Abstract
This article traces the early history of CAPTCHA, the now ubiquitous cybersecurity tool that prompts users to “confirm their humanity” by solving word- and image-based puzzles before accessing free online services. CAPTCHA, and its many derivatives, are presented as content identification mechanisms: the user is asked to identify content in order for the computer to determine the identity of the user. This twofold process of content identification, however, has evolved significantly since CAPTCHA’s inception in the late 1990s. Pivoting away from a realist framework, largely dependent on the standard tenets [of] cryptography, toward a relational framework premised on aesthetic contingency and social consensus, CAPTCHA’s arc uniquely illustrates how contested notions of both “content” and “identity” become materialized in contemporary internet infrastructure. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s exegetical study of early photography, this critical historicization aims to foreground CAPTCHA as a particularly fraught juncture of humans and computers, which, as with Benjamin’s intervention, productively troubles received ideas of humanism and automation, mediation and materiality.
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