Today it rests in Tokyo, in the Statistical Museum of the Statistics Bureau of Japan, alongside other early computers and tabulators. Who were the people this machine counted, during its brief period of use as a prototype? It seems impossible to say.

Sia Yoon: Counting likes

South Korea; spring 2022. Sia Yoon (five feet tall, blood type A, born on 15 March and now seventeen years old) is woken by her digital alarm clock, sits up in bed, stretches. Turns on music (Schubert), showers, dresses, leaves her tiny apartment for Dara High School.

Half a million people follow Sia’s morning routine, because she is a successful vlogger. Aged seven, she was on TV as a martial arts prodigy, and she has never looked back. She calls herself a ‘natural-born cutie’ (‘Yes, yes! Be jealous of me!’), and the further reaches of stardom now beckon. A million followers is a goal, and she is starting to produce commercially sponsored posts: for lip tint, for tote bags (the tote bag post got 24,318 likes).

Sia’s day continues with classes, lunch, meetings with friends. She posts photos, checks the responses: how many views, how many likes (or dislikes). Checks her ranking (‘Of all Dara High School students, I rank in the top 1% for the number of subscribers!’)

It’s not all good news. Sia recently broke up with her boyfriend and vlogging partner of two years. There was naturally an element of personal despair about her response, but she’s also deeply worried about the effect on her online presence. Her photo post announcing the breakup got 155,205 likes in a few hours, but her subscribers fell away in their tens of thousands over the subsequent days. Her life at the moment is dominated by the search for ways to remedy the situation.

Sia Yoon, star of NewTube.

webtoon.com.

In the decades either side of 2000, culture was transformed in many countries by a set of processes loosely grouped as ‘digital’. The hardware involved descended from three sources.

On the one hand, there were mechanical calculating machines, whose history goes back to the seventeenth century if not before. By the close of the nineteenth century, desk calculators that could perform the four arithmetical operations were commonplace, and they remained so until the middle years of the twentieth. Second, there were mechanical counting and calculating devices like Hollerith’s, using punched cards to store data, and manipulating the cards to perform various operations upon that data. Third, the typewriter and – even more common at one time – the cash register: input devices more user-friendly than laboriously punching holes in cards.

In the 1930s, it was already becoming feasible to assemble multiple punched-card machines to perform and control complex sequences of operations automatically, for applications in fields such as astronomy and engineering. IBM marketed a ‘card programmed calculator’ in the 1940s and 1950s that was already effectively a computer in the sense of being programmable and able to store, retrieve and process data. Innovations in the basic hardware followed – vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits – leading over a few decades to smaller, faster and cheaper machines. Punched cards, as a means to store data and control machines, were similarly replaced by magnetic tapes and floppy discs. But the basic concepts of data storage, data manipulation and program remained central to what a computer was.

A vacuum-tube computer in the 1940s and 1950s filled a room or even a building. Their names – they were rare enough to have individual names – now sound like quaint jokes: ‘Colossus’, ‘Whirlwind’. Yet, in the mid-1950s, one of them – the ENIAC at the University of Pennsylvania – could plausibly claim to have done more arithmetic in its eleven-year life than humanity had done in the whole of its previous history.

The uses of computers at first remained limited to industrial, military and scientific calculation, and to tasks of the bookkeeping type: airline reservation systems, human-resources administration and stock control. In the 1960s, there were perhaps 10,000 computers in the world. The following two decades saw the rise of affordable computers for individuals, and a software market sprang up, focused in particular on word processing, spreadsheets and databases. User interfaces became graphical rather than text-based in the late 1980s. Meanwhile, microchips found an increasing range of uses outside computers: in cash machines, for instance, in barcode scanners, in digital watches, in arcade games.

Initially, computers were isolated devices, but that, too, gradually changed through the 1960s and 1970s as new capabilities were devised. First, to enable remote working from multiple terminals within a single university campus, all linked to one central computer. Next, to network together multiple computers, whether in local networks with dedicated wiring or – using existing telephone lines – across continents and beyond. Once protocols had been standardised for securing a network and exchanging data over it, commerical online services took off rapidly from the mid-1980s. In 1990, there were just over 300,000 computers on the internet; a decade later there were 100 million.

Email was the crucial application in the initial stages of the internet’s popularisation, closely followed by the World Wide Web and by social media platforms which hosted, aggregated, sorted and sifted ever-increasing oceans of user-generated content. By the 2020s it was becoming difficult to think of a social or economic function that could not be done online: shopping, meeting, gaming, banking … The growth of the internet coincided with the development of more and more portable devices – laptops, smartphones, tablets and smart watches – and drove the spiralling demand for them.

Since the 1930s, science-fiction authors had speculated and fantasised about the global sharing of information, under evocative titles such as the ‘world brain’, the ‘memex’ and the ‘noosphere’. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, it seemed rather as though those dreams had come true, with both their positive and their negative consequences. For some, the internet created a radically new form of culture, a ‘consensual hallucination’, a digital playground in which individual perception, participation and bricolage would replace the old modes of cultural production. An ever-wider range of cultural artefacts were now either being ‘born digital’ or were rapidly being converted into digital surrogates for online distribution. Online identities were freely malleable, online freedoms unconstrained.

At the same time, it was conspicuous that some parts of human experience were being left behind because they resisted being transformed into data, and that some people – indeed, most people – were being left out of the digital revolution because of the accidents of wealth and access to technology. The new, participatory online culture was seldom – if ever – as open, as unconstrained or as democratic as it at first seemed, and it facilitated negative behaviours – theft, lying and bullying – just as often as positive ones. It also facilitated spying, coercion and control, sometimes in new and alarmingly powerful forms. In the new realm of online data, it often felt as though the tasks of navigation and quality control had been outsourced to end users ill-equipped to perform them: that what had been created was an unstable, unreliable post-truth society in which what mattered was how many followers you could get to believe you, not whether what you said bore any relationship to an offline reality.

All of this has everything and nothing to do with the history of counting. What is digitisation if it is not, in a sense, ‘counting’? (The use of ‘digit’ – literally a finger – to mean a number or a number symbol seems to derive from Roman and medieval finger-counting.) What is online culture if it is not the sheer profusion of modern ways of counting, the participatory spectacle of a world turned into pure numbers? Computers were inherently digital from the days of vacuum tubes, consisting of electrical components whose state was either on or off, conventionally interpreted as 1 and 0 in a binary representation of numbers.

Yet even by the early years of the twentieth century, punched-card machines were performing tasks very much more complicated than just counting. It seems forced to describe, say, the mid-century code-breaking devices as mere ‘counting machines’, and frankly bizarre to insist that that is what a smartphone really is. Indeed, once the function of counting has become detached from having a human being pay sequential attention to things or events and keep track while doing so, machine counting quickly begins to feel very unlike other kinds of counting. The interesting questions shift to its capability for transforming people into punched cards, paintings into on-screen images, videos into advertising revenue: and away from the fact that those transformations are mediated by binary numbers.

That said, microchip devices are also used for functions much more like old-fashioned counting: as a substitute, when asking how many, for counting in words, on your fingers, or using some other device. One of the most conspicuous is the counting of friends, likes, followers and views in social media contexts. Here, the digital world has provided not only a new technology with which to count, but new things to count.

All of these issues play out in microcosm in the life of Sia Yoon. She lives in South Korea, a country whose industrialisation and economic growth have involved conspicuous success in the electronics industry, from semiconductor components to phones and watches, and also successive phases of cultural export – the ‘Korean Wave’ – facilitated and driven by online marketing and online presence.

K-pop leads the way, with the most popular artists and videos gaining countless followers online. By December 2014, Psy’s video ‘Gangnam Style’ was on track to ‘break YouTube’, as the number of views approached the largest that can be stored using thirty-two binary digits (rather more than 2.1 billion, assuming you use the first digit to record whether the number is positive or negative), neatly illustrating that every way of counting has its limits. YouTube upgraded its hit-counter to use sixty-four digits instead, and the problem was averted. Games, films, television and of course devices by Samsung and LG are also major exports. Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world in terms of broadband and wireless connectivity and ownership of digital phones, cameras and other devices.

After her breakup, Sia found a new boyfriend fairly quickly, and started a vlogging project that involved making him over. Minho (five foot ten, blood type AB, birthday 17 August) was, to begin with, a nerdy devotee of Japanese animé: overweight, unhealthy and uncharismatic. His best friend was shocked at the very idea of liking a girl who lived ‘outside the monitor’. But Sia was convinced that this rediscovered childhood crush could be transformed: specifically over the course of one hundred days, which she diligently counted down on camera as her followers watched. The project was a winner on social media: her initial announcement was viewed 1.59 million times in the first day, receiving 27,000 likes (and few or no dislikes), and she went on to vlog in detail about Minho’s newly imposed exercise and diet regime (‘W-wait … But … There’s nothing but leaves and sweet potatoes here …’).

His first workout video got 250,000 views in a day; a weigh-in 880,000, with 3,000 comments. As his appearance improved, the couple’s first selfie together gathered 20,000 likes, and a clip from their skiing trip went viral and attracted 1.6 million views. And so on, and so on. The project succeeded in terms both of Minho’s health and appearance (his weight eventually dropped to 169 pounds), and of subscriptions, which rose to over 650,000. As one supporter put it, ‘you’ve become an icon of hard work and effort, and everyone loves you for it’. Yet Sia would never lose sight of the fact that ‘what’s important is the view count’.

Sia, perhaps fortunately, is not a real person. She is a character in the webtoon My Dud-to-Stud Boyfriend (story by Yerang; art by Sutggi; nine million page views at the time of writing).

Webtoons descend from printed manga and from the online picture-diaries of the 1990s. Like K-pop, they have surged hugely in popularity over the first decades of the new century, both inside and outside Korea: by 2018, over 35 billion episodes had been read, and half a million views per episode was not uncommon for a successful series. Commissioned and volunteer translators render them into – so far – over thirty foreign languages. Films, TV shows and games have appeared as spin-offs. As scholar Dal Yong Jin describes:

on a bustling subway ride to work, it’s not hard to find people staring into their smartphones or PC tablets, scrolling quickly down the screen to see what comes next. On sidewalks or in coffee shops, the situation is the same. If a smile can be spotted on the user’s face, it would not be far-fetched to say they could be reading one of their favorite webtoons.

Adapted to presentation on the web or through a dedicated app, webtoons scroll vertically through sixty or eighty panels per episode, often ending on a cliffhanger. By contrast with printed manga, they are presented in colour, sometimes with the addition of sound or animation. Genres range from biography and sports to crime noir and fantasy. Romances and self-consciously mundane slice-of-life stories are particularly popular, in which self-referential appearances of technology and social media are common: characters use phones to count blog posts, likes and comments, smart watches to check heart rate and time exercises, tablets to access music, video and news and shop, check the time, track bank payments, read toons …

The so-called artist incubation system, in which artists compete for audience attention on the webtoon platforms, has much in common with social media platforms like YouTube (or the fictional equivalent NewTube, on which Sia Yoon is such a star), with comments, likes, hit counts and followers. There has been both criticism and celebration of a model that lowers the barriers to entry – ‘webtoon artist’ is reportedly one of the most popular career ambitions for Korean pre-teens – but concentrates the rewards on a very small percentage of participants, picking a handful of winners based mainly on their popularity, who are then under intense pressure to conform to audience expectations and keep up a gruelling schedule of new material. Just like Sia herself, in fact.

Sia’s story is perfectly believable in a digital world, one in which what counts is what you can count, or rather what your many devices can count for you. In which success, popularity and worth are matters of automatically aggregated numbers of hits, views and likes. The resonance between her story and the ‘attention economy’ in which webtoon artists themselves operate adds a layer of richness to her; and perhaps a whisper of unease too.

Sia’s story is not yet finished, and her many fans – both real and fictional – eagerly await what will happen. Now that her new boyfriend is transformed, she and he have taken up positions of fame and social leadership in their school, but they have also rapidly learned of the costs of exploiting social media to shame and expose their enemies. The sponsored posts continue, but so do the dilemmas; so, at times, does a certain emptiness at the heart of Sia’s digital life. Her birthday party photos get 10,000 likes, but she comments ruefully that ‘all the presents I get every year are just sponsored products from brands’. According to Sia’s creators, there are years of content still to come, and there is no doubt that she will go on compulsively, mechanically counting views, likes and followers, all tracked for her by her devices and the online platforms to which she subscribes. She is, in more senses than one, the product of a digital age.

Is a digital world one that contains more counting, or less? What does the future hold, as human beings outsource more and more of their everyday counting (and arithmetic) to sophisticated machines? Is it reasonable to imagine that arithmetic, and even counting itself, might eventually vanish from human practice, in the same way that, say, copperplate handwriting has done? Perhaps it is. Few people with access to digital technology would now do more than the simplest arithmetic either mentally or on paper, rather than asking a device. Few would count more than, say, a few dozen objects by hand without outsourcing the task to a machine. When was the last time you counted more than a hundred of anything? More than ten?

Perhaps one of the possible futures of humanity is a world after counting.

7

Counting words and more

in the Pacific world

Counting machines are another branch of the counting story that is in danger of feeling like the story; their present-day forms are so dominant as to overshadow any other way of counting, past or present. But they are in reality only one branch among many. To continue the journey around the globe is to find further worlds of counting, in the Pacific and the Americas: rich, distinctive and fascinating.

After walking as far east and south as mainland Asia will take you, keep going. Build rafts, build canoes, and paddle or sail across the channels of water to island after island. Through the archipelago of Indonesia, making short sea passages on which you can see the next island from the one you just left. On a few of the longer passages, your destination is out of sight: a new sort of voyage into the unknown.

Continue as far as the wind and the water will take you. Discover forests, deserts, barren atolls and teeming reefs. Find new worlds, and devise new ways to live in them. To the great continent in the south; to the scatter of tiny islands beyond. Carry your language, your culture – your ways of counting – with you.

From start to finish, it would take human beings over 60,000 years to populate the Pacific.

Not surprisingly, Oceania is home to an enormous diversity of human cultures, and therefore of ways of counting. The extraordinarily deep human history in the Pacific world, with its successive waves of migration over tens of thousands of years, give the story of counting a particular flavour here. These were cultures that relied on spoken, not written words: their history must rely on archaeology and on the memory of living languages and communities. There were no number symbols here, but instead an extraordinary range of number words and gestures, from some of the simplest systems documented to some of the most complex. That range is well represented by languages spoken today. The languages of Australia, spoken by descendants of the first humans to arrive in the Pacific, have on the whole quite simple counting systems, sometimes consisting of just a few words. The peoples of neighbouring New Guinea, on the other hand, are famed for elaborate routines combining word and gesture, which seem to have developed in situ over perhaps the last few thousand years. Finally the Austronesian languages, whose speakers populated Micronesia and Polynesia over the last 5,000 years, use regular decimal systems to count to extremely high numbers, used for food distribution and other purposes. This is a region that can display the range and power of human counting words like no other.