May the code be with you

What makes the world go round? A straight answer would tell you it is the initial force, as it did the other planets, after they were gloriously coughed up by a supernova, then captured by the sun – an object so massive that it warps the space around it – resulting in the earth’s orbit. Unless something humongous knocks our planet off the solar carousel or the Sun quits, we can count on the Earth traipsing along its elliptical path. Newton clinched that law and even if he is no longer around to argue with, the universe he lived in and died in, continues to behave that way.

The celestial tapestry we know including stars, planets, galaxies – are all part of the “visible” universe we know and can perceive – the one that is made up of matter.  And matter is made up of a combination of strange entities with their own characteristic temperaments and defined moods. Thus, elementary speaking, hydrogen is the loner, helium is the passive duo, and carbon, as Bill Bryson calls it, is the conga dance troupe. The other elements are fair game to any name-calling as well. Bunch these entities in different numbers and groups and they will form the nooks and crannies, spans and heights, folds and strips, of the material world that Madonna and the rest of us mortals sing about, live in and with.

I have been reading Hugh Aldersey Williams’ Periodic Tales: A Cultural History of the Elements, from Arsenic to Zinc and it is giving me new eyes through which to view the fundamental elements – many of which have literally shaped the world we know of and live in.  I am now at “copper” – the only red metal – and how its properties specifically ductility (it can be stretched into a wire!) enabled the cabling of the world across land and oceans since the 1800s. All electrical communication – from telegraphs to telephones – have been made possible by copper wire as thin as the lead in pencil, in bunches weighing hundreds of tons, laid underground and through oceans in vast distances. Copper was the backbone through which words and wealth were transmitted.

But even Williams, as he paid tribute to copper wire as the cocoon of that wired world, he had to acknowledge how the baton has now been passed on to satellites, wi-fi and fiber optics.  And as I paused here reading that, I was drawn to another question. What goes through those icons of the digital age? What goes around the world – what now animates it like blood?

A series of in-depth articles from BreakingSmart – a site that explores the not-so-obvious but deep transformations happening because of digital technology – helped me answer it.

In the first one entitled “A New Soft Technology”, it made a very good case that indeed that after writing and wealth (money), “coding” has become only the third soft technology that has deeply transformed how humans live, work, play and may I add, even how we sleep and dream and also fall ill.

I once saw a cartoon of a teenager hugging a computer with the caption “I love my computer because all my friends live here.” The New York Times 2012 bestseller fiction Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore was such because it mirrored the gravitas that coding had in people’s lives now. I perceived my coding friends and acquaintances with a new layer of “interestingness” after I read that novel.

Where I work, we ask people everyday, what their favorite technology is. At least 95% percent of them reply “computer”. The computer is their most favorite thing in the world! These are not just kids, but across all ages. Some might easily dismiss this as evidence of an increasingly materialistic world. Maybe so, but it could also mean something else other than that.

We also ask those people why the computer is their favorite technology. They go on to tell us that it is because computers enable them to talk to their families who are abroad, or they can entertain themselves to new heights by playing video games online even with people from other countries, or they can do their research for their homework without having to buy or borrow books from the library, or they can learn just what they need to know on specific topics or just feel like they are a part of a borderless world.

They do not love the computer for the silicon, transistors and plastic – they love what runs through them that enable them to do all those things. Of course, whether they realize it or not, the empowerment that they feel are made possible by software – the configurations of 0s and 1s that run through all the gadgets we have. We still love, fight, get mad, get even, learn, play and labor but we can now do it also through codes.

Mitch Resnick, who heads the Lifelong Kindergarten group at MIT Media Lab, thinks we should all learn to code in the same way as we all learned how to read and write. It is another way to express ourselves and another door to ways of being alive. He says that in the same way that when you learn how to read, you then could now read to learn, the same could be said about coding – learn how to code and you will then code to learn – for life.

In the Periodic Tales, Williams wrote that with the elements, particularly the metals, the “experience of those who mine it, smelt it, shape it and trade it gives it meaning.” With codes, it is not the coders who give the codes meaning – but the ones who use these codes to explore new ways of being alive. The soul of the human in the digital age is animated by codes.  Would it help us be better humans? Just like words and wealth, it depends on what you do with them.

May the code be with you.  – Rappler.com