTION OF LANGUAGE, THE FLATTENING OF LIFE
“pancake people”: Foreman, 2005.
The conservative propensity: Cohen, 2011.
FURTHER READING
On the history of computing: Subrata Dasgupta’s It Began with Babbage, Margaret Boden’s Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science, Mark Priestley’s A Science of Operations: Machines, Logic and the Invention of Programming, Edgar Daylight’s The Dawn of Software Engineering: From Turing to Dijkstra.
On computer science: John MacCormick’s 9 Algorithms That Changed the Future, Charles Petzold’s Code, Peter J. Denning and Craig H. Martell’s Great Principles of Computing, David Harel’s Algorithmics, Scott Aaronson’s Quantum Computing Since Democritus.
Reflections on science: Henri Poincaré’s The Value of Science, Jacob Bronowski’s The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination, Gian-Carlo Rota’s Indiscrete Thoughts, Heinz Pagels’s The Dreams of Reason, Jeremy Gray’s Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics.
On philosophy and language: Raymond Smullyan’s This Book Needs No Title, Denis Diderot’s D’Alembert’s Dream, Albert Atkin’s Peirce, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, David Stern’s Wittgenstein on Mind and Language, Laura Riding’s Anarchism Is Not Enough, James O’Shea’s Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn.
On James Joyce: Frank Budgen’s James Joyce and the Making
of Ulysses, Roland McHugh’s The Finnegans Wake Experience, Philip Kitcher’s Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake.
On role-playing games: Jon Peterson’s Playing at the World.
WORKS CITED
Aaron, D. “Playing with Apocalypse.” New York Times, December 29, 1985. http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/29/magazine/playing-with-apocalypse.html?pagewanted=all.
Abelson, H., & Sussman, G. J. The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (2nd ed.). Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.
Alciné, J. Twitter. June 28, 2015. Retrieved from https://twitter.com/jackyalcine/status/615329515909156865.
Angell, M. “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption.” New York Review of Books, January 15, 2009. Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/01/15/drug-companies-doctorsa-story-of-corruption.
Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 35 F.3d 1435. Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit, September 19, 1994. https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17794375458513139314.
Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle: Metaphysics (vol. 8). Translated by W. D. Ross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908.
Associated Press. “Rabbi OKs Deleting ‘God’ on Computers.” Los Angeles Times, January 2, 1999.
Auerbach, D. “A Delville of a Tolkar: Martin Gardner’s ‘Undiluted Hocus-Pocus.’ ” Los Angeles Review of Books, November 4, 2013. Retrieved from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-delville-of-a-tolkar-martin-gardners-undiluted-hocus-pocus/.
———. “MUSCULAR ’Roid Rage!” Slate, October 31, 2013. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/bitwise/2013/10/nsa_muscular_program_spying_on_google_and_yahoo.html.