Kelly reflects “on the transcendent power of digital computation” (Kelly 2002). A few of the naturalizing themes of the digital discourse are reiterated in this article as well. But they are now set in a different, transcendental context, and so their meaning is also changed. Life, Kelly says, is made of numbers: “Biology, that pulsating mass of plant and animal flesh, is conceived by science today as an information process . . . hard matter is information as well . . . [The physical world is] incorporeal. . . . everything . . . in the universe [is] . . . made of nothing more but 1s and 0s. The physical world itself is digital . . . Every it—every particle, every field of force . . . —derives its function, its meaning, its very existence entirely from binary choices, bits. What we call reality arises in the last analysis from the posing of yes/no questions” (Kelly 2002).
We have seen that type of assertions above. But Kelly now takes this “world-as-information” argument a little further, arguing for a new science, which Kelly terms “digitalism,” which suggests that “the universe itself is the ultimate computer—actually the only computer” (Kelly 2002). Digitalism’s attempt to understand physics as “a form of computation” opens the door, according to Kelly, to a new cosmology, a new understanding of nature and being, and ultimately a new theology: “From this perspective [that is, digitalism], computation seems almost a theological process. It takes as its fodder the primeval choice between yes and no, the fundamental state of 1 or 0. After stripping away all externalities, all material embellishments, what remains is the purest state of existence: here/not here. Am/not am. In the Old Testament, when Moses asks the Creator, ‘Who are you?’ the being says, in effect, ‘Am’. One bit. One almighty bit. Yes. One. Exist. It is the simplest statement possible” (Kelly 2002).
Binarism, or digitalism, that is, the expression of reality as strands of 0s and 1s (or more accurately, as a state of existence or inexistence), is the ultimate model of reality (which in effect means it is not a model at all but reality as such), a universal language. Hence, it is divine. God, which knows reality for what it is, knows digitalism. Kelly seems to find in the Bible confirmation for digitalism. God’s reply to Moses evidently vindicates digitalism as the ultimate reality. (And incidentally reveals the creator to be a programmer, or at least well conversed in the digital language.) But one should not really be surprised—after all, if God has created this world, he had to be a programmer. To be God is—quite literally—to play a programmer. Here is how the work of God-cum-programmer is presented by Kelly: “All creation, from this perch, is made from this irreducible foundation [0s and 1s]. Every mountain, every star, the smallest salamander or woodland tick, each thought in our mind, each flight of a ball is but a web of elemental yes/nos woven together” (Kelly 2002).
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age