Searching for Zero: Spitballing Hegemonic Modes of “Unseeing” and Conjuring the Big “O” Other

• In Event: Spitballing STS: Millenial Tactics

Abstract

In 1945, the ENAIC went live, and while it is often lauded as the first digital computer, it wasn’t until 1949 that a computer named after a woman, the MADDIDA (pronounced “Mad Ida”), demonstrated the first fully digital circuitry. The difference between the two computers was a matter of nothing, which is to say: a matter of how their designers thought about zero. This brings to light to a larger issue in the post-west, in terms of how we still often treat the big “O” other as if it lacks materiality, which is to say: it isn't just that our archives are haunted, but that our daily lives are brimming with materialities that we merely look at without seeing, leading us to trip. Bringing STS into conversation with an electric range of writings, from Avery Gordon’s new utopianism to Simone Brown’s racialized surveillance, from Arlie Hochschild’s emotional labor to Dana Jack’s feminized depression, from Lacan’s “rootstock” to Timothy Morton’s ecocriticism, from Eve Sedgwick’s closet to Aimee Baghn’s futurity, to Viet Thanh Nguyen’s post-fundamentalism, we come to see how one is only the loneliest number because a great deal of work has been done to unground and underground zero, manifesting as a collective “unseeing” that delays our best efforts to make better technologies and more perfect democracies.

Author

• Samara Hayley Steele, University of California at Davis