Informatic machines prevail in situations of great susceptibility to differentiation. This is why informatic machines rely so heavily on arithmetic discretization. (And why the integers are the most fundamental medium of computation.) But informatic machines will be found in any situation in which differentiation takes over. Hence weaving, one of the first human activities to be fully industrialized, was also one of the first human activities to be fully computerized. I mean computerized in a loose sense. The Jacquard loom of the early 19th Century had software imprinted on articulated cardboard ribbons. The looms used a control mechanism to execute this software on the appropriate hardware (the loom itself). Weaving's own susceptibility to differentiation is what made this process so easy. Threads are spun into discrete strands from a puffy woolen mass. Warp threads are arranged in vertical lines, facilitating discretization in one direction. The weft thread passes discretely under or over the warp threads, continuing the process of discretization. One direction is oriented perpendicular to the other, accentuating the capacity for difference. The textile grid, with its interacting orthogonality, is a perfect embodiment of digital media. (To be sure, weaving is truly contemptible from a Deleuzian perspective -- practically fascist -- given such an extreme form of striation and structure. Only felt, with its tangled, smooth heterogeneity, would pass the Deleuzian test.) Differential abstraction is the key technology here. And of course there are certain special mechanisms that facilitate differential abstraction. These may be physical, like switches and logic gates. Or they may be structural, like the symbol (the number), the array or list, the tree or the graph, or the grid. Switches are absolutely crucial for informatic machines. The “And” logic gate is produced by wiring two separate switches in series. While the “Or” gate is produced by wiring two switches in parallel. (It remains to be seen what effect this might have on Kittler's famous “serial” media of 1900, and the “parallel” media that came to dominate a hundred years later. But provisionally, we might say that the gramophone and its analog ilk are “And-media,” while computers are “Or-media.”)