"The Analytical
Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate
anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to
perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of
anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is
to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted
with." — Ada Lovelace
"Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important."
— Vannevar Bush in
As We May Think
Franco Berardi speaks on the codes that are instilled in life and culture to instruct how individuals act and interact.
Today, a great deal of the codes we have are unspoken ones. Personally, the code that allows members of the queer
community to recognize each other in situations where their sexuality does not make itself immediately apparent is
something that effects my interactions profoundly. Codes function to give an individual a basis for action, and a way
to recognize the people who share their habitus and culture. In directing and defining interactions and lifestyles
codes also dictate the future- how a community will develop, by what rules they will continue to operate under.
To code is to create a set of implicit instructions; ones that are memorized as directions. They function in technology in
the same way as they do in life; it can just be easier to see the ones that affect us personally compared to the ones
that dictate all that we do with technology.
There is code in nature that dictates when plants bloom, where birds fly to in the wintertime, when the cicadas emerge
from their 17 year slumber and awaken the world. In college, there is code that dictates what you can and can’t say to a new
acquaintance, when it’s acceptable to sit with someone you don’t know, how you can approach them. These are all codes written
in communities and recognized as rules that function to make things run smoother.
Code can, of course, be rewritten. This changes the rules, eradicating the past and dictating an entirely new set
of guidelines to follow. In the world of technological code this change is easy- it is a shift of lines,
a revising of CSS or HTML but in life the change in codes for communities, individuals, or species is gradual. Coding can also be employed in media as a form of subconscious acknowledgement. Like queer coding: a subtle nod to the
subtext of a character that writers might use to bait viewers with no intention of following through on explicitly
acknowledging what has been written under the surface. It’s also used to create associations between different subjects (i.e.
villains being coded as queer.)
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths. Its province is to assist us to making available what we are already acquainted with." — Ada Lovelace
