While the four of us largely agree on the basic terms discussed in Digital Theory, a few specific points of disagreement remain. Dialectics is one of those points of disagreement. Handelman and Weatherby's chapter, titled "Digital Dialectics," argues that the two terms are intertwined. Meanwhile, my chapter insists that the digital is strictly incompatible with dialectics. The argument is simple: the digital militantly observes both the principle of identity and the principle of noncontradiction, age-old logical principles known since Aristotle at least; whereas the dialectic constantly violates those two principles (which is why we love it).
Yet I tried to strike a compromise in the essay. While holding on to a narrow definition of the digital, I also freely acknowledge that digital tech will necessarily enter into dialectical encounters once it becomes embedded in a device such as a computer. Four such encounters come to mind: an encounter with its own material hardware; with users; with other machines; and with itself at a future state.
In sum, I want to retain dialectics as a specific form of rationality, distinguished from digital rationality. Claiming that the digital is dialectical due to an admixture of users, hardware, etc. is imprecise.
Below is an excerpt from my chapter, titled "A Brief History of Digital Philosophy in 10 Expressions," where I characterize the disagreement.
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In [Handelman and Weatherby's] chapter...they spell out more intricately the case for a dialectical theory of the digital. While we likely agree in a holistic sense--namely that dialectics is the proper way to subsume the interrelated fields of the digital and the analog--we disagree on some of the more narrow points. In particular, I remain rather stubbornly attached to the strict incompatibility between digital and dialectical. As previously stated, dialectics violates both the principle of identity and the principle of noncontradiction, whereas the digital militantly observes the integrity of those two principles. Because of this, we have digital computers, and we even have analog computers, but I’m not aware of there ever having been invented a dialectical computer.* As a computer programmer, I’ve never seen a dialectical data type in a piece of software, for instance, or a dialectical operator in a line of code. Yet as a programmer who is also a Marxist, I recognize that computers exist at the intersection between machine and flesh, that they harbor qualitatively distinct components within them (plastic, copper, glass, electricity, photons, etc.), and that they exist within a broad social fabric rife with contradiction and antagonism. In that larger sense one might certainly wish to speak about a digital dialectic. Hence if I ultimately prefer a narrow, arithmetical definition of the digital (as incompatible with dialectics), Handelman and Weatherby address the digital within the expanded field, a field that is no doubt inherently dialectical.
Excerpt from Alexander R. Galloway, "A Brief History of Digital Philosophy in 10
Expressions" in M. Beatrice Fazi, Alexander R. Galloway, Matthew Handelman and Leif Weatherby, Digital Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press [co-published with meson press], 2025), 84-85.
* Yes, I am aware of the Russian ternary computer, which, while using three basis tokens rather than two, was not dialectical in any real sense of the term.