Bitwise : a life in code Logo and love Chat wars Binaries Interlude: Foreign tongues Naming of parts Self approximations Games computers play Interlude: Adventures with text Big data Programming my child Big human Epilogue: The reduction of language the flattening of life An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument demonstrating how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and who we are. As we engineer ever more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbachs thoughtful ode to the computer codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child and a reflection of how hes both experienced and written the algorithms that have come to taxonomize human speech knowledge and behavior and compel us to do the same. With a philosophers sense of inquiry and an engineers eye 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 schooling as an engineer and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and then to software built to sift through Googles data stores. His unsettling conclusion that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives is inescapable.