Unicode is everywhere and nowhere at once. Since its invention in 1993 by lucrative American companies, including Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft, Unicode has been the global standard for information exchange, enabling the transfer of data across the world by converting more than a hundred and sixty world scripts into standardized bits and bytes. Its spread is so expansive, its technical complexity so elaborate, and its integration into daily lives so seamless that Unicode has become a natural part of the world––used everywhere, yet seen nowhere. This talk will denaturalize Unicode by examining its origins from an East Asian perspective and situating it within a longer history of script engineering that was deeply intertwined with imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. Disclosing the historical links between the nineteenth-century age of script engineering and the birth of Unicode in the 1980s, this talk will demonstrate that the new information infrastructure sought to abstract all writing systems into a standardized sequence of bits and thus enable the corporate accumulation of capital at a global scale. Unicode, in short, was the critical infrastructure that enabled the birth of a global neoliberal information economy.
This is an in-person talk with the option to join via Zoom by clicking this link or by using the following details: Meeting ID: 922 4823 6494; Passcode: 963512
This lecture is the first in a series planned for the 2024-25 academic year as part of the Borghesi-Mellon Workshops in the Humanities. Organized by graduate students in the UW-Madison departments of History and Asian Languages & Cultures, the workshop series is titled “The Lure of Information: Reexamining Information/Information Studies in the Sinographic World”. Co-sponsored by the Center for East Asian Studies.
