In this digitally-obsessed world,
it seems everything has become
digitized into strings
composed of 0s and 1s.
Indeed, it seems little has value
unless it boasts a binary code
to identify it.
I expect many parts of my own identity
have been condensed by parties,
known and unknown,
into strings of 0s and 1s.
Will there come a time when,
what we know as our own names,
will be obsolete,
replaced by coded identfiers?
Faces, too, can be reduced to codes
to be entered instantly into machines
making them comparable
to faces stored in a gigantic database.
And, there we have it:
a universal system of coding
by which all manner of entities
can be reduced for identification,
comparison, storage.
Just to be clear,
I do not regard you as a string
of 0s and 1s.
I still regard you as old 0010011
Oh dear.
Densley Harley Palmer
Densley Palmer served as director of counseling services
at Linfield from 1983 to 1998.
