The categories we think of as discrete, bounded entities are most often continua, with broadly coherent centers and hairy, noisy edges that defy categorization.

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Computers operate on binary states, but the actual electronics that represent these ones and zeroes are quite noisy, and only average out to "off" and "on." It's quite ironic, because computerization so often forces us to incinerate the edge-cases.

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Prior to computerization, the fuzziness of analog record-keeping and the potential for official forebearance allowed us to maintain the pretence of neat categories while (sometimes) accommodating the infinite complexity of the edges.

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My grandparents had given names, Russian names, Hebrew names, Yiddish names, anglicized names AND English nicknames, jumbled across their official forms and paperwork.

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My grandfather Avram (Abe, Abraham, William, Bill) Doctorow (Doctorowicz, Doktorowicz, Doctorovitch, Doctorov, Doktorov) would sometimes have to explain this to officials, and they could accept it or even note it in the margins in ink.

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Computerization doesn't necessarily allow this. A "name" field of 64 characters allows names up to 64 chars, period. If your name is longer than that, tough shit.

Computerization is often undertaken by isolated, wealthy execs from the global north, directing technologists.

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In that sense, it is hegemonic, a way for an elite coterie to project its will over millions, even billions of people who lack even a means of registering their discontent.

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Remember when Facebook and Google waged cruel warfare against their users with their "Real Names" policy that unilaterally declared what a name was (and was not)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nymwars 

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They were carrying on the work of the Global War on Terror. After 9/11, the world saw waves of official name-change requests.

The requesters weren't changing their names: they were preserving them.

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The names they'd used all their lives were suddenly cause for suspicion, due to discrepancies between their real names and their official names. In the world of unchecked GWOT power and paranoia, that discrepancy could cost you a job or a border-crossing or your liberty.

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Ambiguous categories are the rule, not the exception. It's a commonplace that the idea of "race" within humanity is incoherent, but so is the idea of "species" in biology, where often animals of different species can still produce fertile offspring.

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Computerization resolves ambiguity by steamrollering it, not by accepting it. I spent years as EFF's rep to a DRM standards committee, DVB-CPCM, whose project was to computationally define a valid "family" (so you could share video with your family).

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The committee - overwhelmingly white, male, wealthy and Anglo - ensured that bizarre, rarely seen "families" fit the definition. If you had a summer home in France, a houseboat, and a lux SUV with seatback videos, they had you covered.

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But if you were migrant-worker parents in Manila whose son was a construction worker in Qatar and whose daughter was an RN in Dallas, you were fucked. This was an "edge-case" they couldn't accommodate without opening up the possibility of "piracy."

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All of that to introduce a highly amusing list called "Falsehoods programmers believe about time," which demonstrates that even the most objective, quantitative constructions are riddled with irreducible complexity resulting from qualitative factors.

https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b923ca

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The list includes obvious ones like "February is always 28 days long" but also "The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future" and "There is only one calendar system in use at one time" and "Time always goes forwards."

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Each of these is the epitaph from some programmer's postmortem of a ghastly error. Each is a reminder that time can be weaponized.

Think of Chinese time, a nation that is notionally many timezones wide, all yoked to a single zone based on Beijing's sunrise and sunset.

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People in outlying territories start their workdays in the dark, or with the sun high in the sky, all so a bureaucrat in the capital need not trifle with subtracting or adding a few hours before phoning a local administrator to bark orders at them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_China

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"Falsehoods programmers believe about..." is a whole genre unto itself:

* Music
* Online shopping
* Email addresses
* Gender
* Language
* Addresses

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

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These falsehoods cover a wide range of cases, but so many can be reduced to a longstanding and important exception that was quietly made in the analog recordkeeping world that can't be easily adapted to a database schema.

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There are many ways to handle another person's exception to your experience, "Computer says no" is surely the worst.

eof/