"Fold, Spindle..."

[Richard Gage]

EXCERPT FROM: < http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/slubar/fsm.html >

Steven Lubar

Smithsonian Institution

May 1991

"Do not fold, spindle or mutilate":

A cultural history of the punch card

But it was in the 1950s, after the invention of the computer and its
widespread business use, that everyone began to see punch cards.
Companies sent punch cards out with bills: the telephone company, utility
companies, and even department stores realized that they could
save a step in their billing process, as well as making it easier for them to
process the returned check, by using the cards themselves as the
bills.[10] By the 1960s, punch cards were familiar, everyday objects.

While company employees could be trusted to take care of the cards, the person
in the street could not. Warnings were necessary. In the
1930s the University of Iowa used cards for student registration; on each card
was printed "Do not fold or bend this card."[11] Cards
reproduced in an IBM sales brochure of the 1930s read "Do not fold, tear, or
mutilate this card" and "Do not fold tear or destroy."[12] I'm not
sure when the canonical "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" first appeared;
it's one of those traditions whose author and origin is lost in the
mists of time. Let's consider the words one at a time, stop and take them
seriously.

"Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate." Folding seems clear; you might fold a
card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you're not supposed
crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren't to be used
in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company
that issued them. "Spindle" is the word that most confuses people today.
Spindling is an old filing system; a clerk would have a spindle, an
upright spike on his or her desk, and would impale each piece of paper on it
as he or she finished with it. When the spindle was full, you'd run
a piece of string through the holes, tie up the bundle, and ship it off to the
archives. (The custom still survives in some restaurants; the cashier
spindles the bills as customers pay.) But you shouldn't spindle the cards:
they are part of someone else's system of paperwork, not your own;
they demand special attention.

"Mutilate" is a lot stronger than the other words. It expresses an angry
intention on the part of the mutilator, or, from the viewpoint of the punch
card user, a fear; people might take out their frustrations on their punch
cards.... (Indeed, punch cards were mutilated: users could buy
machines advertised to "recondition mutilated punch cards."[13]) Why would
people mutilate punch cards? Punch cards were the interface
between the public and the billing system. Metaphorically, they were where the
person meshed with the corporate world. They became
symbolic of the whole system. Earlier, it was the machines that were the focus
of attention; in the 1960s the cards took center stage.

The '60s

Punch cards became not only a symbol for the computer,[14] but a symbol of
alienation. They stood for abstraction, oversimplification, and
dehumanization. The cards were, it seemed, a two-dimensional portrait of
people, people abstracted into numbers that machines could use.
The cards came to represent a society where it seemed that machines had become
more important than people, where people had to
change their ways to suit the machines. People weren't dealing with each other
face to face, but rather through the medium of the punch card.
All of the free-floating anxiety about technology, the information society,
"Big Brotherism," and automation attached themselves to punch
cards. Examining the metaphorical ways in which punch cards were used lets us
understand some of the reaction and resistence to the brave
new information world.[15]

The first place that "do not fold, spindle or mutilate" was taken off the
punch card and unpacked in all its metaphorical glory was the student
protests at the University of California-Berkeley in the mid-1960s--the "Free
Speech movement." The University of California administration
used punch cards for class registration. Berkeley protestors used punch cards
as metaphor, both as a symbol of the "system"--first the
registration system and then bureaucratic systems more generally--and as a
symbol of alienation.[16] The Berkeley student newspaper
recognized their symbolic importance when it put the punch card at the top of
the list of student lessons: "The incoming freshman has much to
learn" the paper editorialized to new students in Fall 1965, "perhaps lesson
number one is not to fold, spindle, or mutilate his IBM card."[17]
The punch card stood for the university, and, of course, students had begun to
fold, spindle, and mutilate them.

The Berkeley Free Speech movement had its start in late 1964 when students
were prohibited from raising funds for political causes on
campus. It was opposed to what it saw as the increasing conformity and
alienation of American society and, more specifically, to the
pro-business policies of the University of California's president, Clark Kerr.
Mario Savio, a leader of the Free Speech Movement, wrote that
the main internal reasons for the revolt

derive primarily from the style of the factory-like mass miseducation of which
Clark Kerr is the leading ideologist. There are many impersonal
universities in America; there is probably none more impersonal in its
treatment of students than the University of California.[18]

Opposition to the bureaucratic organization, standardization and automation of
the university, and by extension, modern industrial society,
were central themes of the protestors' philosophy.[19] In the most famous
speech of the movement, Mario Savio used a memorable
technological metaphor:

There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, it makes
you so sick at heart, that...you've got to put your bodies upon
the gears and upon wheels...and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to
indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that
unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.[20]

Savio's speech is famous, but few have realized that "the machine" he had in
mind was not merely a mechanical metaphor for society; it was,
at least as much, a metaphor for information technology.

Berkeley students were well aware of the standard 1960s notion that the United
States had become an "organizational society." They
believed, with most of the popular sociological writers of the day, that "the
shape and tone of our society, indeed the very way we think is
dependent upon the products and information processed by large
organizations"[21] The university, wrote one student, was "a bureaucratic
machine."[22] Another called it a "knowledge factory": "mass production; no
deviations from the norms are tolerated."[23] The "information
machine" metaphor was made explicit in Hal Draper's history of the Free Speech
Movement. Draper, a participant in the movement, wrote
that the student in the "mass university of today" feels that it is "an
overpowering, over-towering, impersonal, alien machine in which he is
nothing but a cog going through pre-programmed motions--the `IBM'
syndrome."[24] Punch cards were the symbol of information machines,
and so they became the symbolic point of attack.

Punch cards, used for class registration, were first and foremost a symbol of
uniformity. Mario Savio wrote that individuals were processed by
the university, emerging as IBM cards with degrees.[25] A student editorial
suggested that the inflexibility of the bureaucracy and the
impersonal grading system" might make a student feel "he is one out of 27,500
IBM cards in the registrar's office."[26] The president of the
Undergraduate Association criticized the University as "a machine...an IBM
pattern of education." [27] A cartoon from a flyer printed by
Berkeley's W.E.B. DuBois club showed the university as a card punch machine
run by big business, its product students as identical to one
another as IBM cards. [Figure 2] It took a professor of sociology, Robert
Blaumer, to explicate the symbolism: he referred to the "sense of
impersonality...symbolized by the IBM technology.[28]

By extension, punch cards also came to represent the students themselves.
(After all, that was, in the students' eyes, the way the University
saw them.) In part, this was an attempt to claim the authority that had been
invested in the punch card. Punch cards were, after all, the visible
part of the bureaucratic system, which held power at the university.[29]
People deserved at least the same rights as punch cards. One student
at Berkeley pinned a sign to his chest: "I am a UC student. Please don't bend,
fold, spindle or mutilate me."[30] The punch card, its protection
by the Establishment guaranteed by the words printed on it, became an ironic
model for emulation. But the metaphor of the punch card cut
both ways. An editorial welcoming new students to the university in 1964
suggested that there was small chance of surviving Registration
without being "torn, mutilated or spindled by an IBM machine."[31] At least
one student felt she had failed: she complained, after registration, "I
feel like a small number stamped on a computer card."[32]

Because the punch card symbolically represented the power of the university,
it made a suitable point of attack. Some students used the
punch cards in subversive ways. An underground newspaper reported:

Some ingenious people (where did they get this arcane knowledge? Isn't this
part of the Mysteries belonging to Administration?) got hold of a
number of blank IBM cards, and gimmicked the card-puncher till it spoke no
mechanical language, but with its little slots wrote on the cards
simple letters: "FSM", "STRIKE" and so on. A symbol, maybe: the rebels are
better at making the machine talk sense than its owners.[33]

Students wore these punch cards like name tags. [Figure 3] Another form of
technological subversion was for students to punch their own
cards, and slip them in along with the official ones:

Some joker among the campus eggheads fed a string of obscenities into one of
Cal's biggest and best computers--with the result that the
lists of new students in various classes just can NOT be read in mixed
company.[34]

These pranks were the subversion of the technician. The students were
indicating their ability to control the machines, and thus, symbolically,
the machinery of the university. But it also indicates, like the students' and
administrations' shared use of the machine metaphor, something of
the degree of convergence of student and administration beliefs and methods.
This sort of metaphorical technical subversion rarely rises
above the level of prank.[35]

Perhaps more radical, or at least with less confused symbolism, were students
who destroyed punch cards in symbolic protest: the punch
cards that the university used for class registration stood for all that was
wrong with the university, and by extension, America. Students at
Berkeley and other University of California branches burned their registration
punch cards in anti-University protests just as they burned draft
cards in anti-Vietnem protests.[36]

The alienation symbolized by punch cards at Berkeley was an aspect of a
broader feeling of alienation, the "depersonalization" of being
treated like a number, not an individual. This reaction to the demands of
information processing technology can be found back at least as far
as the introduction of serial numbers for prisoners and members of the
military, and of Social Security numbers. The prisoner who loses his
name and becomes "just a number" is a staple of country music and prison blues
songs. These earlier precedents no doubt influenced
reaction to the introduction of social security numbers: a cartoon shows Uncle
Sam insisting that a citizen give his number when asked for his
name. [Figure 4] The impersonality of identification numbers became a staple
of 1960s counterculture: Phil Ochs sang "You've given me a
number and you've taken off my name."[37] The same feeling reached into
popular culture: Prisoner Number 6 on the TV show The Prisoner
repeated: "I am not a number; I am a person." He summarized his stand against
the "system" by saying, in the first episode: "I will not be
pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. My life is
my own."[38]

The depersonalization of the punch-card era found its catch phrase in the
words on the cards; its ubiquity gave it instant familiarity. One
observer of the period wrote that marijuana, the '60s escape from the rigors
of the real world, let you see "the strangeness of real
unfolded-unspindled-unmutilated life."[39] "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate"
became shorthand for a whole realm of countercultural
experience. The ecological movement of the early 1970s, a child of the 1960s
counterculture, picked it up too: a popular poster for Earth Day
1970 showed a picture of the Earth taken from space with the legend "Do not
fold, spindle, or mutilate."

Punch cards as symbols found their way into everyday use by people well
outside the counterculture. A murder mystery from 1970 was titled
Do Not Fold Spindle or Mutilate apparently because its publishers thought it
would sell books: the only punch-card related part of the story is
a mention of computer dating.[40] A book of advice to parents about their
children was not only entitled Do Not Fold Staple or Mutilate! but
was even shaped like a punch card, complete with the top left hand corner
chopped off![41] Stan Rogers summed up white-collar work in his
"White Collar Holler": "No one goin' fold, bend or mutilate me."[42]

When punch cards moved beyond the counterculture they took with them their
peculiar juxtaposition of contradictory symbolism. They
symbolized modern computer civilization, but also a notion of reaction against
the "IBM culture." Consider a birthday greeting card from 1968
[Figure 5]. The front shows a punch card punched with large holes in the shape
of candles; inside, the greeting reads " That's I.B.M. for happy
birthday!". Punching holes in the card is subversive; everyone knows that
you're not supposed to do that. Consider also the short-lived
tradition of using punch cards as Christmas tree ornaments, or even, combined
together, as Christmas trees![43] They show the acceptance
of the prime symbol of computerized bureaucracy, the welcoming of it into the
home. But the cards are being subverted to uses beyond those
allowed by the companies who issued them; there's an undercurrent of
disobedience in the popular use--more accurately, misuse--of punch
cards.

The same ambiguity can be seen in the ways that images of the punch card were
used in advertisements for one of the more peculiar fads of
the sixties, computer dating. [Figure 6]. The punch card became the symbol of
the modernity of that process. But the punch cards pictured in
ads for computer dating services are always changed a little bit. One
advertisement for computer dating showed Cupid holding a punch card,
with his arrow shot through it; another showed fashionably dressed young men
and women overlaid on a punch card.[44] These ads, by
blatantly mutilating the punch cards, suggest that the people behind the cards
are more important than the cards, and that the computer
behind the cards isn't to be taken too seriously.

Across the Atlantic, punch cards had a completely different career--one in
which punch cards became a much more serious symbol of
oppression. Germany, like the United States, used punch cards in the censuses.
[Figure 7] The German censuses of 1930 and 1940, though,
were rather more terrifying than the American ones--especially for Jews or
Gypsies who were asked to provide their religion or national origin.
The Nazis were superb record keepers, and punch cards were the best technology
for keeping records. According to testimony at the
Nuremburg War Crimes trials, one of the first things that arriving prisoners
at the death camp at Treblinka saw was a clerk sitting at a Hollerith
machine, punching cards to keep track of prisoners.[45]

The story of punched-card record keeping by the Nazis was lost, or largely
forgotten, until the 1960s and 1970s, when there was an enormous
backlash against against census-taking and record keeping in Germany and
Holland. "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate" never became a
slogan there, and the reaction against punch cards was not merely against the
bureacracy and anonymity they represented, but, more
seriously, against the power of the state that stood behind them.

Conclusion

And now we are at the end of the punch card era. The punch cards have
disappeared, and all that's left are the words, the slogan.[46] Is there
a moral here? I think that there is. Culture outlasts technology; the human
reaction to machines can last longer than the machines. The punch
card--or more accurately, the words on the punch card--became a convenient
metaphor for all that people disliked about the computer and
computerized big business and government: its narrow focus on easily quantized
details; its refusal to deal with customers or citizens as
people rather than bundles of information; its inclination to abstract,
mechanize, and computerize; to worry, at best, about the "human
interface" and not the human.

Understanding the strength of the cultural legacy of "Do not fold, spindle, or
mutilate" can help us understand the reaction to computerization.
Symbols are important, and the survival of these few words as a part of
popular culture suggests the depth of ambiguity about computerized
progress.

Fred Shapiro wrote:

> Can anyone supply any early documentation of usage of the punch-card
> phrase "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate"?  I would also be interested in
> early documentation of usage of the later slogan, "I am a human being: do
> not fold, spindle, or mutilate."
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
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