Bitwise: A Life in Code

By David Auerbach and David B. Auerbach

Book Overview

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 lan­guages and codes that captured technologist David Auerbach's imagination. With a philoso­pher's sense of inquiry, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the pro­gramming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his education as an engineer, and his contribu­tions to instant messaging technology devel­oped for Microsoft and the servers powering Google's data stores. A lifelong student of the systems that shape our lives--from the psy­chiatric 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 examina­tion of the inescapable ways in which algo­rithms 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 ma­chine, Auerbach argues, we willingly erase our nuances and our idiosyncrasies--precisely the things that make us human.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1101972149
• ISBN13: 9781101972144
• Release Date: July 2019
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.1" x 7.9"