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Social Digitalisation
Persistent Transformations Beyond
Digital Technology
Kornelia Hahn
“The focus on social digitalisation theory offers an original contribution to

the field. I particularly liked the breadth and depth of historical examples that
the book presents in an engaging and compelling demonstration of the social
and historical processes underpinning ‘transformation’.”
—Kate Orton-Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Sociology,
University of Edinburgh, UK
Kornelia Hahn
Persistent Transformations Beyond
Digital Technology
Kornelia Hahn
Politikwissenschaft
Universität Salzburg
Salzburg, Austria
ISBN 978-3-030-79866-6 ISBN 978-3-030-79867-3 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79867-3
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature
Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting,
reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical
way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software,
or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt
from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this
book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the
authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained
herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover illustration: Hugh Williamson/Alamy Stock Photo
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To my son Tyrique
Preface
Writing this book in the year when COVID-19 first swept the globe
has inevitably come with unforeseen effects, including on my own stance
towards the phenomena explored in these pages. Like many academic
instructors and authors, I had longed to have more time to work at home
before the lockdown ruled out any other option. In spite of the privilege
of being able to continue to work in these circumstances, it seemed at
first that writing a book in the midst of a global cataclysm might be
something of a sideshow.
However, the pandemic has also compelled me to speculate, like many
others, not only on the scale and depth of changes likely to be accelerated
and generated by this pandemic but also on the role that might be played
in these changes by the very subject of this book, i.e. by transformative
processes of social digitalisation.
Back in the classroom in March 2020, just as I was announcing the
teaching schedule for the coming week, it was through my students’
connections to the outside world via their digital devices that I first learnt
there would be no more face-to-face classes for the foreseeable future.
The university had just ordered an immediate lockdown—a state whose
vii
viii Preface
significance most of us were still only beginning to grasp. Worldwide,

across every sector of society and the economy, rapidly adjusting to this
state has entailed harnessing the resources of material digital technologies
on an unprecedented scale. Such technology has proved pivotal both in
tackling the direct health impacts of the pandemic and in enabling many
people to continue performing much the same work they were doing
prior to the lockdown. In my own case, for example, the transition to
teaching online proceeded quite smoothly over a matter of weeks—so
smoothly, in fact, that it is hard to imagine there will ever be a complete
return to pre-pandemic routines.
While the application of digital technology in relation to the pandemic
raises many questions, and while we have witnessed many tragic failures
to mitigate the virus, such technology has undeniably proved immensely
helpful and even essential for people coping with lockdown conditions
and other impacts of the pandemic. For better or worse, the outcome is
that more and more areas and activities have swiftly become connected
with and/or organised by digital processing.
With digital technology set to become ever more ubiquitous over the
coming years, the hope that has helped drive me in writing this book
is that our globally shared experiences of the pandemic will lead to
more profound assessments of further digital transformation, including
assessments from the perspective of social theory as set out in this book.
The social theory approach proposed and elucidated here is primarily
concerned with long-term developments in digital processing, including
those set in motion long before the advent of material digital tech-
nologies—in some cases prior to the so-called Age of Steam. From this
perspective, the ‘Digital Transformation’ is thus understood as a trajec-
tory rather than a sudden disruptive change. This approach is above all
focused on the re-organisation through digital processing of social activ-
ities that were previously more or less contingent. Such re-organisation
involves simultaneous and intertwined processes both of discontinuance
through the digitisation of discrete units and of continuance through the
application of streamlined programming, necessarily complemented by
what I term ‘co-programming’ on the part of ourselves as interpreters.
What should be noted here already is that these intertwined processes
can only be set in motion by strategic actions and deliberate decisions,
Preface ix
with such actions and decisions often taken in a highly non-transparent

way. Once processes have been made digital, moreover, the dynamics of
this transformation generally do not encourage or support any further
assessment of its trajectory. Public and scholarly discourse about digital
transformation has thus far mostly limited itself to a consideration of
policies without shedding much light on the political decisions that have
led to the implementation of overall digital processing. In this book, by
contrast, I call for a critical analysis of the impacts of social digitalisation
that goes beyond an assessment of implemented material digital tech-
nologies and the policies related to their use. Failing to undertake such
an assessment of social digitalisation ‘on the run’ would itself constitute
a political decision. An important aim of the approach I propose here,
therefore, is to contribute to assessments of ongoing and future digital
transformation and thus to facilitate more informed decisions and poli-
cies better designed to address the consequences of such re-organisations
of social activities.
If this book has a message, then, it is a call for all of us to think
about digital transformation as a form of social processing beyond tech-
nology. The intention here is not to set out a case against the implemen-
tation of digital technology per se but rather to emphasise the impor-
tance of understanding the social conditions in which digital technology
is implemented and how its implementation is likely to change the trajec-
tory of social processes. A key element of this approach is thus the need
to consider the consequences of digitalisation from a variety of social
perspectives.
The more extensively digital technology is implemented, the more
urgent it becomes to base empirical studies and policies of this
phenomenon on theoretically sound foundations. This work represents
my own attempt to help strengthen the theoretical basis of research
and ultimately of political decision-making regarding forms of social
digitalisation.
A brief summary of the overall structure of the book here may help
readers to navigate its contents more easily. Thus, readers can find an
outline of social digitalisation as a long-term organisational logic of
modern society in Chapter 1, while the final chapter provides a summary
of the theory of social digitalisation. The five intervening chapters apply
x Preface
this approach to the analysis of some key modern settings in order

to garner evidence of and gain insights into the long-term dynamics
of social digitalisation. These settings include the factory (Chapter 2),
the bourgeois household (Chapter 3), the department store and other
retail settings (Chapter 4), watching television at home (Chapter 5),
and a contemporary luxury restaurant equipped with augmented reality
technology (Chapter 6).
I hope that the breadth of the approach I have taken in analysing the
re-organisation of these settings over the long term will also prove of
interest to readers who may not be especially preoccupied with digital
transformation itself. It should be noted, however, that social digitalisa-
tion theory approaches these settings not as distinct spheres but as inter-
linked in order to better capture the entangled and dynamic trajectory of
digital transformation.
Finally, the epilogue to Chapter 7 offers a short version of the theory
of social digitalisation and a small-scale practical example of its applica-
tion to the contemporary phenomenon of encapsulated ground coffee (as
depicted on the front cover of this book).
I wish to thank all those who have supported me in different ways
in the process of writing this book. Working together with Sharla Plant
and the editorial team and staff at Palgrave Macmillan was a pleasur-
able experience and I thank them all for their support and patience.
Several anonymous reviewers engaged with the contents and aims of
the book and their positive attitudes towards the project were a major
encouragement, while their criticisms inspired me to push myself further.
I am grateful to my teaching assistant, Filip Kulling, who supported
the writing process, not least by discussing the ideas and arguments in
the book and offering insights into how they might best be conveyed
to readers. My colleague Alexander Schmidl read chapters of the book
and offered highly constructive comments. As a non-native speaker of
English, I am also deeply indebted to my proofreader, Matt Jones, for his
close engagement with the drafts of this book and for his invaluable help
in increasing the readability of the text.
I dedicate this book to my son Tyrique, who has good-humouredly
endured and adapted not only to the restrictions imposed by the
Preface xi
pandemic but also the changes to our family life arising from my work
on this book over an extensive period of time.
Salzburg, Austria Kornelia Hahn

July 2021
Contents
1 Introducing Social Digitalisation 1

1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology: ‘Digital Fruits’
and Other Examples of Digitalisation in Food
Production, Retail and Marketing 4
1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early Modernity 19
1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation: Organising
Processes of Dis/continuance 30
References 44
2 The Dis/continuous Factory System and the Rise
of the Digital Era 49
2.1 The Culture of Industrial Productivity 50
2.2 The Manufactory: Setting the Scene for Digital
Organisation 56
2.3 The Factory: Perfecting Systems of Dis/continuance 64
2.4 Mediators of Digital Processing: Commodities 70
2.5 Technologies of Industrial Productivity 78
References 82
xiii
xiv Contents
3 Digitalisation and the Production of Bourgeois Privacy 85

3.1 The Concept of Bourgeois Privacy 86
3.2 The Distinctive Bourgeois Lifestyle 90
3.3 The Organisation of Bourgeois Life as a Series
of Dis/continuances 95
3.4 Manufacturing in the Bourgeois Household 100
3.5 Technologies of Household Reproduction 108
References 119
4 The Formalisation of the Modern Market 123
4.1 The ‘Open’ Market and Its ‘Closed’ Organisation 124
4.2 The Department Store: The Formalisation
of Interaction Designs Inside the Retailing Machine 134
4.3 Technologies of Physical and Logistical Assemblage
in the Department Store 145
4.4 Physical and Logistical Assemblage as Self-Service
and Prosumption 150
4.5 The Imaginative Assemblage Undertaken
by Purchasing Audiences 159
References 163
5 The Evolution of Advanced Digital Literacy 167
5.1 The Networked Household: ‘homes with a View’ 168
5.2 The Industrial Production of Digitalised Television
Programmes 178
5.3 The Fluid Technologies of Programming Reality 184
5.4 Imaginative Assemblage of TV Audiences:
‘Continuity Editing’ as an Advanced Form
of Digital Literacy 192
References 197
6 Augmented and Reduced Realities 203
6.1 Theories About Technologically Mediated Realities 204
6.2 Modern Perception Styles 211
6.3 Experiences of Augmented and Reduced Realities 221
6.4 Diverse Readings of Augmented and Reduced
Realities 229
Contents xv
6.5 Co-programming Technologically Programmed

Sign-Worlds 236
References 249
7 The Dynamics of Social Digitalisation 253
7.1 Social Digitalisation and Material Digital
Technology 254
7.2 Social Digitalisation’s Chains of Interdependence 260
7.3 Semiotic Resources Supplying Digital Processing 264
7.4 The Significance of Digital Literacies 270
7.5 Researching Social Digitalisation 275
References 279
8 Epilogue: Social Digitalisation Theory Encapsulated
in a Cup of Coffee 281
References 292
Index 293
1
Introducing Social Digitalisation
Preliminary definition: ‘social digitalisation’ refers to the dynamics entailed

in the organisation of social life through the persistent implementation of
digital logic over time. Digital logic is defined as a combination of digitisa-
tion, i.e. the rendering of things and processes into abstract discrete units that
engenders discontinuances in social procedures and activities, and program-
ming, i.e. the formal composition of these units in such a way as to produce
continuance. As a vital component of this process, such re-organisation
requires the simultaneous co-evolution of our capacities to interpret and make
sense of such digitalised processing—capacities I refer to most generally as
‘digital literacy’. In contrast to prevailing conceptualisations of the ‘digital
transformation’, this approach does not consider digitalisation as the outcome
of any material digital technology introduced in recent decades but rather as
a long-term trajectory in modern society and culture.
SOS, the alphabetic equivalent of the Morse code distress signal,
seems a good example of what this book is about, namely the evolu-
tion of modern digital transformation prior to the advent of material
digital technology. There are many examples of such transformations
in everyday life, including the well-known Maggi bouillon cube or the
shelves of orderly stacked boxes of encapsulated ground coffee depicted
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
K. Hahn, Social Digitalisation,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79867-3_1
2 K. Hahn
on the cover of this book. Digital organisation and transformation have

been underway for a long time, arguably long before the SOS distress
signal was first used for ship rescue in 1905.1 As a consequence of this
long evolution, today’s material digital technology has necessarily had to
be fitted into a pre-existing ‘digital culture’. Throughout the following
chapters I present evidence for this argument to show how the holistic
approach I propose can lead to a better understanding and evaluation of
contemporary social digitalisation.
The example of the SOS signal affords a first illustration of the overall
argument set out in this book, including in its application of digital
logic, people’s interpretation of this innovation, and in the fact that
Morse code itself was the culmination of numerous attempts made before
the nineteenth century to develop a code system by which to convey
messages through telegraphy—a word whose literal meaning is ‘writing
at a distance’. Prior to the use of electronically transmitted sounds, for
example, various code systems had been developed using flags and lights.
When Samuel Morse came up with the first version of a single-wire
code system in 1837, however, this system proved so highly efficient
and economical that it ultimately became the basis of the International
Morse Code. This system was itself based on the earlier code system of
the alphabet, which the Morse code converts and further encodes. Morse
is a binary code consisting of two symbols, i.e. the ‘dots’ and ‘dashes’ in
the visual version that symbolise the duration of the signal units in the
audio version. For obvious reasons, the code of a distress signal should
be as brief and clear as possible, prompting the choice of two of Morse’s
simpler codes, i.e. those for the letters ‘S’ (dot code: · · ·) and ‘O’ (dash
code: ———), combining these to form SOS (· · · ——— · · ·). The
codes of the letters S and O are not only simple codes compared to
the other letters but also the most distinct from each other (Headrick,
2000, p. 204). The coding of this distress signal was thus designed on the
basis of and in relation to the formal traits of the code units, which are
arbitrary and without reference to any literal meaning. Since it was first
introduced, however, the sequence of the SOS code has been interpreted
1 For a comprehensive history of the telegraph and the Morse code with reference to the
Internet, see Tom Standage’s (1998) book, The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the
Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century’s On-Line Pioneers. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.
far less technically. In order to better memorise the sequence, people have
ascribed to the code the more comprehensible and also somehow cultur-
ally indicative phrase ‘Save Our Souls’. After all, unless one knows the
real origins of the signal it seems intuitively plausible that the letters SOS
might be an acronym of ‘save our souls’ as a means of indicating distress.
This example can help advance our analysis of digitalisation in several
important ways. For one, the binary system of the Morse code reminds us
that the digital code system so crucial to computers is a technology that
was already well-established before the invention of the computer—in
the alphabet and in sheet music, for example, and indeed in any numer-
ical grading system. A yet more important insight to be gained from
this example is that the Morse code system was used most effectively
and efficiently only after it had been implemented within an existing
social context. Transmitted by a wireless telegraph apparatus, messages
converted into Morse code initially made most sense in contexts where
it was not possible to communicate by any other means and where it
was desirable to communicate instantly, especially in a distressing situ-
ation—as in the case of its initial use by crews aboard the new steam
vessels of the time. Once the hardware and software of the telegraph
had been ‘inserted’ into this particular setting, however, the SOS code
became associated with this context to such an extent that the reference
between this code and the specific communication of an emergency situ-
ation has now become part of global culture. In other words, even though
SOS is a technical code that was first conceived within a technical and
not a social context, there is an inextricable link between the technical
code and the socio-cultural context of its use. So much so is this the
case, indeed, that from today’s vantage point it is rather astonishing to
learn that the globally recognised emergency call ‘Save Our Souls!’ is not
actually literally encoded in the SOS signal. And while the SOS code
is obviously limited as an example of social digitalisation, it does hint
at the complexity of the historical trajectory of digital organisation and
what would later become known as ‘digital culture’.
4 K. Hahn
1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology:

‘Digital Fruits’ and Other Examples
of Digitalisation in Food Production,
Retail and Marketing
The trajectory of digitalisation can further be illustrated by ‘digital fruits’
as an example from contemporary everyday life. ‘Digital Fruits in the
Supermarket’ was the headline of an article in an Austrian newspaper
in 2018 (Wienerroither, 2018). This article was informed by an inter-
view with a representative of a local company providing technology
for the so-called digital fruits—a product that was actually no more
than a packet of dried fruits wrapped in a newly designed material that
enabled consumers to obtain additional information about the product
via Augmented Reality (AR) technology. By scanning the product’s pack-
aging in the supermarket with a smartphone, potential customers are
linked via an app to videos, promotional lotteries, recipes and nutri-
tional facts about the product, as well as the possibility of learning
more about the ecological and social conditions of the product’s culti-
vation, harvesting and distribution. The article further informed readers
that the AR technology allows for ‘interaction’ with potential customers,
connecting the company’s software with users who in turn provide the
company with data, albeit mostly inadvertently. As indicated in the
headline, ‘digital fruits’ are presented in this article as part of contem-
porary digital culture and/or material digital technology, even though
the product itself can easily be imagined in a traditional and even pre-
modern marketplace not embedded in any digitalised setting at all. This
observation suggests it is worth reflecting on what exactly it is about these
dried fruits that makes them ‘digital’.
Starting from the immediate context, the first thing to note is that
the product is offered within a contemporary supermarket setting. This
is important because tracing back the organisation of this setting in line
with the social digitalisation approach I propose can help us to under-
stand how today’s ‘digital fruits’ have emerged within and are dependent
upon an already long-established and far-reaching trajectory of digital
organisation. Thus, since we may fairly assume that dried fruits could
still be sold and consumed even in today’s ‘digital culture’ without the
need for any digital organisation, it is clear that ‘digital fruits’ must also
now serve as sign vehicles in addition to their use and exchange value.
For example, while the promotion of the product obviously appeals to
motives for buying fruits beyond mere consumption, it is also clearly
beneficial for sellers to obtain information about customers beyond the
customers’ interest in buying dried fruits. For customers, the AR tech-
nology embedded in the product packaging might make the selection
process in the supermarket more meaningful than merely grabbing a
random product from the shelves without AR technology. Furthermore,
some customers may prefer to obtain any information they seek about
the product by interacting with the AR packaging rather than with a
copresent human seller. What is important to note here, however, is that
the meaning ascribed to this purchasing process does not depend on the
AR technology itself; rather this meaning is influenced by the signifying
practices of the interpreters, i.e. in this case the purchase-related signi-
fying practices of potential customers for digital fruits. These practices in
turn are embedded in and draw upon semiotic resources that have been
shaped by our accumulated experiences of the extensive organisation of
digitalised settings over time, including the now seemingly ‘ordinary’
contemporary self-service supermarket. A key argument advanced in this
book is thus exemplified here in that potential customer must first have
developed some degree of digital literacy before they can make sense of
products promoted in supermarkets as ‘digital fruits’. In other words, it
is this evolved digital literacy that enables customers to ‘read’ the signif-
icance of a technologically augmented food product offered within an
already highly digitalised setting. This is not to say that the ‘significance’
of this product is necessarily unambiguous; indeed, the ambiguity of a
product and thus its openness to multiple interpretations can often be
an intentional strategy to widen its potential appeal.
There have in fact been many precursors of ‘digital’ food throughout
modernity. In the food retail industry in particular, as a sector that has
for some time accounted for a substantial proportion of global GDP,
there has been quite a long history of digital processing. For example,
a study by Kinsey and Ashman (2000, p. 83) of the use of information
technology in the food retail industry provides evidence of how attempts
6 K. Hahn
to increase productivity in the grocery business have always relied on the

adoption of new technologies. As the most recent example of such adop-
tion at the time they conducted the study in 2000, Kinsley and Ashman
cited the use of digital technology for testing the quality of fruits,
including the visual screening of their surfaces and the digital measure-
ment of their firmness and levels of ripeness. Interestingly, although this
method of quality testing is performed automatically with the aim of
ensuring faster processing, it nevertheless involves testing every single
fruit, thus constituting a form of digital processing based on the smallest
unit—in this sense comparable to a ‘bit’ or binary digit.
Further examples of digitalisation in the food industry include the
introduction of the Food Categorization Code to identify products in
the global food processing industry more clearly and precisely than is
possible through our linguistic coding of food. The category code for
‘dried fruits, nuts and seeds’, for example, is 04.1.2.2.2 Another code
system that has been around in the food industry since 1990 is the price
look-up code (PLU), introduced as a way to identify bulk produce in
order to streamline checkout and inventory control processes in super-
markets, i.e. to make these processes easier, faster and more accurate.3
The PLU code is administered by the International Federation for Produce
Standards and assigns either four or five random digits that are printed
onto stickers for labelling conventionally and organically grown products
respectively. These methods of organisation have changed the retailing
process in a specific way, with bulk produce now digitised in discrete units
in order to enable each item to be handled individually. Such itemisa-
tion is clearly beneficial for commercial purposes; in addition, however,
this numerical identification system transcodes our more ambiguous
linguistic codes.4 Customers in supermarkets can certainly still talk to
2 According to information at: https://foodlicensing.fssai.gov.in/PDF/Food_Categorization_C

ode.pdf. Accessed 25 February 2021.
3 According to information at: https://www.ifpsglobal.com/PLU-Codes. Accessed 25 February
2021.
4 By chance I had a telling personal experience of this ambiguity in January 2019 when I
happily grabbed a savoy cabbage from a very limited stock in a corner of the lowest shelf of
the vegetable section in my local supermarket. It was only when I reached the checkout that I
realised my savoy cabbage was neither wrapped nor labelled and had no PLU code, much to
the irritation of the very busy person in charge that Saturday morning. “What is this?” the shop
clerks and sales assistants or to each other when shopping, of course,

but communications based on the linguistic code of talking literally
do not ‘count’ in this digitalised communicative system of economic
transactions.
Starting from the mid-1970s in the United States, supermarket
checkout-scanners transformed the management of stock-keeping
because the same data collected by scanners could also be used for
easily re-ordering any products missing on the shelves. The comput-
erised internal organisation of stock was later further enhanced by the
added option of connecting the purchase of one item to all other
items presented at the checkout by individual customers. The collec-
tion of such data helped to inform more effective marketing and other
strategies to increase sales (Kinsey & Ashman, 2000, p. 86). With the
advent of electronic data interchange (EDI) systems in 1999 and the
direct transmittal of scanner sales data to manufacturers and suppliers,
moreover, shelves could now be automatically replenished, thereby
“developing a continuous and coordinated flow of product” (Kinsey
& Ashman, 2000, p. 88). The generation and use of scanner data
made it possible not only to determine which products to order and
when but also to calculate the optimum product assortment. This in
turn has facilitated the development of ‘category management’, leading
somewhat paradoxically to a reduction in the variety of products and
services available to customers at the same time as enabling a “continuous
replenishment of products” (Kinsey & Ashman, 2000, pp. 88–89). Such
category management digitises (bulk) food by assigning abstract numer-
ical codes according to the discrete units of a specific category system,
thereby supporting sales strategies that are shaped primarily by the aim
of ensuring a continuity of sales rather than, say, the aim of providing
customers with a wider range of higher quality products.
assistant asked. “It’s a savoy cabbage,” I answered. “But is it a lettuce or a cabbage?” she asked,
glaring. “It’s a savoy cabbage”, I repeated. (I should add the German word for ‘savoy cabbage’
is phonetically completely distinct from the words for either ‘lettuce’ or ‘cabbage’ and so I was
referring to a third type of product.) Apparently concluding that any further conversation with
me would be futile, the shop assistant then referred to a list before entering some numbers into
the cash register and proceeding with the sale. On leaving the shop, I learnt from my receipt
that she had decided to record my purchase as ‘cabbage’.
8 K. Hahn
As we have already seen in the case of ‘digital fruits’, food wrapping

and the substantial role played by packaging in retail is a topic that well
merits exploration in relation to social digitalisation, not least because
some form of wrapping is essential and now even legally compulsory
for most foods offered as products on the market. The evolution and
role of food wrapping can best be demonstrated in the case of food that
is more highly processed—or ‘transcoded’—than dried fruits. Industri-
ally produced meat and bread products, for instance, first developed and
distributed at the beginning of the twentieth century, provide especially
good examples of the historical development of packaging and digital
processing. The history of these products has been described in two excel-
lent studies by Roger Horowitz (2006) on the US meat industry and
Aaron Bobrow-Strain (2012) on the social history of store-bought bread,
as explored below in relation to social digitalisation.
As Horowitz notes, the modern marketing of meat products in super-
markets contrasts with the marketing of many other products, including
dried fruits for example, since meat is now mostly offered ‘fresh’ rather
than preserved or dried as was often the case in the past. Horowitz (2006,
p. 130) describes the meat industry’s “struggle to tame nature” by “over-
coming the process of decay”, explaining how the mass marketing of
fresh meat entailed tackling not only the problem of meat’s perishable
nature but also “the dilemma of organizing mass production around an
item that came in irregular sizes” (Horowitz, 2006, p. xii). The solu-
tion eventually adopted to overcome these obstacles and thus enable
the profitable sale of fresh meat in supermarkets was to slow down the
process of physical decay and to standardise the shape of meat (Horowitz,
2006, p. 2). This was accomplished by applying a new technology that
preserved the perishable product as ‘fresh’, namely the technology of
cellophane packaging that was introduced into meat retailing in the
United States in the 1920s.
Cellophane packaging material serves at least two purposes. First, it
attenuates the natural process of decay by interposing a film between the
meat and the external environment, thereby creating “artificial condi-
tions” or an “artificial environment” that “allowed for manipulation of
[meat’s] appearance” (Horowitz, 2006, p. 137). Second, cellophane was
the first transparent packaging material available for consumer prod-

ucts and significantly altered the way customers encountered meat.
Different cuts of meat could now be customised for different market
segments while less popular products such as internal organs could be
presented more appealingly, especially as cellophane wrapping influ-
ences both the colour and smell of meat (Horowitz, 2006, p. 137).
The slogans used for marketing cellophane as food wrapping—including
“‘Shows What It Protects! Protects What It Shows!’” (Horowitz, 2006,
p. 139)—emphasised the enhanced visibility of products for customers
prior to purchase. Together with claims as to the increased safety and
hygiene of the new wrapping technology, this factor of enhanced visi-
bility became an important sales aspect. The transparency of cellophane
serves as a screen through which an inspecting customer can gather
certain hints, at least subjectively, about the quality of the product.
Horowitz (2006, p. 139) quotes advertisements promising that “cases
filled with cellophane-wrapped meat would ‘Make shopping quicker,
easier’” and “permit selection of ‘the weight or size you want,’ and
‘provide menu ideas’”. Moreover, the new packaging “carried a distinc-
tive logo […] and minimal text to maximize the meat visible through
the cellophane” (Horowitz, 2006, p. 139). Here, Horowitz is refer-
ring to the star logo of Armour and Company, one of the leading
meatpacking firms in the United States. As emphasised in the adver-
tising, customers in the new self-service supermarkets, first introduced
in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1916,5 were no longer reliant upon a pre-
selection made for them by sellers/clerks. This latter traditional process
was now critically exposed by comparison with self-service, moreover,
especially compared to pre-selected products wrapped in non-transparent
material and offered on the recommendation of a seller/clerk rather than
by a formal and ‘official’-looking quality label.
The presence of a brand logo conveys information to customers who
might otherwise feel uninformed about the cultivation and processing
of a product. Such branding transcodes information about the produc-
tion process only in an abstract and symbolic way, however, while the
5The introduction of the self-service supermarket will be addressed more comprehensively in

Chapter 4.
10 K. Hahn
actual meat production process itself has obviously become less and less
visible to customers ever since. With the introduction of visual and later
written communications about products on meat packaging, customers
could also choose to skip any conversations over the butcher’s counter.
On the one hand, therefore, the ‘reality’ of the traditional retail setting
was reduced by presenting cuts of meat through preservative and labelled
cellophane wrapping, thereby decreasing contingencies with regard to the
quality of the product. On the other hand, adding a distinctive logo and
text to cellophane wrapping in some way ‘augmented’ the retail envi-
ronment.6 Although the companies’ options for conveying information
about the product through the use of cellophane, labels and text were
far more limited than the options available today through the use of AR
technology, these developments in packaging altered the organisation of
retailing in crucial ways.
The industrial production and cellophane wrapping of another staple
food can be traced back to as early as the 1910s. As Aaron Bobrow-
Strain (2012) has shown in his investigation of store-bought bread,
the entire production process of bread was transformed, along with its
supply chains and retailing environments, once bread became an indus-
trial product sold in supermarkets. In the case of bread, we can see even
more clearly the impact of the semiotic resources that accompanied and
were drawn upon in bringing about this transformation. For while the
introduction of logos and text on packaged meat products informed
customers about the production process in a very specific way, liter-
ally screening the product, the introduction of industrially produced and
packaged bread also involved the adoption of a cultural narrative related
to the social context of its emergence. As Bobrow-Strain has shown
in reference to the new industrial product of ‘white bread’, this trans-
formed production process was narrated and framed in terms of allegedly
increased levels of hygiene. This marketing strategy centred on the claim
that industrial bread, unlike the handmade bread sold in the corner-
store bakeries common in the United States at that time, was produced
“untouched by human hands” of “dirty people”, with the new bread
6The phenomenon of simultaneous symbolic reduction and augmentation is addressed in

greater depth in Chapter 6.
factories introduced as “sanitary bakeries” in pointed contrast to their

competitors whom the new producers reviled by publishing “reprinted
news reports on the ‘shocking state of cellar bakeries’” (Bobrow-Strain,
2012, pp. 37–40). Importantly, as Bobrow-Strain (2012, p. 44) points
out, while commercials for white bread stressed the relevance of knowing
where food came from, the paradoxical consequence of this emphasis was
that customers were thereby actually further distanced from actual food
production processes. Indeed it could be argued that such marketing was
just as much if not more about knowing where food was not coming
from.
Historically, bread had always been produced predominantly at home
and it was only in the late eighteenth century that immigrants to the
United States started opening ‘cellar bakeries’ to make a modest living,
i.e. the same bakeries that were later to be denigrated for the purpose
of marketing the new ‘white’ bread. When industrially produced bread
first appeared in the early twentieth century, the attribute of ‘whiteness’
was promoted not only on account of the use of white flour instead of
the wholegrain flour used by the corner bakeries but also with refer-
ence to the overall ‘purity’ of the production process, since the new
‘sanitary bakeries’ were owned by ‘white’ long-term US citizens and
introduced large laboratory-like factory settings in which the raw mate-
rial was processed exclusively by machines and the final product was
mechanically wrapped and sealed. From the 1920s onwards, machine-
processed bread was further ‘optimized’ by a new design, the streamlined
loaf—a perfectly rectangular loaf completely even in consistency and
neatly sliced before being packaged (Bobrow-Strain, 2012, pp. 57–61).
As a result of these processes, both bread and meat, while extremely
different in their original raw ‘material’, were now encountered in the
supermarket in the very same way, i.e. as processed, evenly cut or sliced
products transparently wrapped and labelled in rectangular packages.
Over the next hundred years these packages became the standard format
for the ever-expanding production of industrial food and the organisa-
tion of food retailing. Transforming food supply chains into operations
that create and proceed exclusively with rectangular, preservative and
labelled packages affords multiples advantages to enterprises. Above all,
such discrete packaging shapes abstract and formalised units that are
12 K. Hahn
‘discontinuous’ in relation to the original shape of the product or raw

material. The processing of such units contributes enormously to the
continuous flow of production and retail that is so commercially desirable
in terms of profit and market expansion. Further progress in digitalisa-
tion is attained once an industrial product has been made as universally
composable as possible with other products by way of abstraction, i.e.
by reducing the specificity of the product in terms of its use and conno-
tations. The more abstract these entities, the more easily such products
can be fitted into culturally diverse contexts, thereby greatly increasing
their sales potential—ideally to the level of universal appeal. Indeed, it
is the very fact that customers can ascribe a wider range of meanings to
more abstract and thus ambiguous products that enables these products
to attain the ultimate exchange value, again contributing to the ideally
continuous flow of sales.
A good example of a product approximating to this perfect retail unit
is the well-known Maggi bouillon or stock cube. This product was first
introduced in 1908 and has since made its way into supermarkets and
grocery stores all around the world. Although Horowitz does not refer
specifically to the Maggi cube, he does point out two aspects of food
production and consumption that seem of importance to the trajectory
of digitalisation highlighted here. The first point is that food production
became subject to frequent scientific and technological experimentation
from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, while the second
is that the cooking of meat requires “considerable skill and knowledge for
dishes at the lower economic level as well as for elite repasts” (Horowitz,
2006, pp. 6, 130). The invention of the industrially produced instant
bouillon cube at once reflected these scientific developments and elimi-
nated the need for such skill and knowledge. Moreover, the stock cube
further overcame the problem that fresh meat products were only rarely
affordable for poor families at that time.
The original Maggi cube was developed in 1886 by Julius Maggi in
his family-owned factory in Switzerland.7 Its development reflected the
new industrialised factory-style preparation of food that had previously
7 All information about the history of the Maggi company is retrieved from the company’s
website: https://www.maggi.de/ueber-maggi/historie/. Accessed 27 November 2019.
been prepared in private households and restaurants. As in other indus-

tries, the production of the cube and other industrialised foods involved
experiments with different chemical procedures that had not previously
been part of food preparation. Second, when Julius Maggi first started
to invent soups prepared from powdered protein-rich legumes at the
end of the nineteenth century, the Maggi company insisted on its chari-
table intentions. According to this narrative, the new powdered soups,
which only had to be dissolved in hot water like the bouillon cube,
were meant to improve the nutrition of working-class people who had
neither the financial means nor the time to prepare the elaborate dishes
consumed by bourgeois households at that time, most of which relied on
the availability of live-in cooking staff.
The original cube was developed as an industrially produced substance
that substituted meat flavours previously only derived from the extract
of elaborately prepared meat. As described in a consumer study of stock
cubes by Kim et al., (2017, p. 1), stock cubes thereby solve the problem
that preparing meat broth “is important for palatable dishes of various
cuisines [but] time consuming and difficult for people who do not
have professional knowledge of cooking”. The new industrialised cube
production process followed a newly patented formula composed of
ingredients specified in precise amounts to be mixed and processed in
an automated procedure. Some of these ingredients are already highly
processed before mixing, as in the case of monosodium glutamate,
usually referred to as ‘flavour enhancer’. In this procedure, as Kim et al.
(2017) further describe, the mixture is then compressed into a square
mould by a cubing machine, with each unit having a precise weight
ranging from four to ten grammes. The units are then wrapped and
arranged in rectangular boxes of various sizes. The resulting product is
not flavoursome if eaten in its raw state but can be dissolved quickly in
any hot liquid.
Interestingly, the professional manufacture of bouillon cubes actu-
ally dates back much further than the industrial production of Maggi
cubes, as described in Rebecca Spang’s (2001) historical analysis of the
invention of the restaurant in Paris. While the cube was not central to
this invention, bouillon itself was crucial, with the stock cube only later
emerging as a spin-off. As Spang (2001, p. 2) informs us, the name
14 K. Hahn
‘restaurant’ has its origins in an abbreviation of restaurateurs, which was

the term used for public rooms in Paris where traveling merchants were
served restorative bouillon: “In its initial form, then, the restaurant was
specifically a place one went not to eat, but to sit and to sip one’s
restaurant.” Produced by cooking meat into a liquid state to condense
the meat flavour and break down its proteins and carbohydrates for
easier digestion, the new commodity of salutary bouillon was marketed
as a quick means of reinvigorating merchants before they continued
with their exhausting business operations, thereby further contributing
to the overall flow of sales in this early form of restaurant. However,
the production and consumption of bouillon in this way was initially
subject to criticism. For example, this form of meat preparation was
regarded as inappropriately ‘augmenting’ the eating experience on the
grounds that bouillon served to “overstimulate the senses and provoke
pernicious eating without appetite, much like pornography” (Spang,
2001, p. 82). As has happened in the case of other ‘augmentations’
throughout modernity, however, and as is the case with AR technology
today, people eventually got used to the experience of sipping bouillon
and those who could afford it now wanted to enjoy it on a regular basis.
Demand for bouillon grew to such an extent that “an aristocratic family
obliged to travel long distances” would go to great lengths to ensure
they could have it without relying on the products of any unknown
chefs they might encounter on their journey, for example by sending
“their kitchen staff ahead in a post-chaise loaded with bottles of broths”
(Spang, 2001, p. 29). This practice ushered in the advent of “meat-extract
bouillon tablets” in the early 1760s, heralded as easy-to-carry and non-
spoiling products that guaranteed safe and healthy voyages on land and
sea (Spang, 2001, p. 29).
What is of particular interest here is not only that the bouillon cube
can be traced back 250 years to the beginnings of industrialisation
but also that the changing technologies applied in producing bouillon
cubes over time have all been deeply connected with the changing
socio-cultural contexts in which this product has evolved. Furthermore,
while describing the technical production of the stock cube captures
its digitised aspects, including its usability in many dishes indepen-
dent of regional varieties of cooking styles and cuisines, the meaning of
the bouillon cube has changed significantly over time, further differing
according to each ‘receiving’ culinary culture in which it has been
marketed.
Soon after its introduction, the Maggi bouillon cube became a glob-
ally successful product of industrialised food preparation. As Maren Jütz
(2013) has shown, the cube has proven extremely popular even in places
where its time-saving properties do not apply. In West African countries,
for example, the cube has enjoyed massive sales in spite of playing no role
in reducing the time needed to prepare food, since it has never replaced
the practice of cooking elaborate dishes in the cuisines of this region. In
these markets the cube has instead been successfully marketed and widely
interpreted as a means of ‘modernizing’ traditional cooking styles and
optimising dishes through the use of a new material technology. Maggi
advertisements in these countries depict cooking as an exclusively female
task and emphasise that the female ‘user’ of the cube will be instantly
rewarded by the use of stock cubes. A commercial from Mali and
Senegal, for example, declares “Avec Maggi chaque femme est une étoile!”
(With Maggi every woman is a star!) (Jütz, 2013, p. 357). By referring to
the cube technology as Corrige-Madame, or ‘Madam Corrector’ (Gross-
rieder, 2017), Maggi’s marketing even suggests a certain guarantee for the
quality of the dish regardless of the competence of the cook—a promise
somewhat similar to some claims made in current discussions about
autonomous driving technology. Interestingly, Jütz also observes from
her fieldwork that a number of NGOs in West African countries have
been advocating for the cube to be abandoned in favour of a return to
seasoning methods with “natural” ingredients (Jütz, 2013, p. 360). This
criticism of the Maggi cube has some parallels with contemporary rejec-
tions of material digital technology. For example, when holiday resorts
promote digital detox stays in exclusively offline environments where the
use of all personal digital devices is forbidden, this offer is often marketed
as an opportunity to reclaim a seemingly ‘natural’ or ‘sensual’ experi-
ence in welcome contrast to our ‘toxic’ frequent use of material digital
technology in everyday life.
A study by Madhudaya Sinha from 2016, neatly entitled ‘Oodles of
Noodles: Nestlé India and the Maggi Consumer Nightmare’, focuses
on some interesting alternative cultural narratives surrounding Maggi
16 K. Hahn
instant products in India. Her study first draws attention to the very high
numbers of Maggi products purchased in India and seeks to account for
this popularity by examining the ways in which the company’s marketing
strategies simultaneously draw on traditions of Indian food preparation
and address concerns about contemporary social changes that compro-
mise traditional food preparation. As in the case of Maggi marketing
in West African countries, the marketing of these products in India is
based on the expectation that it is predominantly women who prepare
food regularly for the whole family, typically preparing these family meals
from scratch according to elaborate recipes. At the same time, however,
women in India are increasingly willing or compelled to seek employ-
ment and thus ever more likely to be subject to work schedules that
interfere with their cooking chores at home. Inexpensive instant food is
accordingly marketed as a way of solving this problem by saving women
both time and money. Despite these perceived advantages of instant
food in relation to modern lifestyles, Sinha thus argues that the factor
of convenience is not sufficient of itself to explain the high sales of
instant foods in India. What makes this product attractive to consumers
in India, she concludes, is actually its evocations of traditional lifestyles
conveyed by a marketing strategy based on narratives of Indian tradi-
tions. Drawing on previous studies, and in particular a study by Tulasi
Srinivas (2006), Sinha assigns a number of labels to these narratives,
including “‘narratives of subterfuge’ where the packaged food is wrapped
in a home cooked authenticity” (Sinha, 2016, p. 24), and narratives of
“‘affiliative desire’[…] referring to food which could possibly recreate
caste, regional and other social identity groupings for the cosmopolitan
Indian family” (Sinha, 2016, p. 20). Such narratives must also contend
with critical counter-narratives lamenting the fact that global food chains
now dominate the Indian food market and questioning the nutritional
value of instant food. Sinha’s findings further suggest that, unlike in West
African countries, the narratives employed to prompt consumers in India
to use instant food do not refer to modernisation but appeal instead
to tradition. Thus, while dissolving a Maggi cube in a West African
dish connotes the use of an advanced food technology that instantly
‘modernises’ an otherwise traditional dish, dissolving the cube in an
Indian dish means instantly adding some desirable traditional element
at a time when traditional cooking procedures are increasingly having to

be abandoned in practice. As I will further demonstrate throughout this
book, such narratives are an essential compliment to digitalisation, since
we necessarily draw on multiple narratives of this kind in making sense
of our experiences of digitalised settings and processes.
For example, the multinational Nestlé corporation that first acquired
the Maggi company in 1947 has recently revived a charitable narrative
with which to sell its instant food products.8 As Klassen-Wigger et al.
(2018, p. 363) relate the matter: “Nestlé’s corporate ambition is to be
the food industry leader in nutrition, health, and wellness” in line with
a business model that “has been anchored on consumer nutrition and
health since its foundation near 150 years ago [and] has added micronu-
trients to numerous foods and beverages since they became available as
food and beverage ingredients early last century.” The introduction of
micronutrient fortification of condiments was piloted in India in 2009,
Klassen-Wigger et al. (2018, p. 364) recount, “with the launch of a new
seasoning powder enriched with iodine, iron, and vitamin A.” These
products were intended to pave the way for a “large-scale food forti-
fication program” in response to findings from studies conducted in
twelve sub-Saharan countries that no less than “79% to 99% of women
reported consumption of bouillon cubes in the past 7 days” (Klassen-
Wigger et al., 2018, p. 364). This evidence of the mass consumption
of instant food at a time when NGOs are advocating against cubes on
health grounds probably led the company to conclude “that it must
help people improve their nutrition, health, and wellness as well as to
deliver superior shareholder value” (Klassen-Wigger et al., p. 363). This
strategy is presented by the company as a form of corporate social respon-
sibility called ‘Creating Shared Value’. While successfully sustaining sales
of stock cubes and other instant products certainly contributes to the
company’s profits, however, it is not quite clear how the ‘fortification’ of
an already controversial food additive serves to promote health and well-
ness among consumers more effectively than the alternative of gaining
such nutrients from food that is not industrially processed. In any case,
8 The multinational company Nestlé still sells bouillon cubes under the brand name Maggi since
acquiring the rights. See: https://www.nestle.com/brands/allbrands/maggi. Accessed 4 January
2020.
18 K. Hahn
the company apparently relies on a strategy devised by market analysts

that depicts such fortification by chemical substances as a consumer
demand that is merely being met by industrial supply, based on the
seemingly innocuous claim that bouillon cubes “are processed foods
distributed by the private sector and, when voluntarily fortified, are an
example of market driven fortification” (Moretti et al., 2018, p. 159).
The plausibility of this argument in turn relies on a widely established
narrative that adding certain substances to one’s diet can improve one’s
health, though the particular substances added are of course subject to
frequent changes in different cultural contexts. Given this widespread
narrative, dubbing any food additive a ‘fortification’ might intuitively
suggest a somehow enhanced quality. Again what is particularly impor-
tant to note here in terms of the overall theory of social digitalisation is
that such alleged ‘fortification’ can only contribute to a continuous flow
of sales by way of referring to and fitting in with pre-existing cultural
narratives and semiotic resources.
From the examples and argumentation above it can be concluded that
the otherwise abstract cube has been fitted into various contexts with
varying commercial trajectories and accompanying narratives and that
it is precisely this digitalised abstract trait that has made the bouillon
cube universally compatible with an almost infinite range of dishes and
culinary cultures. The success of the bouillon cube is thus not merely
the result of a sales strategy but the outcome of quite complex develop-
ments in terms of both its technological production and its acceptance
in different cultural contexts. In this sense, the trajectory of the indus-
trially produced stock cube can be usefully compared to a ‘bit’ inasmuch
as it has gradually become an almost completely abstract, simple and
discrete unit quite disassociated from its original context. Paradoxically,
it is precisely on account of this abstract character that the product is
apparently able to become globally meaningful when composed among
other units in order to better ‘programme’ an intended outcome, i.e. the
aim of higher sales. While the extensive use of the cube suggests that such
a programmed outcome is highly profitable and therefore appreciated, the
meaning associated with the use of the cube can vary considerably.
1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early

Modernity
The generation of abstract units and their composition within
programmes is obviously most readily associated today with the algo-
rithmic coding now applied in all software. When the ‘new media’
theorist Lev Manovich coined the term “software culture” in 2013,
for example, he meant thereby to emphasise the relevance of software
over hardware technology, arguing that “the production, distribution,
and reception of most content is [now] mediated by software” and
that “software as a layer permeates all areas of contemporary society”
and “reconfigures most basic and cultural practices” (Manovich, 2013,
pp. 15, 39, 33). What concerns us here, by contrast, is whether all these
crucial cultural transformations had in fact already been influenced by
digital processing before the advent of what is now called ‘software’. To
phrase this question in more technical terms: ‘Can software really be
considered as a layer imposed on cultural practices? Or did software
actually emerge from pre-existing cultural practices?’ In the remainder of
this section, I explore some further examples of digitalisation prior to
the emergence of software that suggest the most plausible answer to this
question is that software is not an added ‘layer’ but rather the outcome
of complex and entangled processes that have evolved in line with and
as part of persistent implementations of digital logic over time, i.e. the
phenomenon I term ‘social digitalisation’.
In advancing this thesis it is worth noting that in his work The infor-
mation: A history, a theory, a flood the science historian James Gleick
(2011, p. 11) clearly stresses the major and persistent role played by
abstract digital coding in the alphabet when quoting from Hobbes’
Leviathan that the “invention of printing, though ingenious, compared
with the invention of letters is no great matter”. While it is true that
alphabetic writing already made use of digital coding, however, it is
important to acknowledge that the social impacts of this system were
enormously amplified and altered by the invention of the printing tech-
nique. Here, our focus is thus on literary practices on a much larger
social scale. Insights into these impacts have been greatly expanded by
the scholarship of Jack Goody and Ian Watt in The consequences of literacy
20 K. Hahn
(1968) and Walter J. Ong (1982) on how the introduction of literacy to

oral cultures led to a shift towards more analytical, distanced and abstract
forms of social organisation, a shift that Ong calls in his subtitle The tech-
nologizing of the world . Elizabeth Eisenstein (2005, p. 44) has since shed
further light on this process, showing in The printing revolution in Early
Modern Europe that while recent studies continue to stress “‘the extension
of mental horizons’ produced by geographical discoveries” in moder-
nity, people’s mental horizons were in fact primarily broadened in this
period by the proliferation of books, illustrating this claim by reference
to Montaigne, for example, the seventeenth-century French philosopher
who famously spent most of his time with his books in his “tower-study”.
Beyond the advent of printing techniques, Eisenstein (2005, pp. 44)
also draws special attention to the setting of the library, since “[m]ore
abundantly stocked bookshelves obviously increased opportunities to
consult and compare different texts”, with the important consequence
that when “old texts came together within the same study, diverse
systems of ideas and special disciplines could be combined”, eventu-
ally leading to the development of new systems of thought. Moreover,
the collaborative process of producing books itself fostered combinations
of ideas (Eisenstein, 2005, p. 45): “Even before a given reference work
had come off the press, fruitful encounters between typefounders, correc-
tors, translators, copy editors, illustrators or print dealers, indexers, and
others engaged in editorial work had already occurred.”
In addition to the multiple combinatory options engendered by alpha-
betic digital coding, printing procedures and the new practices of reading
and publishing, another key trait of early digital culture was the produc-
tion of temporal linearity, with its most closely related material technology
being the clock. Characterising clock-controlled time as abstract, measur-
able, quantifiable and divisible, the German sociologist Rainer Zoll
argued that linear time was a prerequisite for the co-ordination of
modern societies since the implementation of this technology of linearity
led to wide-ranging changes in social rhythms, initially experienced in
the form of an enormous sense of “acceleration” (Zoll, 1988, p. 14).
Although precise clock time certainly played a major role in the process
of modern industrialisation, however, research suggests that people were
already time-conscious in their everyday lives even before the advent of
the factory system. In a study of historical court records documented

before the French Revolution, for example, Bruno Blondé and Gerrit
Verhoeven (2013) found that people had already started to narrate
activities according to precise clock time. Although the ownership of
individual watches was still limited to a small number of people who
could afford them in this period, which suggests that the possession
of a watch was more of a status symbol than a technology indispens-
able for organising time, the narrative format employed in the court
records presented by Blondé and Verhoeven provides ample evidence that
activities were already perceived within a linear time frame.
The much wider social implementation of linear time coincided with
a transformative digital re-organisation of geographical space. This re-
organisation was mediated by maps whose designers aimed to reconstruct
space on the basis of abstract visual symbols. Historical studies have
investigated the prerequisite conditions that led to the conception of
such maps (Behrisch 2006a). From a study by Achim Landwehr (2006)
on territorial demarcation in the region of Venice in the eighteenth
century, for example, we learn that this process of setting and confirming
borders had altered significantly since the seventeenth and sixteenth
centuries. Former demarcation practices had sought evidence of any
existing borders by conversing with locals on the ground and exploring
the physical features of the locale. The officials in charge of this process
would interview people regarding their knowledge of previous demarca-
tions and any commonly perceived borders marked by the presence or
absence of economic activities. These officials would also keep an eye
out for any physical phenomena that might be interpreted as indicating
‘divine will’ regarding certain borders. Whereas demarcation had thus
previously involved multiple contingencies, this process shifted in the
course of the eighteenth century from one of negotiating spatial struc-
tures to one of structuring space by assigning numerically conceived
demarcations.
The representation of space was henceforth no longer perceived as
a matter of experience but as a matter of abstract rational thought
patterns evolved in line with developments in the natural sciences and
mathematics in the seventeenth century (Behrisch 2006b). Above all,
this abstract representation involved the creation of continuous lines
22 K. Hahn
of demarcation in place of the limited local demarcations previously

implemented wherever—and usually only whenever—a particular need
was felt for them. As a clear example of this digital logic, Landwehr
(2006, p. 61) quotes from one document that describes this new
policy of demarcation as “formare un stato continuato”,9 highlighting the
demand to shape enclosed territories by uninterrupted demarcation lines
and exact measurements. Landwehr argues that organising these new
geographical units in this way subsequently gave rise to new geospa-
tial policies and economies as continuous demarcation lines created
new opportunities to control and exert power over the inhabitants of
newly conceived state territories. In addition to the new clear-cut and
confined spatial order based on mathematically informed measurements,
the cartographic methods already practised during expeditions at sea
were now extended inland.
The ultimate goal of these cartographic endeavours was to locate any
geographical spot in the world with the utmost precision by applying
an abstract numerical scheme of space. To this end, the Royal Society of
London issued an instruction in the seventeenth century that all expe-
ditions must henceforth follow the rule to “travel over, describe and
measure” (Despoix, 2009, p. 24). Initially, these descriptions were part
of the diaries first made mandatory following the formal Directions for
Seamen, Bound for Far Voyages issued in 1665. These diaries were anal-
ysed by both the Admiralty and the Royal Society before being archived
for reference. The instructions were gradually refined by stipulating
that the verbal descriptions of visual impressions in the diaries must
be completed or indeed entirely replaced by figures obtained through
technical measuring tools. Professional drafters were then employed to
translate these figures into diagrams that would later become maps.
Eventually a world map was conceived in accordance with this digi-
talised scheme that included numerical degrees of longitude and latitude
representing an abstract geography of the entire globe (Despoix, 2009,
pp. 81–83).
9 This quote, meaning ‘to form a continuous state’, is cited from a document dated 1752 in
which a land surveyor refers to the demarcation between Friuli in present-day Italy and the
territory of the Habsburg Monarchy in present-day Austria.
Having established demarcations and degrees of longitude and lati-

tude that confined spaces to enable the precise location of any spot, what
was still missing was a kind of ‘geo-graphy’, i.e. a description, accessible
at a distance, of who and what was to be found at each spot. At the
level of urban settlements, this demand for precise location was met
by ‘address offices’. As recorded in several in-depth studies by Anton
Tantner, these offices were established between the seventeenth and the
nineteenth centuries in the fast-growing European capitals of London
and Paris to provide addresses in return for brokerage fees. The new
offices also provided services to find travel companions, shared rides, and
domestic staff, sometimes also serving as pawnbrokers and moneylen-
ders. What is of particular interest here is that the services provided by
these new address offices were based on the generation of formalised stan-
dard units collected by the address office in the form of names, addresses
and offers of service, etc. These ‘bits’ of information were then arranged
in a specific order by the creation of a ‘register’ with the aim of facil-
itating the convenient and rapid retrieval of any of these units at any
time.
Among the many uses afforded by the mere existence of such a register,
Tantner (2011) notes that address offices were perceived as particularly
advantageous by customers interested in obtaining information anony-
mously. The opportunity to perform ‘secret’ inquiries without the need
to declare why they were looking for these addresses was often the motive
for paying a fee. Tantner further informs us that these new means of iden-
tifying places by number were of benefit to those who wished to roam
in unfamiliar places without having to ask for directions from passers-
by. In a way that is conceptually quite similar to Internet directions and
global positioning satellite devices today, house-numbering thus enabled
strangers to get around on their own without the need for any copresent
human contact.
In a follow-up study on this subject, Tantner (2015) referred to address
offices as the first “search engines”. The emergence of these search engines
offered by address offices was supported by the new concept of house-
numbering as yet another example of the formal re-organisation of social
life characteristic of modernity. In a monograph of 2007 on the history
of house-numbering in Europe between the seventeenth and twentieth
24 K. Hahn
centuries, Tantner describes how all houses had been numbered by the
end of this period, often in spite of strong opposition from house-
owners and inhabitants. Public authorities, and in some cases also private
entities, used house-numbering as a tool to exert greater control over
the residents of the numbered dwellings. Such numbering served a
variety of purposes in different regions, including for taxation and mili-
tary recruitment or conscription, as well as economic activities such as
selling compulsory fire insurance policies for each dwelling. Moreover,
house-numbering served as a powerful technology for reducing citizens’
opportunities to conceal or disguise their presence or absence (Tantner,
2007, p. 25).
An important point to note here is that while house-numbering
systems have sometimes been replaced by alternative systems and actual
house numbers would and still do occasionally change, house-numbering
is never carried out arbitrarily, i.e. the assigned numbers always stick
to a system, whether that system be applied to a single street, a block,
a quarter or an entire town. Tantner (2007, p. 23) refers to these
numbering systems as “continuous chains of figures”, and for our thesis
what is especially salient is that it was only through the creation of these
chains of figures that previously unrelated single units (i.e. houses) were
thereby able to be formally connected within a digitalised system. As
in the case of developments in cartography, these systems for organising
space formed a new synoptic and abstract perspective that was no longer
based on local knowledge and experience but on an abstract programme.
House-numbering is also comparable with the numerical Internet
Protocol (IP) address system, of course, which is similarly used for
remotely identifying and routing the physical location of a computer.
IP addresses refer to a network structure based on the total number of all
addresses. As Alexander Galloway (2004, p. 3) has shown, these addresses
are essential for the very structure of computer technology, based as it is
on a “digital computer, an abstract machine [whose] management style is
protocol, the principle of organization native to computers in distributed
networks.”
Network structures are likewise a long-established system for trans-
ferring information that can be traced back to the huge infrastructural
project that began at the end of the fifteenth century with the develop-
ment of the first postal services. Such postal services were already oper-
ating throughout most of Europe by the eighteenth century, described
by Headrick (2000, p. 184) as a system that “was reliable, and by
the standards of the day, fairly swift” at that time, with “its relay of
horses on all the main routes and up to twenty thousand messen-
gers”. While the postal service business first founded by Franz von Taxis
(1459–1517) still used the pre-established permanent relays of the Habs-
burg imperial networks, what was new in the eighteenth century was
that the postal service was now offered to the general public, albeit
again—like the services of the address offices—in return for a certain
fee (Headrick, 2000, p. 184). For those who could afford this fee, it had
become quite easy to send and receive messages without needing to rely
on other people to convey such messages on their travels. As with other
developments associated with digital processing, moreover, we can fairly
assume that the professional postal service was attractive to people not
only on account of offering greater reliability and frequency of trans-
port but also because it removed the need to establish social contact
with a messenger, thereby allowing for anonymity. Another parallel with
the Internet is that these messenger services, which had initially been
reserved for official use and primarily for military officials, were now
commodified . Indeed, the same trajectory applied in the case of telegraph
technology, the successor of the postal network, which was initially only
released for military purposes but later became a vast, privately owned
and operated business.
The science historian Frans van Lunteren (2016, p. 775) similarly
views the historical organisation of such networks as direct predecessors
of the computer age, showing how the computer not only incorpo-
rates earlier machines but above all draws on older concepts that in turn
were influenced by experiences with significant machines of their day.
In van Lunteren’s account, clocks, weighing machines (scales), steam
engines and computers have all crucially mediated society and scientific
thought. For example, it was quite common in the seventeenth century
to compare the entire world to a machine, as in the phrase machina
mundi, since the “world was now viewed as operating in the same way as
a machine” (van Lunteren, 2016, p. 766). Various machines also became
26 K. Hahn
widespread metaphors for labelling social processes and concepts: the

clock became a metaphor for linearity and continuity (van Lunteren,
2016, pp. 767–771), weighing scales became a metaphor for desired
political equilibrium and stability, while the steam engine—constantly
“transforming the chemical powers of coal into both heat and work”—
became a metaphor for a “dynamic world” based on the concept of
“energy” (including psychic energy) as “the capacity to perform work”.
The computer itself has since become a quite common metaphor for
“nature, the living world, and the human mind”, with “the universe
being pictured […] as a large machine that processes information” (van
Lunteren, 2016, pp. 773–774). Here, van Lunteren is describing the
interplay between modern thought and modern society, conceived of
largely in terms of people’s experiences of technical infrastructure. Such
interplay has in turn determined the success or failure of the implemen-
tation of certain technical infrastructures over others. Headrick implicitly
offers a telling historical example of such contextualised implementation
of technology in emphasising the co-emergence of the telegraph with
rationalising trends in both thought and technology:
The telegraph appeared at the same time that revolutionaries were

restructuring the national territory into equal departments, imposing a
homogeneous system of weights and measures, and reorganizing time
itself through a new calendar. The same mentalité led them to seek a
rational solution to the problem of communicating at a distance. The
optical telegraph was not only a response to war but also a child of the
Age of Reason. (Headrick, 2000, p. 98)
Headrick thus links the communication technology of the telegraph, i.e.

a digital system by which time and space were re-organised, to a cultural
disposition of abstracting time and space.
With regard to the organisation of systems, including systems of
thought, prior to the ‘invention’ of technology, it is also interesting to
note that the very concept of programming was not initially developed
in reference to a material technology but to actual human computers
or ‘processors’ (Grier, 2005). These were professionals whose job it was
to generate programmes and process algorithms. As described by Claudi
Alsina (2017, p. 61), such processing basically involved the structured

and multi-step organisation of a wide range of activities, including math-
ematical calculations. The ‘algorithm’, as James Gleick (2011, p. 13)
has shown, was thus “another new term for something that had always
existed (a recipe, a set of instructions, a step-by-step procedure) but
now [i.e. in the twentieth century] demanded formal recognition.” As a
way of illustrating algorithms through everyday examples, Alsina (2017,
p. 100) offers instructions on how to generate an algorithm for preparing
a dish. These can be summarised as follows:
1. Number all the tasks involved and estimate the time required to
complete each task.
2. Identify any interdependent tasks (such as shopping) and all tasks that
need to be performed sequentially.
3. In order to optimize organisation in terms of the number of co-
workers and the number of available devices (ovens, blenders, pots,
etc.), apply an algorithm to ensure that all tasks which can be executed
simultaneously are executed simultaneously and that any other tasks
are executed sequentially. (Author’s translation from German)
Other everyday life examples of the application of algorithms offered by

Alsina include industrial supply chains and door-to-door waste collec-
tion. In general terms, the generation of an algorithm follows a specific
process in which discrete units are first identified and then composed
and formulated in accordance with mathematical graph theory for the
purpose of process optimisation, typically with the aim of saving time or
money or otherwise increasing productivity (Alsina, 2017, p. 51). In this
way the entire procedure is streamlined or linearised in order to render it
calculable and economical. A prerequisite for such a programmed organ-
isation is the initial process of digitisation 10 by which the generated units
that form the digits of the final linearised procedure are first rendered
abstract.
Alsina’s proposed algorithm for preparing a dish demonstrates how an
algorithm can be applied regardless of the scale of the procedure, since
10See also the article by Desai (2014, p. 1469) in which digitisation is conceived of as the
“new steam”.
28 K. Hahn
the procedure for making a meal from scratch at home can be based on
an algorithm in fundamentally the same way as the large-scale indus-
trial production of food is organised and operated through the use of
advanced material digital technology. While scale may not impinge on
the logic of an algorithmic procedure, however, it does impinge on our
human capacities to compute, which is where the idea of mechanical
computing comes into play.
Computing was initially concerned with counting rather than with
developing algorithms. By way of example, Grier (2005, p. 94) relates
the story of Herman Hollerith, an employee of the United States Census
Bureau in 1880 whose “interest in mechanical tabulation began on a
day when he was inspecting the office operation with the census director
[…] watching the clerks repeat similar operations again and again”. This
led Hollerith to conceive the idea of a mechanical tabulation device. In
1885, inspired by observing a train conductor punching holes in a ticket,
he began recording census data in the form of holes in cards, with each
card holding the information about a single person. The card was then
placed on a frame and, as Grier (2005, p. 94) recounts: “an array of wires
was lowered upon it. If the wire encountered a hole, it would complete
a circuit and advance a counter. If it encountered cardboard, it would
do nothing”. ‘Hollerith cards’, as they came to be known, were to have
an enormous impact on the operations of the first computers, though
again this innovation in fact resembled a tool already in use in the textile
industry.
As early as 1804, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, a French weaver and
merchant, had patented his invention of a loom that connected mechan-
ical weaving procedures with a set of interchangeable punched cards.11
By making it possible for unskilled workers to weave complex and
detailed patterns, the invention of the ‘Jacquard loom’ played an impor-
tant role in automating tasks in textile production, further boosting
an industry that was booming in Great Britain and other European
regions at that time. The new weaving procedure was much faster and
cheaper than previous methods, replacing the need for a master weaver
11 All information on the history of the Jacquard loom is retrieved from the Manchester
Science and Industry Museum: https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-sto
ries/jacquard-loom. Accessed 6 August 2019.
and an assistant to work together in the production of patterned fabric.

Although the Jacquard loom and Hollerith’s tabulating machine both use
punched cards, an important difference between these two systems was
that Hollerith’s tabulation was operated by an additional, non-human
source of energy, i.e. electricity. This energy resource also operated within
a kind of network structure, i.e. the electronic circuit, and thus came
with a new operative unit based on only two levels: ‘current on’ or
‘current off ’. Later these binary states were reflected in the digital code,
consisting of the digits 0 and 1, representing the ‘bit’, i.e. the most basic,
non-specific and discrete unit of information. As such, the bit can fairly
be considered the signature unit of the ‘Information Age’.
As James Gleick has observed (2011, p. 6), the bit is the latest develop-
ment in what he terms “mathematicization”, by which he refers to part of
the process we refer to here as ‘digitisation’. In other words, the bit is the
ultimate outcome of what Gleick calls a necessary “rite of purification” of
information in line with previous processes of “simplifying”, “distilling”
and “mathematicizing” phenomena. With the conceptualisation of the
bit, Gleick argues, the term ‘information’ has ceased to refer to a quality
and come instead to denote a simplified, abstract and fundamental unit.
Such bits of information are now “everywhere”, Gleick (2011, p. 3)
observes: a meme is now considered a ‘bit’ of cultural information, for
example, while money can be understood as a bit of information about
“who owns what, who owes what”. For the theory of social digitalisation,
what is most important to note in Gleick’s account of developments in
‘information’ is that he relates these outcomes to a historical trajectory
of transforming qualities into quantities. This is clear, for example, when
he relates how “the bit now joined the inch, the pound, the quart, and
the minute as a determinate quantity – a fundamental unit of measure”
(Gleick, 2011, p. 3), thereby highlighting the persistent—indeed almost
constant—introduction of new quantitative units into social life over
recent centuries. This crucial point will accordingly be further expanded
and elaborated upon both here in this chapter and throughout the rest
of this book.
We have already seen how the bit represents but the latest in a series
of abstract units by which social life and social activities have long
since been transcoded and ‘measured’. What is equally essential to note,
30 K. Hahn
however, is that this form of digitisation has necessarily been comple-

mented by the correspondingly long trajectory of the programming of
these units. It is the evolving combination of digitisation and program-
ming that constitutes what is meant here by ‘social digitalisation’. As
such, these intertwined processes essentially drive the dynamic of what is
commonly referred to today as ‘digital transformation’. As I hope to have
clarified already, and as I shall demonstrate in the following chapters, the
theory and approach applied here does not consider such ‘digital trans-
formation’ as the outcome of any recently introduced material digital
technology but rather as a phenomenon embedded in the trajectory
of modern society and culture. Indeed, the term social digitalisation is
used precisely to distinguish the holistic approach adopted here from the
prevalent understanding of digital transformation as a process defined by
the use of material digital technology. By focusing on a set of processes
in which material digital technology is integrated but not definitive, my
aim is to uphold the standard of good social theory work set out by
John Thompson in his seminal work on Media and Modernity (1995,
p. 7), in which he argued that it is not tenable to “study the development
of communication media independently of broader social and historical
processes.”
1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation:

Organising Processes of Dis/continuance
As we have seen, social digitalisation refers to the organisation of
processes of digitisation and programming manifested and embedded in
specific cultural contexts. By definition, digitisation engenders discon-
tinuances, while programming aims at producing continuance. These
processes are differentiated solely for analytical purposes, however, since
in social reality we can only experience them as intertwined. For this
reason I shall hereafter refer to these processes jointly as processes of
dis/continuance. This conceptualisation of the technical operation of
social digitalisation as entailing processes of continuance and discon-
tinuance serves two key purposes. First, digitalisation does not describe
a state but a dynamic that can better be observed by distinguishing
these two different types of processing for the purposes of analysis.

Second, while social digitalisation definitively does not refer solely to the
internal technical procedures of IT technologies, focusing on processes of
dis/continuance makes the approach I propose compatible with research
into all types of digital processing from digital re-organisations of social
activities throughout history to the latest innovations in material IT. The
compatibility of this approach with digitalisation in all its forms further
enables us to observe long-term processes of digital transformation prior
to the advent of material digital technology. While it is analytically
useful to deconstruct the trajectory of digital transformation, however,
the dynamics of social digitalisation are ultimately best understood by
exploring how these deconstructed processes work and are experienced
together in combination.
Adopting a broader perspective on digital transformation has the
further advantage of allowing for the inclusion of established and even
classical social theory in the analysis of social digitalisation. Here it
should be emphasised, however, that including classical theory in the
analysis of contemporary phenomena should not be undertaken in such
a way as to risk narrowing and confining our analysis to explanatory
schemes of existing theory. Rather than merely ‘applying’ classical theory,
such theory should instead be critically interpreted with a view to its
potential contribution as an analytical tool with which to grasp or at
least plausibly account for contemporary empirical phenomena. More-
over, any analytical tool employed in the social digitalisation approach
I propose must be sufficiently flexible to be adapted to the multiple
and diverse socio-historical contexts that are addressed in applying this
approach. For while theories are considered ‘classical’ on account of their
enduring explanatory power, even classical theories need to be adapted
to the particular research context being explored. This is especially the
case when the research question refers to phenomena unknown at the
time a theory was first conceived. Even given that the explanatory power
of a ‘classical’ social theory lies in its generalisability independent of the
specific context and time frame with which it is associated, ‘compatibly’
applying a theory to a specific research focus always necessarily requires
interpretation. Although any such interpretation of classical theory is
obviously disputable, to claim ‘validity’ for a classical theory on account
32 K. Hahn
of its seemingly unchanged and ‘objective’ application would equally

constitute an interpreted and therefore disputable application of that
theory.
Proceeding on this basis, therefore, I propose that Max Weber’s clas-
sical theory of the connections between economy and society, as set out
in his 1921 posthumously published work Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(‘Economy and Society’),12 can be interpreted as a theory that offers
useful insights into the dynamics of digital transformation. As the title
of this work suggests, Weber observed a profound and specific intercon-
nection between society and economy established in modern Western
societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. Weber analysed this
interconnection by deconstructing and identifying key elements of its
underlying historical trajectory in order to better assess probable future
developments engendered by the interplay of these elements.
Weber’s conceptualisation of the interconnection of economy and
society was thus based on an approach by which he explored in great
depth and detail the trajectory of producing and reproducing human
subsistence. In order to better understand this trajectory, Weber drew
an analytical distinction between ‘economy’ and ‘technology’ (1978,
p. 65) and between ‘formal’ and ‘substantive’ rationality (1978, p. 85).
With this analytical distinction, he aimed to offer a more comprehensive
and accurate description of how the economy acts a driver of soci-
etal developments. More specifically, this distinction allowed Weber to
undertake comparative analysis of these developments as they unfolded
in very different cultural contexts, including historically and region-
ally diverse contexts. Through such comprehensive comparative analysis,
Weber aimed at eventually achieving a more concise and fruitful concep-
tualisation of the key characteristics of modern Western society.
The wide-ranging impacts of the economic processes identified by
Weber in modern Western society need to be considered in their various
12 My basic reference is the German fifth edition of Weber’s Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft published
in 1980 and edited by Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen, Germany: J.C.B. Mohr, Paul
Siebeck). The original work was published in 1921/1922. In order to make the references more
accessible to an international readership, however, I quote from the English edition edited by
Gunther Roth and Claus Wittich and published in 1978 under the title Economy and Society:
An Outline of Interpretive Sociology.
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We made a straight course of it across the plains for about thirty miles,
changing horses occasionally at some of the numerous wayside inns, and
passing numbers of wagons drawn by teams of six or eight mules or oxen,
and laden with supplies for the mines.
The ascent from the plains was very gradual, over a hilly country, well
wooded with oaks and pines. Our pace here was not so killing as it had
been. We had frequently long hills to climb, where all hands were obliged
to get out and walk; but we made up for the delay by galloping down the
descent on the other side.
The road, which, though in some places very narrow, for the most part
spread out to two or three times the width of an ordinary road, was covered
with stumps and large rocks; it was full of deep ruts and hollows, and roots
of trees spread all over it.
To any one not used to such roads or to such driving, an upset would
have seemed inevitable. If there was safety in speed, however, we were safe
enough, and all sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and
dexterity of the driver as he circumvented every obstacle, but without going
one inch farther than necessary out of his way to save us from perdition. He
went through extraordinary bodily contortions, which would have shocked
an English coachman out of his propriety; but, at the same time, he
performed such feats as no one would have dared to attempt who had never
been used to anything worse than an English road. With his right foot he
managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his
body from side to side to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair
of wheels, now on the left, he cut the “outside edge” round a stump or a
rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult
maneuver on a piece of road which slanted violently down to one side, he
trimmed the wagon as one would a small boat in a squall, and made us all
crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize.
When about ten miles from the plains, I first saw the actual reality of
gold-digging. Four or five men were working in a ravine by the roadside,
digging holes like so many grave-diggers. I then considered myself fairly in
“the mines,” and experienced a disagreeable consciousness that we might
be passing over huge masses of gold, only concealed from us by an inch or
two of earth.
As we traveled onwards, we passed at intervals numerous parties of
miners, and the country assumed a more inhabited appearance. Log-cabins
and clapboard shanties were to be seen among the trees; and occasionally
we found about a dozen of such houses grouped together by the roadside,
and dignified with the name of a town.
For several miles again the country would seem to have been deserted.
That it had once been a busy scene was evident from the uptorn earth in the
ravines and hollows, and from the numbers of unoccupied cabins; but the
cream of such diggings had already been taken, and they were not now
sufficiently rich to suit the ambitious ideas of the miners.
After traveling about thirty miles over this mountainous region,
ascending gradually all the while, we arrived at Hangtown in the afternoon,
having accomplished the sixty miles from Sacramento city in about eight
hours.
CHAPTER VI
LOOKING FOR GOLD
T HE town of Placerville—or Hangtown, as it was commonly called—

consisted of one long straggling street of clapboard houses and log
cabins, built in a hollow at the side of a creek, and surrounded by high
and steep hills.
The diggings here had been exceedingly rich—men used to pick the
chunks of gold out of the crevices of the rocks in the ravines with no other
tool than a bowie-knife; but these days had passed, and now the whole
surface of the surrounding country showed the amount of real hard work
which had been done. The beds of the numerous ravines which wrinkle the
faces of the hills, the bed of the creek, and all the little flats alongside of it,
were a confused mass of heaps of dirt and piles of stones lying around the
innumerable holes, about six feet square and five or six feet deep, from
which they had been thrown out. The original course of the creek was
completely obliterated, its waters being distributed into numberless little
ditches, and from them conducted into the “long toms” of the miners
through canvas hoses, looking like immensely long slimy sea-serpents.
The number of bare stumps of what had once been gigantic pine trees,
dotted over the naked hillsides surrounding the town, showed how freely
the ax had been used, and to what purpose was apparent in the extent of the
town itself, and in the numerous log-cabins scattered over the hills, in
situations apparently chosen at the caprice of the owners, but in reality with
a view to be near to their diggings, and at the same time to be within a
convenient distance of water and firewood.
Along the whole length of the creek, as far as one could see, on the
banks of the creek, in the ravines, in the middle of the principal and only
street of the town, and even inside some of the houses, were parties of
miners, numbering from three or four to a dozen, all hard at work, some
laying into it with picks, some shoveling the dirt into the “long toms,” or
with long-handled shovels washing the dirt thrown in, and throwing out the
stones, while others were working pumps or baling water out of the holes
with buckets. There was a continual noise and clatter, as mud, dirt, stones,
and water were thrown about in all directions; and the men, dressed in
ragged clothes and big boots, wielding picks and shovels, and rolling big
rocks about, were all working as if for their lives, going into it with a will,
and a degree of energy, not usually seen among laboring men. It was
altogether a scene which conveyed the idea of hard work in the fullest sense
of the words, and in comparison with which a gang of railway navvies
would have seemed to be merely a party of gentlemen amateurs playing at
working pour passer le temps.
A stroll through the village revealed the extent to which the ordinary
comforts of life were attainable. The gambling-houses, of which there were
three or four, were of course the largest and most conspicuous buildings;
their mirrors, chandeliers, and other decorations, suggesting a style of life
totally at variance with the outward indications of everything around them.
The street itself was in many places knee-deep in mud, and was
plentifully strewed with old boots, hats, and shirts, old sardine-boxes,
empty tins of preserved oysters, empty bottles, worn-out pots and kettles,
old ham-bones, broken picks and shovels, and other rubbish too various to
particularize. Here and there, in the middle of the street, was a square hole
about six feet deep, in which one miner was digging, while another was
baling the water out with a bucket, and a third, sitting alongside the heap of
dirt which had been dug up, was washing it in a rocker. Wagons, drawn by
six or eight mules or oxen, were navigating along the street, or discharging
their strangely-assorted cargoes at the various stores; and men in
picturesque rags, with large muddy boots, long beards, and brown faces,
were the only inhabitants to be seen.
There were boarding-houses on the table-d’hôte principle, in each of
which forty or fifty hungry miners sat down three times a day to an oilcloth-
covered table, and in the course of about three minutes surfeited themselves
on salt pork, greasy steaks, and pickles. There were also two or three
“hotels,” where much the same sort of fare was to be had, with the extra
luxuries of a table-cloth and a superior quality of knives and forks.
The stores were curious places. There was no specialty about them—
everything was to be found in them which it could be supposed that any one
could possibly want, excepting fresh beef (there was a butcher who
monopolized the sale of that article).
On entering a store, one would find the storekeeper in much the same
style of costume as the miners, very probably sitting on an empty keg at a
rickety little table, playing “seven up” for “the liquor” with one of his
customers.
The counter served also the purpose of a bar, and behind it was the usual
array of bottles and decanters, while on shelves above them was an
ornamental display of boxes of sardines, and brightly-colored tins of
preserved meats and vegetables with showy labels, interspersed with bottles
of champagne and strangely-shaped bottles of exceedingly green pickles,
the whole being arranged with some degree of taste.
Goods and provisions of every description were stowed away
promiscuously all round the store, in the middle of which was invariably a
small table with a bench, or some empty boxes and barrels for the miners to
sit on while they played cards, spent their money in brandy and oysters, and
occasionally got drunk.
The clothing trade was almost entirely in the hands of the Jews, who are
very numerous in California, and devote their time and energies exclusively
to supplying their Christian brethren with the necessary articles of wearing
apparel.
In traveling through the mines from one end to the other, I never saw a
Jew lift a pick or shovel to do a single stroke of work, or, in fact, occupy
himself in any other way than in selling slops. While men of all classes and
of every nation showed such versatility in betaking themselves to whatever
business or occupation appeared at the time to be most advisable, without
reference to their antecedents, and in a country where no man, to whatever
class of society he belonged, was in the least degree ashamed to roll up his
sleeves and dig in the mines for gold, or to engage in any other kind of
manual labor, it was a very remarkable fact that the Jews were the only
people among whom this was not observable.
They were very numerous—so much so, that the business to which they
confined themselves could hardly have yielded to every individual a fair
average California rate of remuneration. But they seemed to be proof
against all temptation to move out of their own limited sphere of industry,
and of course, concentrated upon one point as their energies were, they kept
pace with the go-ahead spirit of the times. Clothing of all sorts could be
bought in any part of the mines more cheaply than in San Francisco, where
rents were so very high that retail prices of everything were most
exorbitant; and scarcely did twenty or thirty miners collect in any out-of-
the-way place, upon newly discovered diggings, before the inevitable Jew
slop-seller also made his appearance, to play his allotted part in the newly-
formed community.
The Jew slop-shops were generally rattletrap erections about the size of a
bathing-machine, so small that one half of the stock had to be displayed
suspended from projecting sticks outside. They were filled with red and
blue flannel shirts, thick boots, and other articles suited to the wants of the
miners, along with Colt’s revolvers and bowie-knives, brass jewelry, and
diamonds like young Koh-i-Noors.
Almost every man, after a short residence in California, became changed
to a certain extent in his outward appearance. In the mines especially, to the
great majority of men, the usual style of dress was one to which they had
never been accustomed; and those to whom it might have been supposed
such a costume was not so strange, or who were even wearing the old
clothes they had brought with them to the country, acquired a certain
California air, which would have made them remarkable in whatever part of
the world they came from, had they been suddenly transplanted there. But
to this rule also the Jews formed a very striking exception. In their
appearance there was nothing at all suggestive of California; they were
exactly the same unwashed-looking, slobbery, slipshod individuals that one
sees in every seaport town.
During the week, and especially when the miners were all at work,
Hangtown was comparatively quiet; but on Sundays it was a very different
place. On that day the miners living within eight or ten miles all flocked in
to buy provisions for the week—to spend their money in the gambling-
rooms—to play cards—to get their letters from home—and to refresh
themselves, after a week’s labor and isolation in the mountains, in enjoying
the excitement of the scene according to their tastes.
The gamblers on Sundays reaped a rich harvest; their tables were
thronged with crowds of miners, betting eagerly, and of course losing their
money. Many men came in, Sunday after Sunday, and gambled off all the
gold they had dug during the week, having to get credit at a store for their
next week’s provisions, and returning to their diggings to work for six days
in getting more gold, which would all be transferred the next Sunday to the
gamblers, in the vain hope of recovering what had been already lost.
The street was crowded all day with miners loafing about from store to
store, making their purchases and asking each other to drink, the effects of
which began to be seen at an early hour in the number of drunken men, and
the consequent frequency of rows and quarrels. Almost every man wore a
pistol or a knife—many wore both—but they were rarely used. The liberal
and prompt administration of Lynch law had done a great deal towards
checking the wanton and indiscriminate use of these weapons on any slight
occasion. The utmost latitude was allowed in the exercise of self-defence.
In the case of a row, it was not necessary to wait till a pistol was actually
leveled at one’s head—if a man made even a motion towards drawing a
weapon, it was considered perfectly justifiable to shoot him first, if
possible. The very prevalence of the custom of carrying arms thus in a great
measure was a cause of their being seldom used. They were never drawn
out of bravado, for when a man once drew his pistol, he had to be prepared
to use it, and to use it quickly, or he might expect to be laid low by a ball
from his adversary; and again, if he shot a man without sufficient
provocation, he was pretty sure of being accommodated with a hempen
cravat by Judge Lynch.
The storekeepers did more business on Sundays than in all the rest of the
week; and in the afternoon crowds of miners could be seen dispersing over
the hills in every direction, laden with the provisions they had been
purchasing, chiefly flour, pork and beans, and perhaps a lump of fresh beef.
There was only one place of public worship in Hangtown at that time, a
very neat little wooden edifice, which belonged to some denomination of
Methodists, and seemed to be well attended.
There was also a newspaper published two or three times a week, which
kept the inhabitants “posted up” as to what was going on in the world.
The richest deposits of gold were found in the beds and banks of the
rivers, creeks, and ravines, in the flats on the convex side of the bends of
the streams, and in many of the flats and hollows high up in the mountains.
The precious metal was also abstracted from the very hearts of the
mountains, through tunnels drifted into them for several hundred yards; and
in some places real mining was carried on in the bowels of the earth by
means of shafts sunk to the depth of a couple of hundred feet.
The principal diggings in the neighborhood of Hangtown were surface
diggings; but, with the exception of river diggings, every kind of mining
operation was to be seen in full force.
The gold is found at various depths from the surface; but the dirt on the
bed-rock is the richest, as the gold naturally in time sinks through earth and
gravel, till it is arrested in its downward progress by the solid rock.
The diggings here were from four to six or seven feet deep; the layer of
“pay-dirt” being about a couple of feet thick on the top of the bed-rock.
I should mention that “dirt” is the word universally used in California to
signify the substance dug, earth, clay, gravel, loose slate, or whatever other
name might be more appropriate. The miners talk of rich dirt and poor dirt,
and of “stripping off” so many feet of “top dirt” before getting to “pay-dirt,”
the latter meaning dirt with so much gold in it that it will pay to dig it up
and wash it.
The apparatus generally used for washing was a “long tom,” which was
nothing more than a wooden trough from twelve to twenty-five feet long,
and about a foot wide. At the lower end it widens considerably, and on the
floor there is a sheet of iron pierced with holes half an inch in diameter,
under which is placed a flat box a couple of inches deep. The long tom is
set at a slight inclination over the place which is to be worked, and a stream
of water is kept running through it by means of a hose, the mouth of which
is inserted in a dam built for the purpose high enough up the stream to gain
the requisite elevation; and while some of the party shovel the dirt into the
tom as fast as they can dig it up, one man stands at the lower end stirring up
the dirt as it is washed down, separating the stones and throwing them out,
while the earth and small gravel falls with the water through the sieve into
the “ripple-box.” This box is about five feet long, and is crossed by two
partitions. It is also placed at an inclination, so that the water falling into it
keeps the dirt loose, allowing the gold and heavy particles to settle to the
bottom, while all the lighter stuff washes over the end of the box along with
the water. When the day’s work is over, the dirt is taken from the “ripple-
box” and is “washed out” in a “wash-pan,” a round tin dish, eighteen inches
in diameter, with shelving sides three or four inches deep. In washing out a
panful of dirt, it has to be placed in water deep enough to cover it over; the
dirt is stirred up with the hands, and the gravel thrown out; the pan is then
taken in both hands, and by an indescribable series of maneuvers all the dirt
is gradually washed out of it, leaving nothing but the gold and a small
quantity of black sand. This black sand is mineral (some oxide or other salt
of iron), and is so heavy that it is not possible to wash it all out; it has to be
blown out of the gold afterwards when dry.
Another mode of washing dirt, but much more tedious, and consequently
only resorted to where a sufficient supply of water for a long tom could not
be obtained, was by means of an apparatus called a “rocker” or “cradle.”
This was merely a wooden cradle, on the top of which was a sieve. The dirt
was put into this, and a miner, sitting alongside of it, rocked the cradle with
one hand, while with a dipper in the other he kept baling water on to the
dirt. This acted on the same principle as the “tom,” and had formerly been
the only contrivance in use; but it was now seldom seen, as the long tom
effected such a saving of time and labor. The latter was set immediately
over the claim, and the dirt was shoveled into it at once, while a rocker had
to be set alongside of the water, and the dirt was carried to it in buckets
from the place which was being worked. Three men working together with
a rocker—one digging, another carrying the dirt in buckets, and the third
rocking the cradle—would wash on an average a hundred bucketfuls of dirt
to the man in the course of the day. With a “long tom” the dirt was so easily
washed that parties of six or eight could work together to advantage, and
four or five hundred bucketfuls of dirt a day to each one of the party was a
usual day’s work.
I met a San Francisco friend in Hangtown practising his profession as a
doctor, who very hospitably offered me quarters in his cabin, which I gladly
accepted. The accommodation was not very luxurious, being merely six feet
of the floor on which to spread my blankets. My host, however, had no
better bed himself, and indeed it was as much as most men cared about.
Those who were very particular preferred sleeping on a table or a bench
when they were to be had; bunks and shelves were also much in fashion;
but the difference in comfort was a mere matter of imagination, for
mattresses were not known, and an earthen floor was quite as soft as any
wooden board. Three or four miners were also inmates of the doctor’s
cabin. They were quondam New South Wales squatters, who had been
mining for several months in a distant part of the country, and were now
going to work a claim about two miles up the creek from Hangtown. As
they wanted another hand to work their long tom with them, I very readily
joined their party. For several days we worked this place, trudging out to it
when it was hardly daylight, taking with us our dinner, which consisted of
beefsteaks and bread, and returning to Hangtown about dark; but the claim
did not prove rich enough to satisfy us, so we abandoned it, and went
“prospecting,” which means looking about for a more likely place.
A “prospector” goes out with a pick and shovel, and a wash-pan; and to
test the richness of a place he digs down till he reaches the dirt in which it
may be expected that the gold will be found; and washing out a panful of
this, he can easily calculate, from the amount of gold which he finds in it,
how much could be taken out in a day’s work. An old miner, looking at the
few specks of gold in the bottom of his pan, can tell their value within a few
cents; calling it a twelve or a twenty cent “prospect,” as it may be. If, on
washing out a panful of dirt, a mere speck of gold remained, just enough to
swear by, such dirt was said to have only “the color,” and was not worth
digging. A twelve-cent prospect was considered a pretty good one; but in
estimating the probable result of a day’s work, allowance had to be made
for the time and labor to be expended in removing top-dirt, and in otherwise
preparing the claim for being worked.
To establish one’s claim to a piece of ground, all that was requisite was
to leave upon it a pick or shovel, or other mining tool. The extent of ground
allowed to each individual varied in different diggings from ten to thirty
feet square, and was fixed by the miners themselves, who also made their
own laws, defining the rights and duties of those holding claims; and any
dispute on such subjects was settled by calling together a few of the
neighboring miners, who would enforce the due observance of the laws of
the diggings. After prospecting for two or three days we concluded to take
up a claim near a small settlement called Middletown, two or three miles
distant from Hangtown. It was situated by the side of a small creek, in a
rolling hilly country, and consisted of about a dozen cabins, one of which
was a store supplied with flour, pork, tobacco, and other necessaries.
We found near our claim a very comfortable cabin, which the owner had
deserted, and in which we established ourselves. We had plenty of firewood
and water close to us, and being only two miles from Hangtown, we kept
ourselves well supplied with fresh beef. We cooked our “dampers” in New
South Wales fashion, and lived on the fat of the land, our bill of fare being
beefsteaks, damper, and tea for breakfast, dinner, and supper. A damper is a
very good thing, but not commonly seen in California, excepting among
men from New South Wales. A quantity of flour and water, with a pinch or
two of salt, is worked into a dough, and, raking down a good hardwood fire,
it is placed on the hot ashes, and then smothered in more hot ashes to the
depth of two or three inches, on the top of which is placed a quantity of the
still burning embers. A very little practice enables one to judge from the
feel of the crust when it is sufficiently cooked. The great advantage of a
damper is, that it retains a certain amount of moisture, and is as good when
a week old as when fresh baked. It is very solid and heavy, and a little of it
goes a great way, which of itself is no small recommendation when one eats
only to live.
Another sort of bread we very frequently made by filling a frying-pan
with dough, and sticking it upon end to roast before the fire.
The Americans do not understand dampers. They either bake bread,
using saleratus to make it rise, or else they make flapjacks, which are
nothing more than pancakes made of flour and water, and are a very good
substitute for bread when one is in a hurry, as they are made in a moment.
As for our beefsteaks, they could not be beat anywhere. A piece of an
old iron-hoop, twisted into a serpentine form and laid on the fire, made a
first-rate gridiron, on which every man cooked his steak to his own taste. In
the matter of tea I am afraid we were dreadfully extravagant, throwing it
into the pot in handfuls. It is a favorite beverage in the mines—morning,
noon, and night—and at no time is it more refreshing than in the extreme
heat of mid-day.
In the cabin two bunks had been fitted up, one above the other, made of
clapboards laid crossways, but they were all loose and warped. I tried to
sleep on them one night, but it was like sleeping on a gridiron; the smooth
earthen floor was a much more easy couch.
CHAPTER VII
INDIANS AND CHINAMEN
W ITHIN a few miles of us there was camped a large tribe of Indians,

who were generally quite peaceable, and showed no hostility to the
whites.
Small parties of them were constantly to be seen in Hangtown,
wandering listlessly about the street, begging for bread, meat, or old
clothes. These Digger Indians, as they are called, from the fact of their
digging for themselves a sort of subterranean abode in which they pass the
winter, are most repulsive-looking wretches, and seem to be very little less
degraded and uncivilizable than the blacks of New South Wales.
They are nearly black, and are exceedingly ugly, with long hair, which
they cut straight across the forehead just above the eyes. They had learned
the value of gold, and might be seen occasionally in unfrequented places
washing out a panful of dirt, but they had no idea of systematic work. What
little gold they got, they spent in buying fresh beef and clothes. They dress
very fantastically. Some, with no other garment than an old dress-coat
buttoned up to the throat, or perhaps with only a hat and a pair of boots,
think themselves very well got up, and look with great contempt on their
neighbors whose wardrobe is not so extensive. A coat with showy linings to
the sleeves is a great prize; it is worn inside out to produce a better effect,
and pantaloons are frequently worn, or rather carried, with the legs tied
around the waist. They seemed to think it impossible to have too much of a
good thing; and any man so fortunate as to be the possessor of duplicates of
any article of clothing, puts them on one over the other, piling hat upon hat
after the manner of “Old clo.”
The men are very tenacious of their dignity, and carry nothing but their
bows and arrows, while the attendant squaws are loaded down with a large
creel on the back, which is supported by a band passing across the forehead,
and is the receptacle for all the rubbish they pick up. The squaws have also,
of course, to carry the babies; which, however, are not very troublesome, as
they are wrapped up in papoose-frames like those of the North American
Indians, though of infinitely inferior workmanship.
They are very fond of dogs, and have always at their heels a number of
the most wretchedly thin, mangy, starved-looking curs, of dirty brindle
color, something the shape of a greyhound, but only about half his size. A
strong mutual attachment exists between the dogs and their masters; but the
affection of the latter does not move them to bestow much food on their
canine friends, who live in a state of chronic starvation; every bone seems
ready to break through the confinement of the skin, and their whole life is
merely a slow death from inanition. They have none of the life or spirit of
other dogs, but crawl along as if every step was to be their last, with a look
of most humble resignation, and so conscious of their degradation that they
never presume to hold any communion with their civilized fellow-creatures.
It is very likely that canine nature cannot stand such food as the Indians are
content to live upon, and of which acorns and grasshoppers are the staple
articles. There are plenty of small animals on which one would think that a
dog could live very well, if he would only take the trouble to catch them;
but it would seem that a dog, as long as he remains a companion of man, is
an animal quite incapable of providing for himself.
A failure of the acorn crop is to the Indians a national calamity, as they
depend on it in a great measure for their subsistence during the winter. In
the fall of the year the squaws are busily employed in gathering acorns, to
be afterwards stored in small conical stacks, and covered with a sort of
wicker-work. They are prepared for food by being made into a paste, very
much of the color and consistency of opium. Such horrid-looking stuff it is,
that I never ventured to taste it; but I believe that the bitter and astringent
taste of the raw material is in no way modified by the process of
manufacture.[1]
As is the case with most savages, the Digger Indians show remarkable
instances of ingenuity in some of their contrivances, and great skill in the
manufacture of their weapons. Their bows and arrows are very good
specimens of workmanship. The former are shorter than the bows used in
this country, but resemble them in every other particular, even in the shape
of the pieces of horn at the ends. The head of the arrow is of the orthodox
cut, the three feathers being placed in the usual position; the point, however,
is the most elaborate part. About three inches of the end is of a heavier
wood than the rest of the arrow, being very neatly spliced in with thin
tendons. The point itself is a piece of flint chipped down into a flat diamond
shape, about the size of a diamond on a playing-card; the edges are very
sharp, and are notched to receive the tendons with which it is firmly secured
to the arrow.
The women make a kind of wicker-work basket of a conical form, so
closely woven as to be perfectly water-tight, and in these they have an
ingenious method of boiling water, by heating a number of stones in the
fire, and throwing a succession of them into the water till the temperature is
raised to boiling point.
We had a visit at our cabin one Sunday from an Indian and his squaw.
She was such a particularly ugly specimen of human nature that I made her
sit down, and proceeded to take a sketch of her, to the great delight of her
dutiful husband, who looked over my shoulder and reported progress to her.
I offered her the sketch when I had finished, but after admiring herself in
the bottom of a new tin pannikin, the only substitute for a looking-glass
which I could find, and comparing her own beautiful face with her portrait,
she was by no means pleased, and would have nothing to do with it. I
suppose she thought I had not done her justice; which was very likely, for
no doubt our ideas of female beauty must have differed very materially.
Not many days after we had settled ourselves at Middletown, news was
brought into Hangtown that a white man had been killed by Indians at a
place called Johnson’s Ranch, about twelve miles distant. A party of three
or four men immediately went out to recover the body, and to “hunt” the
Indians. They found the half-burned remains of the murdered man; but were
attacked by a large number of Indians, and had to retire, one of the party
being wounded by an Indian arrow. On their return to Hangtown there was
great excitement; about thirty men, mostly from the Western States, turned
out with their long rifles, intending, in the first place, to visit the camp of
the Middletown tribe, and to take from them their rifles, which they were
reported to have bought from the storekeeper there, and after that to lynch
the storekeeper himself for selling arms to the Indians, which is against the
law; for however friendly the Indians may be, they trade them off to hostile
tribes.
It happened, however, that on this particular day a neighboring tribe had
come over to the camp of the Middletown Indians for the purpose of having
a fandango together; and when they saw this armed party coming upon
them, they immediately saluted them with a shower of arrows and rifle-
balls, which damaged a good many hats and shirts, without wounding any
one. The miners returned their fire, killing a few of the Indians; but their
party being too small to fight against such odds, they were compelled to
retreat; and as the storekeeper, having got a hint of their kind intentions
towards him, had made himself scarce, they marched back to Hangtown
without having done much to boast of.
When the result of their expedition was made known, the excitement in
Hangtown was of course greater than ever. The next day crowds of miners
flocked in from all quarters, each man equipped with a long rifle in addition
to his bowie-knife and revolver, while two men, playing a drum and a fife,
marched up and down the street to give a military air to the occasion. A
public meeting was held in one of the gambling-rooms, at which the
governor, the sheriff of the county, and other big men of the place, were
present. The miners about Hangtown were mostly all Americans, and a
large proportion of them were men from the Western States, who had come
by the overland route across the plains—men who had all their lives been
used to Indian wiles and treachery, and thought about as much of shooting
an Indian as of killing a rattlesnake. They were a rough-looking crowd;
long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the usual old-flannel-shirt costume of the
mines, with shaggy beards, their faces, hands, and arms as brown as
mahogany, and with an expression about their eyes which boded no good to
any Indian who should come within range of their rifles.
There were some very good speeches made at the meeting; that of a
young Kentuckian doctor was quite a treat. He spoke very well, but from
the fuss he made it might have been supposed that the whole country was in
the hands of the enemy. The eyes of the thirty States of the Union, he said,
were upon them; and it was for them, the thirty-first, to avenge this insult to
the Anglo-Saxon race, and to show the wily savage that the American
nation, which could dictate terms of peace or war to every other nation on
the face of the globe, was not to be trifled with. He tried to rouse their
courage, and excite their animosity against the Indians, though it was quite
unnecessary, by drawing a vivid picture of the unburied bones of poor
Brown, or Jones, the unfortunate individual who had been murdered,
bleaching on the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, while his death was still
unavenged. If they were cowardly enough not to go out and whip the
savage Indians, their wives would spurn them, their sweethearts would
reject them, and the whole world would look upon them with scorn. The
most common-sense argument in his speech, however, was, that unless the
Indians were taught a lesson, there would be no safety for the straggling
miners in the mountains at any distance from a settlement. Altogether he
spoke very well, considering the sort of crowd he was addressing; and
judging from the enthusiastic applause, and from the remarks I heard made
by the men around me, he could not have spoken with better effect.
The Governor also made a short speech, saying that he would take the
responsibility of raising a company of one hundred men, at five dollars a
day, to go and whip the Indians.
The Sheriff followed. He “cal’lated” to raise out of that crowd one
hundred men, but wanted no man to put down his name who would not
stand up in his boots, and he would ask no man to go any further than he
would go himself.
Those who wished to enlist were then told to come round to the other
end of the room, when nearly the whole crowd rushed eagerly forward, and
the required number were at once enrolled. They started the next day, but
the Indians retreating before them, they followed them far up into the
mountains, where they remained for a couple of months, by which time the
wily savages, it is to be hoped, got properly whipped, and were taught the
respect due to white men.
We continued working our claim at Middletown, having taken into
partnership an old sea-captain whom we found there working alone. It paid
us very well for about three weeks, when, from the continued dry weather,
the water began to fail, and we were obliged to think of moving off to other
diggings.
It was now time to commence preparatory operations before working the
beds of the creeks and rivers, as their waters were falling rapidly; and as
most of our party owned shares in claims on different rivers, we became
dispersed. A young Englishman and myself alone remained, uncertain as
yet where we should go.
We had gone into Hangtown one night for provisions, when we heard
that a great strike had been made at a place called ’Coon Hollow, about a
mile distant. One man was reported to have taken out that day about fifteen
hundred dollars. Before daylight next morning we started over the hill,
intending to stake off a claim on the same ground; but even by the time we
got there, the whole hillside was already pegged off into claims of thirty
feet square, on each of which men were commencing to sink shafts, while
hundreds of others were prowling about, too late to get a claim which
would be thought worth taking up.
Those who had claims, immediately surrounding that of the lucky man
who had caused all the excitement by letting his good fortune be known,
were very sanguine. Two Cornish miners had got what was supposed to be
the most likely claim, and declared they would not take ten thousand dollars
for it. Of course, no one thought of offering such a sum; but so great was
the excitement that they might have got eight hundred or a thousand dollars
for their claim before ever they put a pick in the ground. As it turned out,
however, they spent a month in sinking a shaft about a hundred feet deep;
and after drifting all round, they could not get a cent out of it, while many
of the claims adjacent to theirs proved extremely rich.
Such diggings as these are called “coyote” diggings, receiving their
name from an animal called the coyote, which abounds all over the plain
lands of Mexico and California, and which lives in the cracks and crevices
made in the plains by the extreme heat of summer. He is half dog, half fox,
and, as an Irishman might say, half wolf also. They howl most dismally, just
like a dog, on moonlight nights, and are seen in great numbers skulking
about the plains.
Connected with them is a curious fact in natural history. They are
intensely carnivorous—so are cannibals; but as cannibals object to the
flavor of roasted sailor as being too salt, so coyotes turn up their noses at
dead Mexicans as being too peppery. I have heard the fact mentioned over
and over again, by Americans who had been in the Mexican war, that on
going over the field after their battles, they found their own comrades with
the flesh eaten off their bones by the coyotes, while never a Mexican corpse
had been touched; and the only and most natural way to account for this
phenomenon was in the fact that the Mexicans, by the constant and
inordinate eating of the hot pepperpod, the Chili colorado, had so
impregnated their system with pepper as to render their flesh too savory a
morsel for the natural and unvitiated taste of the coyotes.
These coyote diggings require to be very rich to pay, from the great
amount of labor necessary before any pay-dirt can be obtained. They are
generally worked by only two men. A shaft is sunk, over which is rigged a
rude windlass, tended by one man, who draws up the dirt in a large bucket
while his partner is digging down below. When the bed rock is reached on
which the rich dirt is found, excavations are made all round, leaving only
the necessary supporting pillars of earth, which are also ultimately
removed, and replaced by logs of wood. Accidents frequently occur from
the “caving-in” of these diggings, the result generally of the carelessness of
the men themselves.
The Cornish miners, of whom numbers had come to California from the
mines of Mexico and South America, generally devoted themselves to these
deep diggings, as did also the lead-miners from Wisconsin. Such men were
quite at home a hundred feet or so under ground, picking through hard rock
by candlelight; at the same time, gold mining in any way was to almost
every one a new occupation, and men who had passed their lives hitherto
above ground, took quite as naturally to this subterranean style of digging
as to any other.
We felt no particular fancy for it, however, especially as we could not get
a claim; and having heard favorable accounts of the diggings on Weaver
Creek, we concluded to migrate to that place. It was about fifteen miles off;
and having hired a mule and cart from a man in Hangtown to carry our long
tom, hoses, picks, shovels, blankets, and pot and pans, we started early the
next morning, and arrived at our destination about noon. We passed through
some beautiful scenery on the way. The ground was not yet parched and
scorched by the summer sun, but was still green, and on the hillsides were
patches of wild-flowers growing so thick that they were quite soft and
delightful to lie down upon. For some distance we followed a winding road
between smooth rounded hills, thickly wooded with immense pines and
cedars, gradually ascending till we came upon a comparatively level
country, which had all the beauty of an English park. The ground was quite
smooth, though gently undulating, and the rich verdure was diversified with
numbers of white, yellow, and purple flowers. The oaks of various kinds,
which were here the only tree, were of an immense size, but not so
numerous as to confine the view; and the only underwood was the
mansanita, a very beautiful and graceful shrub, generally growing in single
plants to the height of six or eight feet. There was no appearance of
ruggedness or disorder; we might have imagined ourselves in a well-kept
domain; and the solitude, and the vast unemployed wealth of nature, alone
reminded us that we were among the wild mountains of California.
After traveling some miles over this sort of country, we got among the
pine trees once more, and very soon came to the brink of the high
mountains overhanging Weaver Creek. The descent was so steep that we
had the greatest difficulty in getting the cart down without a capsize, having
to make short tacks down the face of the hill, and generally steering for a
tree to bring up upon in case of accidents. At the point where we reached
the Creek was a store, and scattered along the rocky banks of the Creek
were a few miners’ tents and cabins. We had expected to have to camp out
here, but seeing a small tent unoccupied near the store, we made inquiry of
the storekeeper, and finding that it belonged to him, and that he had no
objection to our using it, we took possession accordingly, and proceeded to
light a fire and cook our dinner.
Not knowing how far we might be from a store, we had brought along
with us a supply of flour, ham, beans, and tea, with which we were quite
independent. After prospecting a little, we soon found a spot on the bank of
the stream which we judged would yield us pretty fair pay for our labor. We
had some difficulty at first in bringing water to the long tom, having to lead
our hose a considerable distance up the stream to obtain sufficient
elevation; but we soon got everything in working order, and pitched in. The
gold which we found here was of the finest kind, and required great care in
washing. It was in exceedingly small thin scales—so thin, that in washing
out in a pan at the end of the day, a scale of gold would occasionally float
for an instant on the surface of the water. This is the most valuable kind of
gold dust, and is worth one or two dollars an ounce more than the coarse
chunky dust.
It was a wild rocky place where we were now located. The steep
mountains, rising abruptly all round us, so confined the view that we
seemed to be shut out from the rest of the world. The nearest village or
settlement was about ten miles distant; and all the miners on the Creek
within four or five miles living in isolated cabins, tents, and brush-houses,
or camping out on the rocks, resorted for provisions to the small store
already mentioned, which was supplied with a general assortment of
provisions and clothing.
There had still been occasional heavy rains, from which our tent was but
poor protection, and we awoke sometimes in the morning, finding small
pools of water in the folds of our blankets, and everything so soaking wet,
inside the tent as well as outside, that it was hopeless to attempt to light a
fire. On such occasions, raw ham, hard bread, and cold water was all the
breakfast we could raise; eking it out however, with an extra pipe, and
relieving our feelings by laying in fiercely with pick and shovel.
The weather very soon, however, became quite settled. The sky was
always bright and cloudless; all verdure was fast disappearing from the
hills, and they began to look brown and scorched. The heat in the mines
during summer is greater than in most tropical countries. I have in some
parts seen the thermometer as high as 120 degrees in the shade during the
greater part of the day for three weeks at a time; but the climate is not by
any means so relaxing and oppressive as in countries where, though the
range of the thermometer is much lower, the damp suffocating atmosphere
makes the heat more severely felt. In the hottest weather in California, it is
always agreeably cool at night—sufficiently so to make a blanket
acceptable, and to enable one to enjoy a sound sleep, in which one recovers
from all the evil effects of the previous day’s baking; and even the extreme
heat of the hottest hours of the day, though it crisps up one’s hair like that of
a nigger, is still light and exhilarating, and by no means disinclines one for
bodily exertion.
We continued to work the claim we had first taken for two or three
weeks with very good success, when the diggings gave out—that is to say,
they ceased to yield sufficiently to suit our ideas: so we took up another
claim about a mile further up the creek; and as this was rather an
inconvenient distance from our tent, we abandoned it, and took possession
of a log cabin near our claim which some men had just vacated. It was a
very badly built cabin perched on a rocky platform overhanging the rugged
pathway which led along the banks of the creek.
A cabin with a good shingle-roof is generally the coolest kind of abode
in summer; but ours was only roofed with cotton cloth, offering scarcely
any resistance to the fierce rays of the sun, which rendered the cabin during
the day so intolerably hot that we cooked and ate our dinner under the shade
of a tree.
A whole bevy of Chinamen had recently made their appearance on the
creek. Their camp, consisting of a dozen or so of small tents and brush
houses, was near our cabin on the side of the hill—too near to be pleasant,
for they kept up a continual chattering all night, which was rather tiresome
till we got used to it.

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Social Digitalisation: Persistent

Transformations Beyond Digital

Technology and the Historian Transformations in the

Mobile Technology and Social Transformations Access to

Primary Mathematics 3A Hoerst

Sustainability Transformations, Social Transitions and

Of Beast and Beauty Daughters of Eville 1 1st Edition

Of Sea and Song Daughters of Eville 3 1st Edition

Digital Twin Technology 1st Edition Gopal Chaudhary

Beyond Capitalism New Social Architectures 1st Edition

“The focus on social digitalisation theory offers an original contribution to

ISBN 978-3-030-79866-6 ISBN 978-3-030-79867-3 (eBook)

Cover illustration: Hugh Williamson/Alamy Stock Photo

significance most of us were still only beginning to grasp. Worldwide,

with such actions and decisions often taken in a highly non-transparent

this approach to the analysis of some key modern settings in order

Salzburg, Austria Kornelia Hahn

1 Introducing Social Digitalisation 1

3 Digitalisation and the Production of Bourgeois Privacy 85

6.5 Co-programming Technologically Programmed

Preliminary definition: ‘social digitalisation’ refers to the dynamics entailed

on the cover of this book. Digital organisation and transformation have

1.1 Digitalisation Beyond Technology:

to increase productivity in the grocery business have always relied on the

2 According to information at: https://foodlicensing.fssai.gov.in/PDF/Food_Categorization_C

clerks and sales assistants or to each other when shopping, of course,

As we have already seen in the case of ‘digital fruits’, food wrapping

the first transparent packaging material available for consumer prod-

5The introduction of the self-service supermarket will be addressed more comprehensively in

6The phenomenon of simultaneous symbolic reduction and augmentation is addressed in

factories introduced as “sanitary bakeries” in pointed contrast to their

‘discontinuous’ in relation to the original shape of the product or raw

been prepared in private households and restaurants. As in other indus-

‘restaurant’ has its origins in an abbreviation of restaurateurs, which was

at a time when traditional cooking procedures are increasingly having to

the company apparently relies on a strategy devised by market analysts

1.2 Digitalised Organisation in Early

(1968) and Walter J. Ong (1982) on how the introduction of literacy to

the factory system. In a study of historical court records documented

of demarcation in place of the limited local demarcations previously

Having established demarcations and degrees of longitude and lati-

widespread metaphors for labelling social processes and concepts: the

The telegraph appeared at the same time that revolutionaries were

Headrick thus links the communication technology of the telegraph, i.e.

Alsina (2017, p. 61), such processing basically involved the structured

Other everyday life examples of the application of algorithms offered by

and an assistant to work together in the production of patterned fabric.

however, is that this form of digitisation has necessarily been comple-

1.3 The Logic of Social Digitalisation:

these two different types of processing for the purposes of analysis.

of its seemingly unchanged and ‘objective’ application would equally

LOOKING FOR GOLD

T HE town of Placerville—or Hangtown, as it was commonly called—

INDIANS AND CHINAMEN

W ITHIN a few miles of us there was camped a large tribe of Indians,

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