Introduction

Introduction “Remember the first time you learned binary code?” “Sure.” “You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them—the axons split and push their way between the dividing glial cells—your bioware self-modifies—the software becomes part of the hardware. So now you’re vulnerable—all hackers are vulnerable—to a nam-shub. We have to look out for one another.” Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash, p. 126 Codes and Magic The myth is probably as old as language itself. There are spells in the world: incantations that can transform reality through the power of procedural utterances. The marriage vow, the courtroom sentence, the shaman’s curse: these words are codes that change reality. It is an old and attractive idea.1 From the logos of Genesis to the many religious traditions identifying the “true names” of God, humanity has persistently believed that certain invocations do not merely describe the world but make it. And why not? Language has always operated at the troubled boundary between reality and the description of reality. The more structured, abstract, and esoteric an idea, the less likely we are to divine its substance without first gleaning a name to call it by. Today our languages sprawl across many registers: procedural computer languages, critical languages of film and new media, creoles, fictional languages, newspeak, emoji. In our perception, each of those registers ascribes certain magical powers to symbols and meaning; each of them generates cultural power based on the inherent tension between reality and 2 Introduction representation. The link between spoken language and abstract symbolic systems, particularly mathematics, has created new avenues for mystical connections between numbers, universal truths, and the fundamental structure of reality. Jewish kabbalah, Isaac Newton’s fascination with alchemy, and biological examples of mathematical figures like the Golden Ratio all reinforce a particular metaphysical notion that some logical order, some grammar and symbolic vocabulary, underlies the universe. In debating these questions, philosophers and mathematicians devel- oped increasingly sophisticated understandings of symbolic languages, lay- ing the groundwork for the contemporary era of computation. From its bones in set theory and symbolic logic to the latest articulations of data- driven machine learning, computation casts a cultural shadow that is informed by this long tradition of magical thinking. As computation trans- forms almost every aspect of cultural life, the stories we tell about it, the balance of myth and reason, will play a major role in determining what we can know and think. Language has power in the world, and may in some sense define the world. When enacted, symbolic logic can effect procedural alterations to reality. The key term here is “enacted.” This book uncovers how the humble vehicle of computation, the algorithm, has its roots not only in mathematical logic but in the philosophical traditions of cybernetics, consciousness, and the magic of symbolic language. To understand the algorithm we need to uncover those roots and then build a new model of “algorithmic reading” that incorporates a deep understanding of abstraction and process. The algorithm deploys concepts from the idealized space of computation in messy reality, implementing them in what I call “culture machines”: com- plex assemblages of abstractions, processes, and people. Algorithms enact theoretical ideas in pragmatic instructions, always leaving a gap between the two in the details of implementation. The implementation gap is the most important thing we need to know, and the thing we most frequently misunderstand, about algorithmic systems. Understanding how we can know that requires the critical methods of the humanities. This is algorithmic reading: a way to contend with both the inherent complexity of computation and the ambiguity that ensues when that complexity intersects with human culture. Introduction 3 Excavation In the epigraph above, the nam-shubs of Neal Stephenson’s seminal cyberpunk novel Snow Crash are ancient Sumerian incantations whose magic infects the modern substrates of silicon and binary logic. A megalomaniacal billionaire begins digging up Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with actual spells that once had the power to directly program human minds. A Sume- rian hearing a nam-shub would ingest it as procedural language, a set of instructions that could alter her mind and her world. Stephenson adapts the magical tradition of Sumerian myth to a near- future digital culture where virtual reality and ubiquitous computation are well established. The novel imagines the nam-shub to be a linguistic algorithm or hack, turning the poetic spells of the god Enki into a set of operating instructions for the human mind. Stephenson makes this rather obscure mythic history more familiar to his readers by putting it in the hands of hackers, who by the book’s publication in 1992 were already imbued with their their own contemporary mythos. In Snow Crash, Hiro Protagonist satirically defines the icon of the hacker figure, working at the periphery of monolithic cultural systems to make crucial interventions through technical skill, idealistic motivation, and a blithe disregard for traditional mores. Hiro is a character right out of the trickster archetype that technology journalist Steven Levy chronicles in Hackers; a character who came to life around Silicon Valley pioneer Stewart Brand’s Hackers Conference in 1984.2 The computational systems of the novel, from the various security systems to the Metaverse itself, were created by hackers and are subject to their manipulations. As a high-water mark in the cyberpunk genre, Snow Crash both embellished and consecrated hackers as potent and capricious architects of computational reality. Tricksters and rebels, hackers performed feats of technological prowess akin to magic (and often depicted as quasi-magical in films like Hackers, Sneakers, and The Matrix, where the source code becomes what media critic Wendy Hui Kyong Chun calls “sourcery”).3 Their power over code was shamanic, and their very roles as peripheral figures reinforced the notion that computation itself was susceptible to mysterious external forces. This story is by now deeply familiar to us and well chronicled by Levy, Brand, Chun, digital culture scholar Fred Turner, and many others.4 4 Introduction But, as the Snow Crash epigraph suggests, hackers are not so much the subjects of this novel as the medium through which the plot propagates, in the form of a memetic virus derived from an ancient nam-shub. Behind the spotlit figure of the hacker is the gloomier region from which he or she draws power: the space of computation itself, of source code, procedural language, hacks, and clever digital tricks. As computers become more ubiquitous and accessible, that space of computation has started to become more thinkable and tangible through our proliferating screens, keystrokes, and muttered queries. We are not just getting logistically closer to that space of computation; we are now intimate with it, sharing our most per- sonal memories and accepting algorithmic guidance on matters ranging from love to real estate. Snow Crash extends this story into a kind of contemporary parable for computation-as-magic. The hackers who carry this virus into the world do so because they are particularly vulnerable to a kind of neurolinguistic infection. In Snow Crash, the space of computation touches you through a kind of code, a procedural language that operates in consciousness as well as in the world. Precisely because language occupies a special status as an intellectual technology, its role as an epistemological layer or medium has interested philosophers from Plato to John Searle. In the context of code, language can reformat the world and the mind. Without the right vocabulary, it is difficult, sometimes almost impossible to articulate certain ideas, particularly in the context of technical systems. Human languages seem to acquire different color words in a predictable sequence, for example, and the exis- tence of the word makes possible, for cultural purposes, the reality of the color: without the word for “green,” that band of the spectrum disappears into the neighboring concept of “blue.”5 Speakers of these languages have the same eyes, the same biological apparatus of vision as the rest of us, but they do not have the “deep structures,” the “neurolinguistic pathways” in their brains parsing out this particular band of the visual spectrum. At some point the universal biological equipment of our sensorium gives way to the relative power of language to structure and prioritize experience. The corollary to this distinguishing power of language is that some incantations cannot be unheard: they permanently alter us when we inter- pret and understand them. In Snow Crash Stephenson imagines that the god Enki deliberately destroyed the universal system of transmission that Introduction 5 was the Sumerian language by releasing a nam-shub virus that, “coiled like a serpent around the human brainstem,” scrambled humanity’s ability to understand other Sumerian signals.6 Linking this moment to the mythic Tower of Babel, Snow Crash makes the nam-shub a relic of a universal language once lost but now regained (and being put to nefarious use). Thus Stephenson taps into the much deeper mythos of language as incantation. If code can be magical and hackers are its shamans, we still recognize it as a symbolic system that operates at the intersection of cognition and reality. By investing the figure of code with cultural power, we also endorse the notion that it functions on a platform: the idea that humanity might run a universal operating system. So code can be magical, code can change the world, and code can change the mind. But how does this actually work? What are the entities, the structures of operation in that space of computation? In Snow Crash’s neo-Sumerian operating system there are me, particular units of language that embody vital civilizational concepts.

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