ABSTRACT
In Morten Tyldum’s acclaimed film The Imitation Game (2014), BenedictCumberbatch plays Alan Turing, a man who was instrumental both in the invention of the digital computer and in cracking the complex ciphers developed by the Nazis in the Second World War. The film ends with Turing’s suicide in 1954, two years after being prosecuted for ‘gross indecency’ – for having sex with another man. Turing’s crime had been to desire the wrong person, to have the wrong desire. The man who helped to transform our world by the manipulation of a binary system (on/off ) was prosecuted and persecuted thanks to another binary system – right/wrong, good/evil, moral/ immoral, legal/illegal, heterosexual/homosexual, normal/perverse. There is a terrible irony here. The machines that Turing dreamed up are now in our cars, airplanes, watches, TVs, mobile phones, cookers – increasingly everywhere – as well as in our PCs and in the mainframe computers that power the complex infrastructure of society. And they exploit a simple polarity to develop the most complex patterns imaginable (and those beyond imagination). Society’s system of ethics and legality, by contrast, can often seem to be stuck in a rigid and unforgiving set of simplistic binary oppositions. Desire: right or wrong.
