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 philoso-pher'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.
About the Author :
David Auerbach is a National Magazine Award-nominated writer and software engineer. He previously worked for Google and Microsoft.
David Marantz is an actor living in New York City. He has narrated eighty-five-plus titles since his first in 2011. He won an AudioFile Earphones Award for The Mind Club by Daniel M. Wegner and Kurt Gray, and was nominated for an Audie Award for his contribution to the short story collection Rip-Off! As an actor he has worked on stage, film, and television. Summers often find him performing Shakespeare for Shakespeare in the Parking Lot on New York's Lower East Side and also in Bryant Park behind the New York Public Library. He is a member of SAG-AFTRA.
Review :
"[A] fun and informative memoir of a life in coding explains what makes coding deeply fascinating and is tamped full, like a scientist's experiment in sphere-packing, of history, fact, and anecdote."
-- "Popular Mechanics magazine"
"A hybrid of memoir, technical primer, and social history... [Auerbach] suggests that we need to be bitwise (i.e. understand the world through the lens of computers) as well as worldwise...We need guides on this journey--judicious, balanced, and knowledgeable commentators, like Auerbach."
-- " New York Times Book Review"
"An eye-opening look at computer technology and its discontents and limitations."
-- "Kirkus Reviews"
"Auerbach spins out the secret history of the computational universe we all live in now, filtering insider technical knowhow through a profoundly humanistic point of view like no book since Godel Escher Bach."
-- "Jordan Ellenberg, New York Times bestselling author"
