we have computation because of weaving
craft, innovation, and the lost feminine origins of code
the original binary
Before there was 1 and 0, there was warp and weft. In the manufacture of cloth, warp and weft are the two basic components in weaving to transform thread and yarn into textile fabrics. The vertical warp yarns held stationary in tension while the horizontal weft is drawn through, inserted over and under the warp thread.
What if everything you know about the history of technology is wrong?
Digital computation did not emerge from the minds of individual male inventors, but from millennia of textile technologies developed primarily by women. Recognizing this lineage transforms our understanding of both technological history and the nature of intelligence itself.
To speak of computation as craft is to reclaim wonder from sterility, to restore the sensual to the systematic. Our most sophisticated technologies grew not from the rational but from the relational, not from dominance but from care. When we recognize this, we can open technology's gates to those who have been told they don't belong.
Our digital futures need not be cold and extractive. "Technology" and "textile" spring from the same ancient Greek word, tekhnē, meaning craft, art, or skill. Before cultures carved hierarchies that separated the making of cloth from the making of tools, there was no distinction between weaving patterns and engineering solutions. Etymology remembers what ideology forgot: all innovation began as giving form to human need.
Perhaps our computational systems can be warm, generative, life-giving — technologies woven from the same impulse that first taught us to care for one another through the making of beautiful, useful things.
the world's oldest evidence of systematic information processing
Long before silicon circuits encoded information in binary, human hands were thinking in the same language: knot or no knot, over or under, pattern or chaos.
Consider the quipu, those knotted cords that held the memory of empire in the high Andes. They acted as a database that exists in three dimensions, where every variable (color, material, knot type, position, twist direction) carried meaning. The Incas could store everything from census data to stories, myths, and cultural knowledge in these fiber networks. Some had as many as 1500 strings.
The mathematical precision rivals modern programming languages. The quipucamayocs (khipu-authorities) could perform arithmetic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, functioning as human processors executing computational operations on this fiber-based hardware.
What they understood in three dimensions, we've flattened into something no less magical: the matrix. These grids of numbers, born from the ancient logic of warp crossing weft, now run your entire digital life. Matrices are deciding whether your face unlocks your phone, which song Spotify plays next, and how your camera makes you look good in terrible lighting. They're translating your voice into text, your location into directions, your browsing into targeted ads that know you better than you know yourself. Even the screen you're reading this on is just millions of tiny matrices switching pixels on and off sixty times per second. We call our newest versions AI, but they're really just the most elaborate weaving project ever attempted.
Software was built from soft wear, patterns you can put on and take off, instructions that can be tailored, hemmed, and passed down.
Like modern databases, quipus were hierarchical and relational. But quipus went beyond mere data storage. "They were like early computers, early counting machines," as filmmaker Kim MacQuarrie observes. They functioned not just as databases but as multimedia storage systems; encoding stories, myths, and cultural knowledge alongside numerical data, much like how modern systems integrate text, metadata, and relational information.
These systems were older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids, older than written language itself. And the Spanish conquistadors declared them "the devil's work" and ordered most destroyed. Of thousands of quipus, only about 1,400 survive. Imagine if 99% of our internet infrastructure were suddenly deleted, leaving only fragments for future archaeologists to decode.
Evidence suggests quipus used binary code to record information, making them the literal precursor to the binary systems that power every device you are using to read these words. Every time your phone recognizes your face, every time your laptop boots up, every time you tap send on a text, you're using the same binary language that Andean fingers first spoke in knots. The math hasn't changed. Only the material.
Yet because these technologies emerged from the Global South, from Indigenous knowledge systems, from domains later dismissed as "craft" rather than "computation," their significance has been systematically minimized.
We are only now beginning to recognize that the most sophisticated information technologies emerged not from isolated innovation, but from patient hands that understood pattern as language, knot as code, thread as memory.
Right now, as you read these words, binary is dancing through your device sixty times per second: pixels switching on and off, creating letters from light and darkness. Your screen doesn't know it's displaying language; it only knows presence and absence. The meaning emerges from the pattern, just as it always has.
Everything speaks in presence and absence. Your heartbeat: lub-dub or silence. Morse code: dot-dash or pause. DNA: base pair or gap. Neurons: fire or don't fire. Tides: high or low. Day and night. Inhale, exhale. Even love operates in binary. Here or not here, chosen or unchosen, remembered or forgotten. This is why code feels so natural once you understand it. We've been thinking in binary since our first breath. The computer didn't invent this language; it simply gave us a way to make the universe's favorite conversation visible.
the printing press of pattern
The revolution arrived disguised as silk.
In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard unleashed something transformative into the world: a loom that could read. Jacquard had cracked the code of human-machine conversation. Punch a hole or don't punch a hole, presence or absence, yes or no. The simplest language in the universe! Here was binary thinking before anyone knew to call it that; the first whisper of digital thought.
The machine spoke in holes. Each card was a line of code, each absence a command: lift this thread, drop that one, make beauty happen. Chain the cards together and suddenly you had a loom that could read patterns like sheet music, translating human dreams into textile reality.
And the world broke open. This was the printing press of fashion; what Gutenberg had done for books, Jacquard did for cloth. Overnight, the cost of complex patterned fabric collapsed. What master weavers had guarded for centuries got democratized, mechanized, made common. Suddenly intricate brocades and complex damasks that had once been the exclusive domain of royalty could be worn by anyone with coins in their pocket.
The technology spread across continents with stunning speed: from Lyon's silk workshops to Manchester's cotton mills, from Scottish tartans to American coverlets, from Russian factories producing elaborate peasant scarves to workshops in India where artisans incorporated Jacquard techniques into their ancient sari-weaving traditions. In England, the technology transformed entire regions: Lancashire became a powerhouse of patterned cotton production, while Spitalfields weavers adapted their centuries-old silk traditions to work with the new mechanical systems. By mid-century, Jacquard looms were operating from Japan to Mexico, each culture adapting the binary language of punched cards to encode their own visual vocabularies.
And across the channel, a brilliant mind was watching. The Englishman Charles Babbage greatly admired Jacquard's invention.
If pasteboard could teach silk to sing, why couldn't it teach metal to think?
Enter Ada Lovelace. Born to poet, Lord Byron, and mathematician, Anne Isabella Milbanke, Ada inherited both poetic vision and mathematical rigor.
When an inventor named Babbage unveiled his plans for the Analytical Engine, widely considered the first modern computer design, Ada Lovelace famously observed: "The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns, just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."
In that single sentence, she shattered the boundary between art and logic, between the domestic and the revolutionary. She saw what the men around her, brilliant as they were, could not: that the loom and the computer were siblings, born from the same impulse to encode human intention in readable patterns.
But Ada wasn't content with observations. She created the first computer program: a detailed algorithm for calculating Bernoulli numbers that required loops, conditional operations, and recursive functions.
While her contemporaries were content to separate reason from imagination, she insisted on their marriage.
Her technical notes exploded beyond anything Babbage had imagined. "The engine might act upon other things besides number... Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent."
Music. Poetry. Art. A century before anyone else imagined it, Ada was envisioning digital creativity!
She refused to choose between the technical and the beautiful, between logic and imagination. She proved that the most revolutionary insights come from minds that can dance between disciplines.
I hope to follow in her footsteps.
is innovation gendered?
In the 1500s, when the Spanish conquistadors encountered quipu for the first time, they saw devil's work. In the 1600s, when colonial administrators found Indigenous people encoding complex information in knotted cords, they saw primitive record-keeping. In the 1800s, when women's technical knowledge in textile mills was essential to the Industrial Revolution, it was labeled "unskilled work" while men's similar factory roles were deemed "skilled." In the 1900s, when scholars finally began to decode these textile systems, they discovered mathematical sophistication that rivaled contemporary databases. Yet they filed it under ethnographic curiosities rather than technological breakthroughs, and cultural practices rather than information systems.
The violence is linguistic as much as physical. We have words like "technology" and "engineering" for innovations that emerge from laboratories and workshops, spaces historically dominated by men. We have words like "craft" and "tradition" for innovations that emerge from homes and communities, spaces historically associated with women and marginalized peoples. The taxonomy itself reveals the hierarchy: one category builds the future, the other preserves the past.
The words we use to describe computational history become the lens through which young minds see possibility. When we erase women from the story of technological innovation, we simultaneously commit historical injustice and future theft, stealing from girls the knowledge that minds like theirs built the digital world they inhabit. Language becomes destiny: call something 'women's work' and watch it disappear from prestige and payrolls; call it 'male genius' and watch young women quietly edit themselves out of the narrative before they even begin.
The gender gap in STEM emerges not from biology but from biography, from the stories we tell about who gets to be brilliant at what.
Consider our most mythologized technological moment: when we reached for the moon, we carried women's hands with us. The core rope memory that guided Apollo 11 through the cosmos was woven, literally woven, by women whose expertise NASA borrowed from the textile mills of Massachusetts. Wire by wire, they threaded copper through magnetic cores with the steady precision their grandmothers had used for lace. Each wire through a core: binary 1. Each wire around a core: binary 0.
The same fingers that once embroidered wedding dresses now stitched pathways to the stars.
The woman overseeing this cosmic needlework was Margaret Hamilton, who led the software engineering team for Apollo, and who actually coined the term "software engineering" itself. They called her the "Rope Mother."
This wasn't the first time women's hands had been deemed essential for what men's minds had designed. Twenty years earlier, six women (Betty Snyder, Kay McNulty, Marlyn Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman, Frances Bilas, and Jean Jennings) programmed ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose electronic computer. They worked without programming languages, without manuals, studying blueprints and figuring out how to manipulate thousands of switches and cables by hand. When ENIAC was unveiled to the public in 1946, the women weren't even invited to the demonstration. They were called "operators" rather than programmers, because programming was considered clerical work — women's work, therefore not worth naming or celebrating.
The result is that we live in a world where the foundational technologies of information processing (pattern recognition, systematic encoding, data storage, algorithmic thinking) are divorced from their origins in civilizations we've been taught to see as "pre-technological." We learn about computation as if it emerged from nowhere, rather than from thousands of years of innovation by minds we've systematically excluded from technological history.
This amnesia serves a function: it allows us to continue imagining technology as the natural domain of certain peoples, certain genders, certain ways of knowing. But if we trace the actual lineage of computational thinking, we find a different story… one that demands we fundamentally reimagine who gets to be called an inventor, whose knowledge counts as technology, and whose innovations get to shape tomorrow.
for young women. on belonging:
I rarely address one group directly in my writing. I write hoping everyone sees themselves in these words, that everyone learns something from the stories I tell. But if you're a young woman with even the faintest pull toward technical fields, this one is for you.
They will tell you that curiosity killed the cat. That you must choose between your love of literature and your fascination with algorithms, between the art that makes you cry and the equations that make you think. They will tell you that you need to choose between being liked and being brilliant, between being helpful and being ambitious. They will tell you that caring about people makes you "not technical enough" and that understanding systems makes you "not creative enough." They will tell you that caring too much makes you soft, that asking too many questions makes you difficult, that bringing your whole self into technical spaces makes you unprofessional.
These are lies designed to keep you small.
But I also need to tell you another truth: Technical work isn't always beautiful. Sometimes it's tedious. Sometimes it's frustrating in ways that make you question your life choices. The math doesn't always click immediately. The code doesn't always compile. The solution you spent days building gets scrapped for something simpler. Your first few months in any technical field will feel like trying to speak a foreign language while everyone around you seems fluent in something you're still translating word by word.
This isn't evidence you don't belong. Your confusion isn't a verdict on your capacity. Your questions aren't proof that you're behind. This stumbling, this reaching, this daily negotiation with the unknown: this is what learning has always looked like.
The discipline required to learn technical skills; the willingness to sit with confusion, to iterate through failed attempts, to debug line by line until you find the error; these are the same qualities that built every technological breakthrough in human history.
The future needs people who can see the human story inside the technical systems, who can ask not just "does this work?" but "who does this work for?" And just as importantly, "who does this work against?"
The revolution we need won't come from minds that think like the status quo. It will come from people who can debug both code and culture, who can architect systems that serve everyone, not just the people who've always had access.
Technology needs your care. Technology needs your creativity. Technology needs your capacity to see patterns not just in data, but in human need. Technology needs you. The most sophisticated systems we've built, from the internet to medical devices, succeeded not just because they functioned, but because someone cared enough to make them work for real people.
Don't let them convince you that struggling with syntax means you're not cut out for this. Every expert was once a beginner who refused to quit during the hard parts. The difference between those who make it and those who don't isn't talent, it's the willingness to be bad at something long enough to get good at it.
The next time someone tells you technology is inevitable, neutral, objective, ask them whose hands built it. Ask them whose knowledge it carries. Ask them which patterns it perpetuates. Ask them whose children will inherit the prejudices we code into our systems today! Then imagine the different world we could weave if we remembered that every line of code is a vote for the future we want to live in, every algorithm a value system, every interface an ideology that shapes not just how humans relate to each other, but how we relate to truth, to power, to the very possibilities we can imagine.
Thank you for reading.
x,
if aristotle and ada lovelace had a gen z daughter,
Maalvika
Your mind is a temple where the wisdom and magic of Goddesses reside. Brilliant article!
what brilliant writing!! though every piece you write is amazing, this one especially left me breathless and inspired! you can *feel* your reverence from this essay. wonderful!!