010101
The Binary Between Machine and Human
Zero-Sum Game
The number zero is enshrined in paradox: nothingness means everything.
A void. Infinite potential. Wholeness. The end of a cycle. Starting anew. Its shape: an ouroboros circling around. An eternal spin of destruction and rebirth.
The Buddhist concept of Sunyata: ‘The “nothingness” you seek is not an empty void. It is the absolute potential, the primordial stillness before creation.’ It is a bridge between the gap and life, a step over the quicksand.
Neither positive nor negative. A marker allowing for infinity. The starting point for life to emerge.
Within culture, zero is the domain of loss:
Patient Zero: the first carrier of a disease, dropped with potent detonation.
Ground Zero: the epicentre of loss, where mourners flock to the past’s memorialisation.
Zero-sum game: one person’s gain is balanced by another’s loss.
Year Zero, though, represents a complete break from the past. To be on the upside of down. To leave the past behind to walk into the future blind.
No Name #1
The death of the past is symbolised by the birth of a new name. A gravestone, with the old forename and surname, missing the date of departure.
What’s in a name? A pseudonym, a nom de guerre. The self-branding of the personal product, solely meant for the individual. An escape from the personal. To conceal and show the self simultaneously.
Deconstruction became the playground of theorists. Nothing was sacred. Not even the symbol of identity.
Roland Barthes proclaimed death of the author, where an individual becomes a construct, and not a person.
Jacques Lacan added the psychoanalytical divide of the self: an attempt to fill absence, to construct a coherent subject through language. The externalisation of unconscious desires to manage internal conflicts.
Judith Butler presented identity as something done, not possessed. Actions speak louder than the words on a birth or death certificate.
Fernando Pessoa described the instability of self and fiction as unity. Fragments that circulated into ‘being’.
The irony? In digital culture, pseudonymity is a fact of personhood: usernames, avatars, profiles. A way to explore fluid, networked selves – multiplicity, not deception – another version of the self, not a mask hiding the true self.
It instils performance, a character that hides the carcass of the old person: Reginald Dwight as Elton John, David Jones as David Bowie, the unreleased names of Angine de Poitrine’s personas.
A new name is not a departure. It is a mutation. The movement from thought to action.
One is the Loneliest Number
The number one symbolises the point of origin. Where life finds its starting point. A monad, the source from which creation springs.
Individualism. Independence. A pioneer of progress. An upright, unwavering force built on a marriage of self-reliance and strong will.
In monotheism: the single, divine source. Oneness: omniscient, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, omnipotent. Or, according to atheists, an omnishambles.
For Pythagoreans, it is not just a number. It is the source of all numbers. The structural foundations of a house of infinite measurements and calculations. Perfection in its purest form. Only total sum. Life as a construction of sequences.
If Year Zero is the implosion, Day One is the beckoning of new beginnings. The reconstruction of identity, the reclamation of agency, the resurgence of singularity.
GMT
The age of hyper individualism is built on the power of names. It provides one’s place in society.
History spins time around individuals, its hands pointing towards those who represent an epoch. As the clock strikes back to the past, it revives a theory placed in the graveyard: Great Man Theory.
The book of life is written by extraordinary people, shaping the world in their image. In the philosophical battlefield, nature emerges triumphant over nurture. One’s charisma, intelligence, courage, and wisdom become a matter of destiny. They are a tide that rises, washing over society to produce a new path. Bringing order to chaos: Napoleon, Lincoln, Gandhi.
Society becomes reduced to an invisible spectre within this frame. There is no society beyond the individual. They are merely the extras in life’s play, watching the performers act, write, and direct the scene.
In the digital age, anyone can concoct their own narrative through the screen. There is no mediation beyond the medium: a prophet, a poet, a priest, a man of letters, a king, and the divine can only be seen through this form.
Behind the software, buried in the hardware, is where true power lies. There is no deity, only the creators of these tools, who developed the new iteration of this theory.
Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration emphasised this shift: technological messrs Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk were seated in the front row; Shou Zi Chew, Tim Cook, and Sam Altman placed just behind. If politics is the steering wheel, these figures emphasise how they provide its engine.
Balancing the Binary
Andy Warhol famously stated that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame. Within this technological landscape, this is formed by a blurring between a person and machine. An individual changed in accordance with the changes charging around them. However, this state is neither natural to humans nor, paradoxically, technology.
Every computer is built on bricks of binary. All data encapsulated in two digits: the absence of current in ‘0’, the presence of current in ‘1’. Life processed into life by numbers.
If technology mirrors selfhood, the image of the self needs greater resolution. To form a place within the confines of the digital world that’s here, and the one to come.
The road to One starts with Zero.
The destruction before creation emerges.
A new face for a new name.
Reconstruction of a new reality.
A transformation of time beyond the coronation of the new GMT.
These binary numbers are not merely a switch. They are a journey, a destination, a sequence to be walked through. A path created by nothingness that leads to wholeness. Only by redrawing these lines can a new road to humanity be drawn.