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An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument that demonstrates how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and who we are.As we engineer ever-more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies - precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbach's thoughtful ode to the computer codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child, and a reflection of how he's both experienced and written the algorithms that have come to taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior, and that compel us to do the same. With a philosopher's sense of inquiry and an engineer's eye, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his schooling as an engineer, and his contributions to instant-messaging technology developed for Microsoft and to software built to sift through Google's data stores. His unsettling conclusion - that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives - is inescapable.