Abstract Code

Abstract Unicode is everywhere and nowhere at once. Since its invention in 1993 by lucrative American companies, including Xerox, Apple, and Microsoft, Unicode has been the global standard for information exchange, enabling the transfer of data across the world by converting more than a hundred and sixty world scripts into standardized bits and bytes. Its spread throughout the world is so expansive, its technical complexity so elaborate, and its integration into daily lives so seamless that Unicode has become a natural part of the world—used everywhere, yet seen nowhere. This article seeks to denaturalize Unicode by examining its origins from a global perspective and situating it within a longer history of script engineering that was deeply intertwined with imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism. It proposes the term “abstract code” to capture a historical process whereby capitalism homogenizes and standardizes diverse cultures of writing to make them exchangeable and commensurable with one another in the market of information. Disclosing the historical links between the nineteenth-century age of script engineering and the birth of Unicode in the 1980s, this article demonstrates that the new information infrastructure sought to abstract all writing systems into a standardized sequence of bits and thus enable the corporate accumulation of capital at a global scale. Unicode, in short, was the critical infrastructure that enabled the birth of a global neoliberal information economy.