Why is everything binary? (video player)

Name: Why is everything binary?
Uploaded: 2025-02-06T00:00:00.000Z
Channel: Heydon Pickering
Description: A brief video about the web from Webbed Briefs

All of my videos are black and white, but especially this one.

These things take a solid frickin’ week to make so, if you’re able, support me on Open Collective or buy a T-shirt or hoodie!

Transcript ↓

Without this little thing, modern computing would not exist as we know it. It’s called a “transistor” and it is very good at one thing in particular: switching. Subject to a type of hormone called an electrical charge, it is able to switch between off and on. The resulting state represents a single bit of data.

Imagine your computer hosts just 8 transistors. By tallying them together, your computer can count all the way up to 8. 8 transistors together make up one byte; enough to render a character like “C”. If this 1-byte computer actually used the tally system, rendering the word c**t would take up half its total capacity.

Instead, computers use a binary system. In binary, each transistor is responsible for a different power of the number 2. What can only represent 3 in the tally system can represent many different—and much higher—numbers in binary. Using binary, the same 8 transistors can count all the way from zero up to 255. This enables enough characters to write full sentences like “Elon Musk is a simpering fascist c**t.”

A console like the Nintendo Entertainment System is said to be 8-bit because it can process 8 bits at a time. In other words, the stream of data it ingests has a girth of 8 bits, 1 byte, or 256 possible values. This is enough to make the console hallucinate 2 whole Italian plumbers.

Unlike computers, humans said to be using binary thinking are not maximizing their capacity. Quite the f**king opposite. That’s because binary thinking in humans means thinking with just one bit, **representing one of 2 possible states.

The so-called gender binary is the result of this 1-bit thinking. It’s a model for gender in which “man” and “woman”, are two oppositionally distinct values. This is despite the fact that all nominally male bodies contain the nominally female hormone estrogen, and some nominally male bodies, containing higher amounts of estrogen than others, have a cracking pair of t*ts.

One of our favorite models for the human brain is also binary. According to this model, the left side of your brain is precise and analytical and the right is creative and expressive. Supposedly, everyone's personality is switched to one side or the other. There is only one, minor problem with this theory: it's bollocks. Pure conjecture. Paradoxically, only someone refusing to use more than 50% of their brain could have come up with it.

But the idea that everyone belongs to one of two archetypes is seductive in its simplicity. So we base everything we do, and make, on this false premise. For example, those who create websites and web applications are divided into non-technical ideators and technical implementors. Organizationally speaking, this creates two departments:

For thinking (but not about how to do the thing you are thinking about doing) and
For doing (but not thinking about why the hell anyone would think this could be done)

If you encounter a broken web interface, which you will, today, probably multiple times, this setup is fundamentally why it sucks so badly. It’s not the binary in your computer at fault; it’s the binary we ascribe to our brains.