Binary Attitudes Do Not Belong in an Analog World
The real world and everything in it is analog.
I am an old school hacker. I wrote my first computer program when I was six-years-old on an Apple II+.
In high school and my young adulthood, I would describe myself as a very digital boy. I dove into the nascent cyberpunk counter-culture and thought the Internet was a unifying technology... That all communication technology was for human beings to connect to one another across greater and greater distances, and with the Internet we could finally have an egalitarian world community.
Then in the 1990s, the Internet moved from a state-sponsored network mostly connecting educational and scientific ventures and became something commercial, turned over to businesses to run, maintain, and administer and introducing a (((profit motive))). A network designed to be decentralized and democratic started to have an experience where people would go to fewer and fewer centralized services governed by corporations, and all users would be at the mercy of opaque and secret algorithms.
With algorithmic services starting with Google's PageRank, and now in the age of social media algorithms controlling "reach," one has to game the system or hope to be blessed by circumstance to be heard online. Social media algorithms are driven by interactions or what is known as "engagement." More engagement gets algorithmically boosted and one's reach is put before more eyeballs.
When I was running an educational page on social media, I used to care about engagement. I followed the interactions on my page and tried things to increase it. I got a decent amount of followers for the niche topic space my page was in, but I never got much traction. When studying social media strategy, I learned what posts get the most engagement: posts that are emotionally and easily disagreed with.
Blindboy Boatclub, the Irish satirist and podcast host, once said that Twitter is not social media, but rather an MMORPG based on performative combat. I think this observation is apt, as disagreement drives engagement, and nothing will boost one's numbers or give the potential to go viral than righteously dunking on somebody wrong on the Internet in 240 characters or fewer.
There is a piece of technology called an ADC - Analog-to-Digital Converter.
When we capture something and record it digitally, be it audio, video, or still images, we are not capturing these things as they are, but rather an approximation determined by the number of bits used.
The real world is messy and full of noise and nuance.
To capture something digitally, it is converted into binary code consisting only of two values: one and zero. On or off. Set or reset. High or low. There is no gray area of something in between in binary, no third state.
Binary code allows all our modern information technology to function.
In most cases, it does a good job. Running these digital entities through a DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter), we can get an approximation of the original signal, probably of high enough fidelity to fool our eyes and ears of being something natural with detail so fine and small we cannot sense it.
However, in discourse today on the Internet and mainstream media, a different kind of digitization takes place. Binary presentation of complex issues boiled down to black or white, good or bad, and most often, our side and their side.
Human beings are tribal creatures.
It is our natural impulse through eons of evolution to see things as either belonging to an in-group or an out-group. We feel safe when surrounded by people we perceive to be on our side, and we feel threatened when we are around people on another side. We want to support those on our side and tear down those on the other side.
This, combined with other binary thinking by approximating real-world events that are messy and analog and nuanced and boiling it down to an our side/their side argument, means we stop looking for solutions and instead look for victory.
As individuals, we often subscribe to another binary: heroes and villains.
We almost always cast ourselves as the hero and those we oppose as villains. We create a social story, where instead of people with a variety of nuanced opinions and ideals, we see the opposition as villains that must be defeated in a contest against good and evil, in a contest where one must lose in order for the other to win.
As much as we are tribal creatures, human beings are cooperative organisms as well.
Empathy allows us to imagine ourselves walking in another's shoes, to understand that other people exist as complete, whole human beings with their own history, experiences, stories, and full lives just as much as ourselves and unique from one another.
There really is no such thing as a "NPC" in the messy, analog real world. Where there is empathy, there can be connection. Where there is connection, there can be understanding.
With understanding, we can create unity. Not a unity where we are all ideologically in lockstep - who would want that? Diversity is one of humanity's greatest assets. No, a unity where diverse opinions come together peacefully and reach a compromise, or hopefully a consensus. (Editor's Note: You can easily prove "diversity is one of humanity's greatest assets." by opening up the borders and government of Israel and Ukraine. Or fly on one of Boeing's "diversity-liners." I'll wait...)
Human interaction can be so much richer with analog signals that can have any value, as opposed to the rigid dichotomies binary thinking necessitates. I have often found that when one is presented with a dichotomy, it is more likely than not a false one. Look for the options that are not stated, and you will then stumble onto real solutions.
Sometimes an adversarial approach is necessary, as in nature: conflict often leads to growth. But conflict does not need to be between polar opposites or have the heat turned up emotionally.
Where people see things in binary terms, zero, or full-on, instead of analog, from ground to gamma radiation you only have two stops, instead of the spectrum of possible values. Taking a step back and seeing the bigger and more varied picture can give a perspective to conflict with many possibilities of resolution, instead of just an all-or-nothing victory or defeat.
When we see things between two extremes, it means our reactions will be likewise extreme.
This black-and-white thinking is a hindrance to seeing how things actually are. When we gain an analog perspective, we can see the noise in the signal which we might ignore if we are using our internal ADC and seeing things as all good or all bad, and miss the nuance in the reality of the thing.
Simplifying things into binaries creates simple solutions. It does not take into account all the noise and mess of the real world, which is not just the remainder of an equation, but part of the substance and makeup of things. The more complex an issue is, the less satisfying and unworkable a binary solution is.
When we navigate the analog world with binary attitudes, it's like walking with blinders on.
It limits what we perceive to the detriment of real conflict analysis and resolution. It puts us in a cycle of performative combat in our discourse and causes us to spin our wheels instead of approaching any workable solutions and change.
With binary attitudes in an analog world, you are manipulated into discord and division which prevents us from coming together and finding solutions that are truly just and equitable. When we are so concerned about our side triumphing over their side, we fail to see what common ground can be had to find a solution that works for all.
In a world full of oppression and inequity, we will either all be liberated together, or we will not be liberated at all.
Take your blinders off and see the messy, noisy world for what it is in its complexity - or be stuck in a binary view without the ability to effect real change.
The choice is up to you.
Dedicated to the hacker BillSF who argued for the analog world to a very digital demiboy at a party in Amsterdam, 1995.
Johnny Fusion =11811= can be found on Bluesky @jfusion@bsky.social and keeps a blog at hacker-ethic.flynnos.org.
