Bitwise - David Auerbach

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Résumé :
An exhilarating, elegant memoir and a significant polemic on how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and of who we are

Bitwise is a wondrous ode to the computer lan?guages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination. With a philoso?pher's sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the pro?gramming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contribu?tions to instant messaging technology devel?oped for Microsoft and the servers powering Google's data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives-from the psy?chiatric taxonomy of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual to how Facebook tracks and profiles its users-Auerbach reflects on how he has experienced the algorithms that taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior and that compel us to do the same.

Into this exquisitely crafted, wide-ranging memoir of a life spent with code, Auerbach has woven an eye-opening and searing examina?tion of the inescapable ways in which algo?rithms have both standardized and coarsened our lives. As we engineer ever more intricate technology to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the ma?chine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies-precisely the things that make us human.

Biographie:
DAVID AUERBACH is a writer and software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft. His writing has ap?peared in The Times Literary Supplement, MIT Technology Review, The Nation, The Daily Beast, n+1, and Bookforum, among many other publications. He has lectured around the world on technology, literature, philosophy, and stupidity. He lives in New York City.

Sommaire:
Introduction 3

PART I

1. LOGO AND LOVE 9
The Turtle 9
The Assembly 17
The Split 26
The Join 33
The Work 42

2. CHAT WARS 44
Interop 44
Microsoft Agonistes 48
Code Work 53
The Buffer Overflow 56

3. BINARIES 63
Praxis and Theory 63
Truthtellers and Liars 65
1s and 0s 68
On and Off 71
True and False 74

INTERLUDE: FOREIGN TONGUES 80

PART II

4. NAMING OF PARTS 89
Labels 89
Male and Female 93
Masterminds and Crackpots 99
Bitwise and Byte Foolish 109

5. SELF-APPROXIMATIONS 113
The Big Five (or Six) 113
Diagnostics and Statistics 117
Machine Psychiatry 130

6. GAMES COMPUTERS PLAY 136
Dungeons and Dice 136
Deterrence and D?tente 148
The Quantified Dwarf 151

INTERLUDE: ADVENTURES WITH TEXT 160

PART III

7. BIG DATA 177
From the Client to the Cloud 177
Hangman 184
The Library of Babylon 186
Descent from the Sky 192

8. PROGRAMMING MY CHILD 199
Initial Conditions 199
Received Ignorance 206
The Child as Network 209
Machine and Child Learning 214

9. BIG HUMAN 223
The Vacuum Cleaner 223
Profiles 229
Bad Labels 236
The Social Graph 243
The Presentation of Self in Internet Life 247

Epilogue: The Reduction of Language, the Flattening of Life 257

Acknowledgments 261
Notes 263
Further Reading 269
Works Cited 271
Index 279