"The threat of the toy by which he earns his living, the threat that makes it more than just a toy, is that it will burn either-or paths in the brains of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic."
— Coetzee, J. M. (b. 1940)
Author
Work Title
Place of Publication
New York
Publisher
Penguin
Date
2002
Metaphor
"The threat of the toy by which he earns his living, the threat that makes it more than just a toy, is that it will burn either-or paths in the brains of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic."
Metaphor in Context
His obsession with chess is waning, he is beginning to read again. Though the Bracknell library in itself is tiny and inadequate, the librarians are ready to order him any book he wants from the county network. He is reading in the history of logic, pursuing an intuition that logic is a human invention, not part of the fabric of being, and therefore (there are many intermediate steps, but he can fill them in later) that computers are [End Page 159] simply toys invented by boys (led by Charles Babbage) for the amusement of other boys. There are many alternative logics, he is convinced (but how many?), each just as good as the logic of either-or. The threat of the toy by which he earns his living, the threat that makes it more than just a toy, is that it will burn either-or paths in the brains of its users and thus lock them irreversibly into its binary logic.
(pp. 159-60)
(pp. 159-60)
Categories
Provenance
Reading
Citation
Coetzee, J. M. Youth: Scenes from a Provincial Life II. New York: Penguin, 2002.
Theme
Mechanism
Date of Entry
06/10/2009
