Binary Cultural History
When, in 1968, I started programming computers we used room-sized machines, coding sheets, punch cards, magnetic tape storage and teleprinters to design and run our systems. All were housed in huge air conditioned rooms and for the next 25 years there was no widespread market for personal computers, a fact my grandchildren find difficult to believe. Computers cost millions of dollars to buy and run and so were available only to corporations. We were at the mercy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs—a sexy IBM as Snow White followed by the dwarfs Burroughs, Control Data Corporation, General Electric, Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and UNIVAC. At Northern Electric we used Snow White along with four of the dwarfs: Burroughs, Honeywell, NCR and UNIVAC. The actual machines were housed in Bell Canada’s four storey, Pointe Claire processing centre. We also used machines in London, UK and Stamford, Connecticut over telephone tie lines running real time programs across the Atlantic a decade or more before the Internet appeared.
Computer programs or apps are binary not only because of the zero/one nature of their storage hardware but also because of the conditional binary form of logic used throughout. This is the logical ‘If/Then’ statement directing a process to be performed on the basis of a True/False test; statements are performed in strict linear order but can be directed to another portion of linear code. If A is true then perform B and bypass C; if A is false then perform C and bypass B. B and C are differing processes which may add up figures, search out stored data, or display something on your screen, etc or may be further If/Then statements. Indeed I was once given a program consisting of a single If/Then statement with 150 similar If/Then statements nested within it—a demonstration of the original programmer’s cleverness but no gift to the programmer having to maintain it. As conditional binary statements multiply like rabbits programmers had to impose their own kind of triage. You tried to identify a very limited number of the most common conditions to test; the untested ones you left out which resulted in most of those unintelligible error messages from Windows and Apple software.
Even our primitive AI relies on these binary choices; there are no maybes and no ambiguities in computer code. You can stuff as many conditions as you want into the final result but that result will still be selected by a final exemplar of binary logic. But the user sees the results of computer processing almost immediately and the perception is one of surety of result; we cannot help feeling that the unseen process has exhausted all possible answers at near light speed and given us the single one that we were looking for. Contrast this with an old-fashioned library card catalogue where, as you thumbed your way through dozens of cards, other associations of possible worth struck you. Those associations are hidden by a computer search; indeed Facebook’s algorithms rely on this fact and invisibly eliminate everything that numerous binary choices deem is extraneous to your request and then supply you with only what you ‘need’ which usually contains several thousand results you don’t need.
Either/Or, True/False, Yes/No, Black/White, Right/Wrong. What is the effect on our culture of a dominant diet lacking all ambiguity. Opinion as fact? Polarization? Reluctance to question further? Super-enhanced individually? Distrust of communal action? Belief in conspiracies rather than culture? To me this is a example of how our communal choice of technological gadgets unconsciously structures our culture—innovation built on the communal work of others with a belief in its usefulness. This leads to other elements in the community promoting their use by marketing them or using them on a large scale by public entities. We don’t need a conspiracy to set the goal posts for our culture but there is no doubt that certain groups of citizens will quite openly work to expand some of these new innovations. Such work of promotion is never the result of a single individual although one individual may be seen as the spokesperson for the group.
We begin to ignore the ambiguity in life which is so much a part of everything we do; we force answers into a binary Procrustean bed. One result is a distrust of truth. Truth is rarely amenable to black and white corroboration; it requires a matrix of the experience of others, logic, reason, and self assessment to reach a truth. Truth is dependent on our state of knowledge and as that is increased the truth stemming from it may undergo modification. Computers unconsciously shift us towards assessing everything on a binary basis; ambiguity and context fly out the window. In discussing the numerous fake memoirs which have often become ‘bestsellers’ in the past few decades, Kevin Young in Bunk states ‘Gone is the idea that something made up, unreal or surreal, could move us. Instead, readers insist that the thing that isn’t real is [real]: that if it affects them it can’t be affected; that they cannot have real feelings about made-up things’. In short, if it is real it is true. All we have to do is pass off lies as real and hey presto they become true. Fiction is real, truth has no place in our appraisal of a work, and the literary justification for actual fiction is gone. We have used a binary choice to eliminate truth and ambiguity. Perhaps this explains why the AI poetry examples given by Phoenix Bee in the Grapevine of some weeks ago came up with only the simplest couplet (AA BB) scheme; in spite of massive language learning AI’s ‘intelligence’ seems unaware that poets use dozens of other rhyme schemes.
Oakley Rankin
