The Idea of Code

Abstract

Whilst we are dead to the world at night, networks of machines silently and repetitively exchange data. They monitor, control and assess the world using electronic sensors, updating lists and databases, calculating and recalculating their models to produce reports, predictions and warnings. In the swirling constellations of data, they oversee and stabilise the everyday lives of individuals, groups and organisations, and remain alert for criminal patterns, abnormal behaviour, and outliers in programmed statistical models. During our waking hours, a multitude of machines open and close gates and doors, move traffic-lights from red to green, and back to red again, monitor and authorise (or fail to authorise) our shopping on credit and debit cards, and generally keep the world moving. To do this requires millions, if not, billions of lines of computer code, many thousands of man-hours of work, and constant maintenance and technical support to keep it all running. These technical systems control and organise networks that increasingly permeate our society, whether financial, telecommunications, roads, food, energy, logistics, defence, water, legal or governmental. The amount of data that is now recorded and collated by these technical devices is astronomical. For example, ‘Wal-Mart, a retail giant, handles more than 1 million customer transactions every hour, feeding databases estimated at more than 2.5 petabytes — the equivalent of 167 times the books in America’s Library of Congress’ and Facebook, a social-networking website, has collected 40 billion photos in its databases from the individual uploading of its users (The Economist 2010c).