Digital Ideology

The digital is material ideology. As the operating principle of the technologies it labels, the digital bears on the world not just in any way but in a particular way. Using digital technologies and living in a world shaped by the digital, people come to think and act accordingly. This way of thinking and acting constitutes an ideology in three parts. (1) The digital treats the world as made entirely of discrete, structured objects and actions. (2) Its process is a mechanism, each discrete step following its predecessor by a rule of logic itself secured by a law of physics. And (3) it is directed, executing commands to achieve its user’s aims. (Or some user’s aims.) Its characteristic ideology then is positivist, rationalist, and instrumentalist.

Positivist: The digital works only in bits, 0s and 1s. In the digital, every object, window, word, icon, menu item, filename, application, ringtone, email, pixel, and PDF, every thing is a structured list of 0s and 1s. Also, every edit, save, open, recalculate, scan, click, drag, record, play, move, jump, fire, every keystroke, every algorithm, every subroutine, every action is a structured list of 0s and 1s. Everything, actions and objects, comes down to bits. The digital world is reducible in its entirety to discrete, unitary bits—posits—and it thus entails a positivism, constructing its world out of individual, autonomous things.

Material things are made of atoms and some buildings are made almost wholly of bricks, but that doesn’t mean that every material object is atomic or that those brick buildings act like giant bricks. As against those examples, the digital’s constitution out of bits renders everything that is digital bitlike. All those windows and icons, algorithms and clicks, they all behave like bits: discrete, mechanistic, precise, positive, and purely formal.

A bit is purely formal because it has no inherent meaning, no significance but its form. 0 means only not-1. And 1 means not-0. We label bit values with numerals, but a bit value 0 does not even mean what the number zero means. A bit doesn’t say anything at all until it becomes part of a structured sequence of bits and, directed by other bits, passes through logic gates that typically take two bits as input and generate one bit as output, a simple calculation. Bits running through logic gates is how sequences of bits are structured and thus how everything happens in the digital.

Rationalist: Everything that happens in the digital happens for a reason. Inasmuch as all digital events take place as sequences of bits passing through logic gates, the reason for any particular emergent bit value is that it is the result of a stunningly simple calculation: two bits enter a logic gate and one bit exits that gate, its value determined by the values of the two input bits and the kind of logic gate. (There are sixteen different logic gates that accept two bits of input and produce one bit of output. Philosophers may know these logic gates as elementary truth tables.)

Programmers and end users and people checking the weather on their smartphones are not (usually) thinking about bits, and the reasons that explain why their code generates compile errors or their spreadsheet shows a budget shortfall or their softball game appears to be rained out are probably not best conveyed by describing bits passing through logic gates. But in each case, the digital outcome is in fact determined by the mechanistic operation of digital calculations. In the digital, there is always a reason, because those inputs fed into that code necessarily generate that output. Everything happens because it must, and it must happen thus because the laws of physics direct the electromagnetic impulses that represent bit values through inexorable logic gates that necessarily produce the expected output bit from the two bits of input.

Some argue that this formal reason of binary logic in the digital is hardly relevant, swamped into insignificance by the sheer number of such simple calculations. In most contexts, it would indeed be a category error to explain a person’s choice of appetizer at a restaurant by referring to the sequence of firing neurons that corresponds to the vocalization, “pan-fried dumplings, please.” Likewise, if the six ball ends up in the corner pocket after being struck by the cue ball, an explanation that cites the individual displacements of billions of molecules of phenolic resin will likely miss the point. But, again, it’s different in the digital, for the algorithms that represent human-level aims—simulating underwater physics or calculating which advertisement is likely to solicit a click from a particular user—those algorithms are not just incidentally made of bits but reflect in their macro-level constitution a bitwise logic, a logic that preserves the mechanism and rigidity of the huge number of logic gates that materially affect those more complex operations satisfying recognizably human ends. To use a word processor or a CAD-CAM design tool on a computer is to break down one’s goal into a series of actions, each of which has its reason as part of the whole sequence, and each of which breaks down into bits passing through logic gates. Human actions at the computer, and computer actions in the computer, all behave like the bitwise calculations that they comprise: a discrete step that accomplishes a precise partial action, possibly in service of a more distant goal.

Instrumentalist: Which is to say, the digital works in terms of means and ends. Every action in the digital is to accomplish something in particular. Every command, every datum entered, every spacebar press aims at an end, however partial, however insignificant. Even when a user does not know what the outcome of a keystroke or mouse click will be, she knows that, by dint of the digital, the outcome will be some specific result, and it will be a specific result that the programmer, or designer, deliberately intended. To write software is to specify a sequence of logical steps, where each step, and the sequence as a whole, produces output according to a variable input. But nothing truly unintended can happen, no output is possible that has not been permitted and already in a material sense sanctioned by the programmer.

Users can misunderstand an interface or click just to see what happens. Programmers can err or try out commands in the spirit of experimentation. In such cases, the behavior of the machine does not align well with the user’s or programmer’s specific intention, if there is an intention. But even these cases belie a directed intention, however vague or misguided, an intention to play around or to find out how something works. And those errant or curious actions generally lead to more directed and specific intentions. One plays around to develop new techniques for doing things at the machine. One finds out more about a code language to gain additional mastery so better to instruct the computer. One fixes errors and adjusts one’s understanding of the interface to restore an instrumental efficacy promoted by the digital’s ontology.

Notably, the digital’s materialized ideology runs around a circle, vicious or virtuous depending on your regard for that ideology. Digital technology arrived in the mid-twentieth century as the apotheosis of the already prevailing values of positivism, rationalism, and instrumentalism, ensuring the digital’s rapid spread and nearly universal adoption. Answering to those values, digital technology also promulgates them: subjects of a culture becoming digital learn to see things as the digital does, using digital devices, encountering digital artifacts, and living in a world in thrall to the digital. And because the digital is pervasive, seeping into so many aspects of human existence, its instruction is nearly constant and almost ubiquitous. This is the way of ideology, to inculcate a worldview to the point of its naturalization, such that other ways of encountering the world are forgotten or depreciated. (This is also the ethical-political upshot of Heidegger’s argument about technology generally, that its associated mode of encountering ourselves and our world [viz., Ge-stell] has squeezed out other ways of seeing and being, so that we not only blind ourselves to possible solutions but fail to recognize that there is even a problem.)

The digital advances an unusually powerful ideology. This is in part because the ground had been long prepared for the advent of digital technology, which materializes a three-headed dog of post-Enlightenment values. But the power of the digital, and of its ideological suasion, exceeds that of other instrumental and rational technologies through “one simple trick” at the heart of digital operation. This simple trick, the distinctive move that underpins the digital’s limitless application and remarkable potency, also extends the meaning of the digital as material ideology: realized in concrete technologies, the digital materializes an idea without relinquishing its ideality. The digital works in practice as though it were equivalent to its own ideal, a Platonic form snatched from the heavens and brought to earth in teeming multitudes. It realizes ideas/ideals at all levels of digital operation, but, again, the core maneuver of materialized ideality lies in the technological instantiation of the bit.

First of all, it is the bit that behaves as its own ideal. It is an abstraction rendered concrete, even as it exists materially as electrical potential or magnetic field strength. In the digital machine, a bit behaves exactly and unwaveringly as one of its two possible values, labeled 0 and 1; defying a chief characteristic of all materiality, a bit is not approximately 0, not close to 0, not probably 0. Rather, a 0 bit produces exact logical results, acting in the digital machine as though its value were precisely 0. As far as the discrete binary logic that powers the digital machine is concerned, the bits that flow through that machine are perfect 0s and 1s.

Of course, a material instance of a bit flowing along the surface of a silicon chip does not have a voltage value exactly equal to the nominal value associated with 0 (or 1). If a given digital system uses a value of +5V to indicate the bit value 1, any particular 1 bit in that system will measure +4.98V or +5.06V or something close to but not exactly equal to +5V. That’s where the simple engineering trick comes in: digital systems are designed so that values approximately equal to the nominal values associated with logical values of 0 and 1 are treated as though they were exact rather than approximate. A voltage value of +4.98V, when passed through a logic gate, results in an output calculated as though the input value were exactly (logical) 1. The inherent fuzziness, deviance, or indeterminacy of all material things is ignored or discarded so that digital operation is at once material and ideal, concrete without ceasing to be abstract.

Much of the digital’s unprecedented technological capacity rests on this small, seemingly insignificant trick—treating fuzzy material values as precise, ideal-logical values. It removes the digital to its own world, so that its operations, though they depend on material substrates, are carried out in a domain of immaterial ideality. The matter of the digital does not stop mattering, but its role is diminished, as the action is elsewhere, in the rarefied abstract digital world. Dividing the digital’s meaning from its medium, this engineering trick inaugurates the digital as code, such that meaning proceeds not from the immediacy of its materiality but depends instead on an (automated) intellectual process of coding and decoding. Thus decoupled from its materiality, this invocation of abstraction renders the digital simultaneously signifier and signified, saying and doing, symbol and effect, narrator and event. A sequence of bits encodes a value that says something inasmuch as it corresponds (via a code) to a command or a color or a letter form, but it also does something, as that same sequence of bits travels through the machine, passing through logic gates, to carry out that command or make a pixel light up in that color or cause that letter form to appear on the screen as the next character in a word being typed.

Lest this ascription to the digital of perfection and real ideality seems itself like an unlikely idealization, note that writing and, for that matter, speaking, perform a version of the same trick. A p or a @ or a Ω work because they too achieve an idealization in situ; a text character depends more on its materiality than does a bit, but for the most part we readers subtract its material singularity to recognize in it only its form, its function deriving from that form rather than from its substantial specificity. As long as it is recognizable as w, it will work pretty much like any other double-u, leaning away from its distinct materiality. Calligraphic arts, font selection, and penmanship have of course real and profound significance, but they remain supplementary to the formal possibilities of reading and writing.

Unbound from and undirected by its matter, the bit is born agnostic, available for any code whatsoever. The digital accommodates anything that is information; “anything that can be completely and unambiguously put into words” can be digitized (von Neumann). It’s the most general form of positivism: the digital engages only things, but the digital can engage any thing, whatever is a thing, in the pure formality of information, as a sequence of 0s and 1s. Indifferent to its material and working by code, the digital is all structure and no substance, bones without flesh. And consequently, the digital can only represent; acting at a distance through its codes, the digital points to substantive things, real and imaginary, but it does not reach those things. Even digital qualities (colors, textures, sizes, values, etc.) are just coded structure, even digital actions (copy, paste, save, select, etc.) are just structure. The digital object has no quiddity, no presentness, for it means only by reference. And reducing in fact to a sequence of 0s and 1s, it is always exactly reproducible, never singular: representation.

Then again, as the digital demonstrates, representation is something of a superpower. It is logically uncomplicated to invent a code that establishes a correspondence between sequences of bits and letters of the alphabet. It is considerably more complicated, though still within the manifest capacity of digital logic, to encode common patterns of human language so that those patterns can be recognized and reproduced. Perhaps not all but at least much of human reason, sensation, behavior, even creativity admits capture as information and thus makes itself amenable to digital representation and manipulation. Moreover, representation allows the digital to host meaning in excess of information: an image made of pixels can “say” things that are nowhere to be found in the code that governs those pixels; a digital text can relay a story that is entirely absent from the letter-by-letter encoding of that story as a digital artifact. The digital, with its material ideology, colors the images and texts (and sounds and everything) that it engenders, disseminates, and presents, shaping form and content of digital stuff, but it does not strictly delimit the meaning of a digital thing.

Compare representation in painting. Whatever the painting says, whatever it means will be inextricable from and deeply indebted to the canvas, the paint, and even the brush and palette. Its immediate significance, as an image of fruit in a bowl or a diagonal slash against a contrasting monochromic background, relies essentially on its materiality. Though it may require some acculturation to parse a two-dimensional image as representing a three-dimensional object, there is no necessary code of painting that invokes an intellectual operation mediating between what’s on the canvas and what it says. The painting includes its matter essentially, and its matter always exceeds its form, ensuring that the painting is never simply equivalent to itself or its content. (Heidegger writes of the artwork as an ongoing strife between earth and world.)

Because the digital works always via a code, every color in an image, every character used in the document, every field in the database record, is a particular color, a precise character, an exact value. Any digital thing, lacking a singular auratic margin, is thus exactly reproducible in principle: the same sequence of bits decoded using the same mechanism yields the same object. It has often been noted that the digital suffers from an endemic impermanence, each screen of text giving way to the next at the press of a button, any image ready for a new filter, or instant resizing, or a mathematized color swap. But digital change is always from one state to another, a static list of 0s and 1s replaced by a different list. And any sequence of 0s and 1s is exactly equal to itself, ontologically stable even if easily altered.

A world in which everything is determinate is a world of sufficient reason, where there is an account for everything, such that the digital offers a paradigmatic sufficiency of reason. This is not how the world we live in usually behaves. Values, things, and events are not fixed and determinate. There is no adequate positivist description of the world, regardless of what infinity of posits one admits. (The Vienna Circle was doomed from the outset.) No color in my world is precisely one color, no character in a book is equal to its abstract ideal, no fact about my friend is only and exactly that fact. I name this principle of difference, this swoon of all worldly things, contingency. Contingency is what the real has that the ideal cannot. Contingency honors no final rule but threatens every rule with an unassailable precarity. Contingency guarantees that in the actual, nothing is ever finally equal to itself, for each step sets foot in a different river. By contrast, the digital appeals always to a final inviolable rule, renders always the same rather than the different, and fixes each thing as a representation whose self-equality is guaranteed by the exactitude of the structured sequence of bits that captures it.

So the problem is not that in the digital everything “boils down” to the numbers that define it. Rather, my claim is that this determinacy of the digital, this fixity of every object, every action, generates in the digital a way of being fundamentally different from our material and human world. Lacking contingency, digital ontology enjoys a plenary positivism, rationalism, and instrumentalism, ensuring its stunning efficiency and unheralded flexibility. Positivism: everything is a thing. Rationalism: everything happens according to reason. Instrumentalism: everything happens in service of an end. It’s a lazy gesture but true nevertheless that these three values of the digital, that together amount to a digital ideology, are often associated too with capitalism and with the dominion of pure reason.

The argument, then, is not so much an indictment of a digital woefully mediated in comparison to the immediacy of the real. Nor is it the claim that the digital is less than the actual, for each has its relative strengths and deficits. Rather, the worry is that the digital is ontologically unlike the actual in important respects, and that its ontology becomes our ontology (ideology) as we suffuse our lives ever more fully with digitality. In my new book, The Digital and Its Discontents, I explore the ontological distinction of contingency, articulating the implications of the digital’s paucity of contingency as it comes increasingly to dominate our ways of thinking and acting. 

It is ontology that drives digital ideology, its way of being that is also a human relation to the world. We practice that ontology in our encounters with the digital, and even when we aren’t looking at a screen or typing with our thumbs, we refashion our non-digital world according to the dictates of the digital, for it has refashioned us. Beguiled by the digital’s compelling strengths, what might we lose when we forsake contingency?