I don’t think that I ever actually thought that barcodes were a tool of the Antichrist. When I was a young teenager, still very much in the throes of a passionate interest in eschatology—not unlike a young secular nerd being fascinated with Star Trek—I think I maybe did believe that the Mark of the Beast was going to be some kind of microchip inserted beneath the skin of the hand or forehead, like an evil Tefillin or an electronic tattoo. (It is bizarre that this kind of thinking was so prevalent so recently, and yet here we are now, carrying around smartphones that have actually been used for all kinds of evil purposes and even the most conservative Christian lacks any semblance of worry).
The other day, though, I learned something fascinating about barcodes that either totally demolishes any possibility that they conceal the number of the Beast—i.e., six-six-six—OR totally confirms that smartphones are the obvious successors of barcodes and will in fact serve to usher in the Great Tribulation, etc. etc.
Ok, that’s probably just clickbait. I am trying to say, though, that there may be some other theological implication to the barcode than iconoclasm or Apocalypse.
While reading the absolutely fascinating book, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold, I learned that barcodes run on binary. I had no idea, honestly. (One of my children informed me that she had known this for a long time—to which I say, good for her). Code has a lot to recommend it, and I will be reviewing it in a future post. Petzold is particularly excellent at explaining mathematical concepts. I had never really understood what “binary” meant. He explained it succinctly by showing the differences between decimal (or “base ten”) counting and binary (or “base two”) counting. If decimal means that you count zero, one, two, three, four, etc. and don’t restart at zero until you get to 10, binary means that you restart at zero as soon as you’ve counted to one. So this means to count up you go: zero, one, ten, eleven, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and ten, one hundred and eleven, one thousand, etc. He explains what this would look like in several other counting systems as well—hexadecimal (or “base sixteen”) counting is particularly mind-blowing. (It involves letters! 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, F, 10, etc. Insane!)
To return to barcodes and binary, though, many of us understand that binary means that the only digits available to you are 1s and 0s. These “binary digits” are better known as “bits” (as in bits, bytes, kilobytes, etc.). A bit is always either 0 or 1. What does this have to do with barcodes? You'll be able to figure it out when I tell you that the leftmost black line, empty space, black line series on a barcode (like the one you see above) correspond to 1, 0, and 1. That’s right! Each black line that is the same thickness as the leftmost line corresponds to 1; each white space that is the same thickness as the leftmost space corresponds to 0. That means that, with that knowledge in hand, we can read the binary code represented in a barcode.
The start of the code above, for example, reads: 1010111011001000100110110100110... and so it goes. Petzold goes into additional detail on how a scanner would then interpret these ones and zeroes into decimal numbers: it’s all actually surprisingly interesting. Ultimately, though, what he explains is that the number you see printed underneath the barcode is just what the barcode’s binary representation shows. In fact, if for some reason the scanner isn’t working, the cashier can just manually type in the number with the same result as scanning it.
So wait? It’s not the Mark of the Beast?! (Not unless 9772434561006 is the Mark of the Beast—maybe if you add the numbers up and multiply them somehow?) How disappointing!
Still, this explanation of how barcodes work may have theological implications that are worth exploring.
Why Barcodes?
I mean, why barcodes at all? As usual, there is a lot of information available on Wikipedia—in this case, about the history of barcodes and much more technical detail on how they work. N. Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver are named there as the inventors of the barcode, the patent for which was issued in 1952. (There's a bit of discrepancy between the “Barcode” Wikipedia page and the page for “Norman Joseph Woodland” on when this patent was issued). That means barcodes have been with us for 70 years this year! Initially, they weren’t used in the way that we are perhaps more used to them being used (although that had been their intent). In fact, the first UPC barcode (which was based on barcode technology, but developed by others) was scanned over twenty years after the barcode was first invented: it was in 1974, and the object was a packet of chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket. (This article was even able to track down the name of the cashier who scanned the first UPC: Sharon Buchanan). The patent for the technology opens with a summary of what the invention is intended to attend to: “This invention relates to the art of article classification and has particular relation to classification through the medium of identifying patterns.”
The need for barcodes in grocery stores in the mid 1970s (and the need for “article classification” in the late 1940s) reflects something much larger it seems—something much larger than we can likely explore in this article! But we can maybe reflect a bit about this. Apparently, the inventors of the barcode first began working on it when one of them overheard the president of a local food chain asking a dean (at the technical institute where Silver was a graduate student) to research “a system to automatically read product information during checkout” (Wikipedia, emphasis mine). That kind of question is of course only possible in an era where “automatic” is a word that one could use to describe what had otherwise been a human action. (Coincidentally, my beloved word-history site, Etymonline, records the first instance of “automatically” used in this sense as occurring that same year, in 1940). A hundred years previously, would it have been possible for someone to ask for such a thing?
Combing through old forums on how grocery work changed after the advent of the UPC code and scanner, I saw the word “skilled” again and again. Although cashier work may not have been a prestigious job, it was recognized as skilled. It made demands upon the human mind insofar as it often required the person to memorize a lot of data. They needed to be aware of the prices, what was on sale, etc.
The invention of the barcode appears therefore (and perhaps obviously) to be part of the larger expectation (that grew over the course of the last century to today) that “menial” human labour could be supplanted by machines. Whether this is a good or bad expectation is perhaps also a much larger topic (and one that could address a number of related questions, including the nature of the fall, whether menial labour is something that should be part of human experience, etc.). It is also possible that the driving concern was not to reduce human labour, but more specifically to create the conditions under which the potential for human error could be avoided.
This rationale is likely going to be one that comes up again and again in future “How It Works” posts. Behind any concern about human error, though, and especially “error” in the sense meant not by the doctrine of human sin, but rather in the sense meant by capitalism, is a more fundamental concern: that nothing should stand in the way of profit. The opportunity for a display of human skill implies the failure of that skill, and such failure, by extension, implies some kind of loss, ultimately, in profit.
Before the advent of UPC labels, how would a cashier like Sharon Buchanan “ring in” items for sale? This Reddit thread has some interesting—and admittedly unverified—suggestions. I particularly liked this post (by rewardiflost):
They [i.e., cashiers] would keep a copy of the circular, they would have a list of the sale items, and the customer would also be participating by checking. Stores also didn’t carry thousands of items with dozens on sale at any time. That wasn’t really practical. Stores carried hundreds of items, and only put 20 or so on sale at any time.
This brief statement is describing another kind of world. And, as I hope comes across very clearly on this blog, that other world is past and gone and ultimately not really known, so it doesn’t merit nostalgia in the sense of wanting to return to it. Yet the benefit of looking into the past, I think, is to at least bear witness to the reality that a different kind of world that was possible. And that means that a different kind of world to the one we are in is also possible.
Does this mean that we want a world without barcodes? I don’t think so! (Although, it is a bit disconcerting to read on IBM’s website how “UPC is planet Earth’s most pervasive inventory tracking tool”). Rather, as we work to understand the theology of how things like the barcode work, the effort of reflecting on that other world without barcodes helps us to recognize the theological implications of the barcode—and, more generally, of that essential liturgy of the Digital: namely, binary.
As I’ve said a few times already in this overly long post, there's too much to cover here. (So why do I keep trying?)
Through a Scanner Darkly
How to wrap up?
For the 1980s fundamentalists, in whose books, “you will discover how these technologies will assist in the control over all ‘Buying and Selling,’ and shift the power of all the wealth of the world into the hands of a few who control the System” (Relfe)1, the proliferation of this technology meant creating the conditions under which a one-world government (led, naturally, by the Antichrist) could take control. This does not seem to have panned out. Yet the ubiquity of the barcode, and the manner in which this technology both emerged and has facilitated the expansion of commerce at the expense of skill does invite us to wonder about what such a technology says about desire, Mammon, and the human—all theological categories.
Humans are always wanting more stuff. As our world has become smaller, and it has become easier to produce consumables at less cost (to the consumer—there is always a cost somewhere, as I hope to explore in other posts), this increase in stuff has needed infrastructure to support it. We’ve needed faster, more efficient, more accurate systems for tracking all of this stuff. If you’ve ever gone to a store where they don’t use a scanner and UPC or similar system, you’ll experience all of these expectations internally. The owner of a used bookstore I love tracks all sales in a ledger—and it takes forever for him to write down the titles and the prices and everything else! What sorts of virtues become possible (for me? for him?) in the time he takes to write down the book?
Andy Crouch, in his recent book on technology and relationships, The Life We're Looking For, draws a direct connection between the problems of technology and the desires of the Power, Mammon. Personifying—or, rather, recognizing the personality of—Late Capitalism, Crouch notes that the driving force behind so much of what technology critics have observed to be problematic about devices like the smartphone is the love of money. Sadly, this same disordered love has played a role in the implementation of this technology.
Ivan Illich has a very helpful idea, which he works out in Tools for Conviviality: the two watersheds of technology. Technology, he observes, often starts off as a legitimate solution to a legitimate problem. It reaches a point where it actually is making a helpful difference in the world; yet there is a second watershed that occurs in which the same technology begins to create the problems that it now is needing to fix. Although I don’t know whether these two watersheds map perfectly on to the barcode as a technology, there is a kind of innocence that I think we can observe in its original development. Like so much technology, its inception has more to do with “art” (as the patent says, “the art of article classification”) than it does with something purely instrumental. Yet it finds itself captured, put to work, and repeated en masse to such an extent that any art has long since been squeezed out.
Finally, there is the question of what the barcode says about humans. Humans cannot, truly, be trusted to not make mistakes. The market, at least in its most advanced form, cannot accommodate such mistakes. Humans cannot avoid making mistakes because that is part of what makes us creatures. Again, we are not talking about sin here. Instead, we are talking about what Wendell Berry calls “do[ing] something that won't compute.” To see the world through the lens of a scanner drains it of its uncertainty, its mess, and ultimately its sacredness. A human may be holding the scanner against the barcode, but that is only to describe the situation in purely literal terms.
I do not think that a theology of how things work needs to always be a downer or somehow anti-technology. My hope both here and generally with this project is that it will open up blind spaces in our day-to-day life and shed light on what these objects say about us and God. These tools display the glory of human ingenuity, which can only ever ultimately point to the majesty of God. They also remind us of the limits of human reason. I don’t think that avoiding barcodes is the answer, though; rather, I hope that reflecting at greater length on how the barcode works helps us to pause and recall that another world may be possible.
An amazing project would be to dig into Relfe's book further, while applying a theopolitical lens. The narrative she weaves, connecting the introduction of the UPC code and the introduction of Social Security Numbers, really seems to resemble modern-day conspiracy theories, but it would be interesting to understand the early roots of those ideas.