Alexander R. Galloway

“World history offers no spectacle more frightful than the gradual extinction of the English hand-loom weavers,” wrote Marx.9

For instance, Anni Albers, the protégé weaver of the Bauhaus, who would help insinuate weaving into the rarified confines of modern art, dedicated her influential book On Weaving, the culminating statement of her life’s work, to “my great teachers, the weavers of ancient Peru.”

While equating computer to loom is a seductive way to rethink media history, it is clear that Babbage’s own metaphor was engine, not loom or some other device, thereby associating his machine with the steam engine, the railroad locomotive, and the various mechanical engines of the early nineteenth century.

her notation reveals the essence of algorithms: one part encoded pattern (from the textile loom), and another part kinetic motion (from the steam engine).

Dietz’s technique was, in fact, half algebra and half creative patterning.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, for instance, has written on the kind of programming work performed by women, often deemed auxiliary or secretarial, and the way in which commanding a machine was interwoven with the notion of commanding a “girl.”

Indeed, computing has always been something of a convenient fantasy, a fantasy about ignoring one side (the unraveling, the glitch), in favor of the other (pure number, frictionless function).

Or as my knitter friend likes to put it: less damning, more darning.

In the year 1948, a sliver of computer memory was a bit, and a bit was a pixel, and a pixel was a dot, and a dot was a keystroke.

In 1948, a bit was a pixel, and a pixel was a dot, and a dot was a sliver of memory.