Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Jordan Frith, "Barcode" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Date: December 31, 2025
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Jordan Frith, Pierce Professor of Professional Communication, Clemson University

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Overview

In this episode, Dr. Miranda Melcher interviews Dr. Jordan Frith about his book "Barcode," part of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. The book unpacks the history, workings, controversies, and cultural significance of the barcode—a technology so embedded in modern life that we hardly notice it anymore. Through engaging anecdotes, technical explanations, and cultural analysis, Frith explores how this simple technology has shaped—and continues to shape—our daily lives and global commerce.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Why Write a Book About Barcodes?

[02:17–06:47]

• Dr. Frith’s research shifted from flashy new media (VR, smartphones) to invisible infrastructures that shape our lives.
• Inspired after realizing that, despite the hype around technologies like RFID, barcodes remain more significant and successful.
• What started as a plan for a small article expanded into a full book after discovering the depth of barcode history, even finding an archive at Stony Brook University.
• Quote: “I've just become more interested in the mundane and how it shapes our lives and how we don't notice it… Becoming boring is maybe the ultimate praise you can give to the ultimate success of a technology.” — Jordan Frith [06:47]

2. What Are Barcodes and How Do They Work?

[07:38–13:39]

• Types of Barcodes:
  • Linear (1D) Barcodes: Recognizable black lines with numbers—e.g., UPC, EAN.
  • 2D Barcodes: Square formats readable in multiple directions, storing more data (like QR codes).
• Barcode Mechanics:
  • UPC barcodes use 15 pairs of lines; 12 contain data, 3 are guard bars.
  • Data is encoded in patterns of black and white lines, interpreted through binary.
  • Barcodes only store an ID number; pricing and other information are stored in a backend database.
• Quote: “You can actually train yourself to read those lines… if you try really hard.” — Jordan Frith [12:38]

3. Why Have Barcodes Endured Over More ‘Advanced’ Technologies?

[14:17–18:38]

• Despite advances like RFID, barcodes have lasted 50 years largely unchanged (first UPC scan: 1974).
• Advantages:
  • Simplicity—they only store an ID, with all data elsewhere.
  • Deeply entrenched infrastructure and global standards.
  • Training millions to use them and replacing them would be costly and disruptive.
  • Alternatives (like RFID) are more technologically complex and error-prone.
• Quote: “Barcodes are pretty simple and work and we’re very used to them. So replacing everything we've built… is going to take a lot of work… nothing has come around, which is why we're still buying groceries with a 50-year-old technology.” — Jordan Frith [18:08]

4. Why Do Barcodes Look the Way They Do?

[19:30–23:42]

• The ‘bar’ design wasn’t inevitable: original patents (1949) proposed a bullseye (concentric circles).
• In the early 1970s, a grocery-industry ad hoc committee narrowed down to two finalists: the IBM linear barcode (UPC) and the RCA bullseye design.
• Linear UPC was chosen by just a few votes; barcodes could have looked radically different.
• Decisions made—data standards, separation of symbol and standard—still impact global commerce.
• Quote: “Once something becomes so taken for granted, it feels inevitable… it's kind of remarkable to realize how close we came to ending up with something completely different.” — Jordan Frith [23:18]

5. The Power of Standards and Simple Design

[23:57–27:58]

• Standards committees kept data encoded in barcodes simple (just an ID), not including price or expiration.
• Numbering systems are tightly controlled; first digits indicate country, company, product class, and a check digit.
• Tight standardization led to global scalability—emulated by other industries.
• These bureaucratic decisions, made in ‘random boardrooms,’ ended up shaping global infrastructure.

6. Controversy and Pushback: Barcodes in the 1970s

[28:24–39:57]

• Barcodes sparked national protests, boycotts, and legislative hearings in the US—much to the surprise of inventors and manufacturers.
• Major controversy: elimination of item-level pricing for shelf-level pricing. Labor and consumer groups feared loss of transparency and agency.
• Carol Tucker Foreman, Consumer Federation of America, led a nationwide protest campaign.
• At one point, retail adoption was so slow that insiders doubted whether barcodes would survive.
• Quote: “The greatest threat the barcode ever faced... led by a woman who was really important and very successful and very powerful.” — Jordan Frith [36:14]

7. From Controversy to Mundanity: The 1992 Presidential Election

[41:15–49:57]

• By the early ’90s, barcodes had become so mundane that being unfamiliar with them was used as a political attack.
• George H.W. Bush was reported as being amazed by a barcode at a grocery convention—a story picked up by the NYT and used by opponents to paint him as out-of-touch.
• The story was exaggerated—he’d actually seen new, unreleased tech—but the narrative ‘stuck,’ haunting him through his presidency and even in obituaries.
• Quote: “By 1992… if you didn't know what a barcode was, you simply just didn’t shop. That's a remarkable turnaround from a technology that had been highly controversial… a little over a decade earlier.” — Jordan Frith [49:19]

8. Barcodes as the Mark of the Beast

[50:31–59:19]

• Some evangelical groups interpret barcodes as the ‘Mark of the Beast’ from Revelation, predicting tattooed barcodes and cashless economies as steps toward apocalypse.
• Sustained minor boycotts, conspiracy books, and even protest letters ensued—often hinging on a misunderstanding that barcodes embed ‘666’ in their design.
• While this did not threaten barcode adoption, it’s a fascinating example of how technology is culturally interpreted.
• Quote: “Barcodes… in some niche evangelical groups became essentially the work of the devil… to some communities [they] represent something much deeper, quite literally apocalyptic.” — Jordan Frith [57:27]

9. Will QR Codes Replace Barcodes?

[59:56–69:26]

• No—because QR codes are barcodes; they’re a type of 2D (matrix) barcode, just more data-dense and readable in multiple directions.
• Multiple 2D barcode types exist; QR codes are just most visible.
• QR codes' popularity in the West exploded during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially for ‘touchless’ interactions, but they were already central to payment systems in East Asia.
• Cultural perceptions and practical uses influence barcode technology adoption, not just technical advances.
• Quote: “QR codes are barcodes. And also QR codes are far from the only 2D barcode… So next time you board a plane… you’re gonna have a 2D barcode.” — Jordan Frith [61:00]

10. What Didn’t Make the Book?

[70:01–74:23]

• Frith wishes he could have written more about:
  • International histories (Europe/Japan)
  • The role of patent trolls (Jerome Lemelson’s lawsuits over barcode patents)
  • Artistic/activist barcode interventions (e.g., war with Walmart by art collective Recoding.org using fake barcodes)
• Quote: “Barcodes are actually a really essential piece in the history of patent trolls… So those are two things [patent suits and barcode activism] I wish I could have spent more time on.” — Jordan Frith [72:13]

11. What’s Next?

[74:23–76:02]

• Frith plans to write public-facing pieces on the cultural imagination of barcodes (e.g., barcodes in dystopian sci-fi, tattoos, architecture).
• Also researching "infrastructural ghosts"—forgotten but still-visible physical infrastructures (like the AT&T microwave relay network).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Becoming boring is maybe the ultimate praise you can give to the ultimate success of a technology.” — Jordan Frith [06:47]
• “The history is wild because barcodes are kind of this taken for granted technology… it feels inevitable.” — Jordan Frith [23:16]
• “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it… Still doing what it needs to.” — Miranda Melcher [18:38]
• On the mark of the beast: “Barcodes, sign of the Antichrist. That same barcode… to some communities represents something much deeper, something like quite literally apocalyptic.” — Jordan Frith [57:27]
• On the Bush grocery store moment: “Not knowing what a barcode is… became a kiss of death for a president as being too out of touch with the American people.” — Jordan Frith [45:56]

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Important Segment Timestamps

• [02:17] — Why Dr. Frith wrote about barcodes
• [07:38] — Types of barcodes and their mechanics
• [14:17] — Barcodes’ resilience over technologies like RFID
• [19:30] — How the barcode’s appearance was chosen
• [28:24] — 1970s controversies and protests
• [41:15] — 1992: Barcodes as ‘mundane’ in US political culture
• [50:31] — The “Mark of the Beast” controversy
• [59:56] — QR codes: Hype, death, and COVID-era resurgence
• [70:01] — What got cut from the book / Additional stories
• [74:23] — What’s next for Dr. Frith's research

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Conclusion

This episode highlights both the everyday invisibility and the extraordinary cultural resonance of barcodes. Dr. Frith’s research unpacks a technology that exemplifies “mundane infrastructure”—a simple idea with world-changing effects, endless stories, and cultural meanings, from economics to conspiracy theories. The product of archival deep-dives and curiosities about the mundane, Barcode brings forward the unseen yet omnipresent ways that infrastructure and standards shape our lives.

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Transcript

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

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[Dr. Jordan Frith]

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[New Books Network Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm really excited today to be speaking to Dr. Jordan Frith about his book titled Barcode. It's just come out From Bloomsbury in 2023 as part of the Object Lessons series, which are short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. This one, obviously is about barcodes, which are all over the place. We use them pretty much every day and we probably don't ever think about them. Thankfully, Jordan has thought about them and is here to tell us all about it. So, Jordan, thank you so much for being with us to tell us about the barcode.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Well, thank you for having me and.

I'm really excited to talk with you about this.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I am too. But before we get into all things barcode, can you please introduce yourself and explain why you decided to write this book?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Sure. So, I am the Pierce professor of.

Professional Communication at Clemson University, and I.

Decided to write this book because of.

Kind of some random serendipitous things happening.

So I mostly am a mobile media researcher and I especially earlier in My.

Career, like dissertation in the first, like maybe six, eight years of my career.

So studied mobile applications, which I still do, but mostly focused on like emerging.

Like flashy, cool new media. Like I have a book on VR, I have a book on smartphones as locative media. I wrote my dissertation on the app.

Foursquare in 2012, which I don't know.

If anyone remembers, but it was cool for a little while.

And over the years I've kind of.

Transitioned to becoming more and more interested in infrastructure, so, so kind of more.

Focusing on all of the invisible things that we tend not to think about that shape our lives in really important ways.

So for example, rather than studying mobile phones and like mobile applications, I began.

Studying like mobile networks and all like.

The back end stuff that makes our mobile communication possible.

And that extended into study studying forms.

Of mobile media and infrastructure, about data and data infrastructures.

And I wrote a book on radio.

Frequency identification for MIT Press and that came out in 2019. And that's kind of this like cool, powerful, new emerging like auto ID technology.

But as I was writing that book, for all the hype about RFID technology, I realized none of that was even.

Remotely as important or as successful as barcodes.

Because barcodes, they are one of the.

Most successful technologies of all time. And for a little bit of context, I'm a 40 year old, so I've never shopped without barcodes. Until I sat down to start writing this book, I've never even imagined a world without barcodes. How you went to a grocery store, how you receive packages, or anything like that.

So as I finished my RFID book, I was like, you know what, I.

Want to write something about barcodes. And the way I started was I figured I might be able to write like an article or two because I couldn't imagine there was that much about barcodes. I mean, they're just barcodes, they're just this thing that we, if you're a certain age, you just grew up with. And they were everywhere. They're how I board a plane, how I get into punk shows, back when I was cool and used to go to a lot of shows, they're just everywhere.

And so I started thinking I could.

Like write an article.

And as I dove more into the.

History, I found that there was more than enough for a book. And not only was there more than enough for a book, there was more than enough to write like a really engaging, fun book about kind of the history of the barcode and revealing like.

All the way it shaped our world.

And all the weird, interesting things about it that have been kind of lost to history as it's become completely taken for granted.

And as a side note, it was.

Always my dream to write an object lessons book because those are my favorite books and this was kind of my shot at doing it. So that's how I got started on barcodes. I ended up finding out that there is an archive of barcode history at Stony Brook University, which shocked me. I had never imagined anyone would have an archive of barcode history.

So I spent a week doing research there. And yeah, I ended up going from thinking I could maybe squeeze an article about and be like, hey, barcodes are cool, to writing this book. And by the end having to make.

A ton of tough decisions of what to cut because these books aren't that long, because I found so much that interested me. And really over the process, like, I kind of fell in love with barcodes and all of their cultural importance and.

Just really focusing on kind of the mundane.

I've just become more interested in the mundane and how it shapes our lives and how we don't notice it. And that making the argument that not.

Noticing it and looking at these technologies.

We think of as boring, that becoming boring is maybe the ultimate praise you can give to the ultimate success of a technology. It's really, really hard to become boring, to become so successful that we don't think about it.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And that's exactly why I can see how you wanted to have an object lessons book. That's exactly the kind of thing that they seem to do and that we love reading about and talking about. So wonderful introduction into all things barcode. Before we go further though, I think we do need to make sure we know what we're talking about, which seems like an odd thing to have to clarify given how much we use them. But how many kinds of barcodes are there and what are the main types and categories?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So that's a great question.

And that was something, I mean, I had never thought of before I started doing this research either.

So ultimately, like, there are two broad types of barcodes.

There are what's called linear barcodes, where the data is read in one direction and that's the barcode that anyone listening to this would recognize. If you've been grocery shopping, if you've received a package, if you buy anything at a retail store, they're the black lines that have the numbers under them that contain the data. Those are linear barcodes, means they're read in one direction.

There are also more advanced barcodes called.

2D barcodes that I'll talk about more later. But they're square and they can be read in different directions so they can contain more data.

But even for linear barcodes, there are.

More types than I could possibly list here, or more types than I know. I came across a book that had a collection of something like 300 barcode symbols.

So the most famous one, the one.

That is immediately recognizable is the UPC barcode or EAN if you're in Europe. But then there are longer versions of that like code 39, code 128, there's shorter versions like my book has an ISBN 10 barcode and most of these.

Linear barcodes, they relatively look the same.

But the design is slightly different in.

That the number patterning is different and.

The number of lines are different. But yeah, there are so many types of barcodes that ultimately do basically the same thing and it's a difference of data storage and capture and also data difference of standards. But then the two main categories are just linear, which are the black lines everyone's used to and the square 2D barcodes. Those are the two main types.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I'm glad you covered my next question in the book because honestly I have wondered about this for a really long time and always kind of thought it might be a dumb question. But you talked about it in the book, so clearly it's not a dumb question. How do barcodes actually work?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So yeah, I agree it is not at all a dumb question because it.

Is also a question that until I started doing this research I had never once thought about it all just was kind of like magic. Like if I'm in self checkout line or if I'm going to a show with a ticket with a barcode, it just gets scanned and something happens, right? I've never thought about it, but the.

Way they actually work is pretty interesting. So to just use like UPC or.

EAM barcodes as an example and most linear barcodes work on this principle is UPC barcode is 15 sets, 15 pairs of black lines.

And of those 15 pairs, 12 of.

Those pairs contain data.

And then there's also three pairs if.

You like look at one, the longer ones on the left, middle and right, those are just guard bars for the scanner, those don't really matter. But the other 15 pair, the other 12 pairs each contain a number.

And the way the number is like determined is basically through a binary process where a scanner looks and it's looking.

For is there black ink or is there white space?

And so a black line next to a black line will represent a 6 based on, like, the width of each.

Of those lines and the space between those lines. Right.

And every six is determined by a standards body. And so every six is the exact.

Same, like, pairing of two different black lines of varying width. Right. And varying space, and that goes from zero to nine. So the way a scanner reads a barcode is it just looks for those two pairs. A pair of fours, for example, has a certain width for each black line. A pair of three has a separate width, and it just decodes that through a binary process and pulls the numbers out of it.

So for a UPC barcode, all it.

Contains is 12 digits which are written.

Underneath it, but it's just written underneath.

It in case the barcode tears.

But each of those 12 pairs of.

Lines just dictates a number which is set by a standards body, which is read automatically, and then that is fed into a database system where it pulls up the record. So there's nothing in the barcode about most barcodes, about prices or expiration dates or anything like that.

It's.

It's purely an identification number based on, like, the patterning of lines.

And as a sign, I probably got.

Like, way too into my research and ended up learn liking barcodes too much.

You can actually train yourself to read.

Those lines if you try really hard. Yeah, you can.

I mean, I could do it with.

Like a resource thing next to me. I couldn't do it off the top.

Of my head, but, yeah, they're always the same. So.

So you can train yourself to look at a barcode and be like, well.

That width of that black line and.

Then that much space and then that thin black line is this number.

A human, ostensibly, if they had too.

Much time on their hands, could train themselves to read the barcodes, like, just based on the width of the lines.

So ultimately it's just patterns of lines.

And spaces grouped into pairs and. And each of those pairs represents a number from 0 to 9. Like, that's ultimately all that it is. And it's had just a major impact on everything, just through that kind of like, binary process of decoding whether what it's looking at is black or white.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm. All right, Before I get too dragged into the idea of being able to read barcodes myself, we will move on. Um, I'd love to ask, you mentioned earlier RFID tags and all sorts of other kind of things in the automatic identification and data capture category that can do a lot more than a barcode. They can hold a lot more data, but you already mentioned kind of. Well, but barcodes are the ones that win. Barcodes are the ones that have magically become things we don't even notice. What benefits do barcodes have over more powerful things within their own category?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So yeah, I think that's a really.

Good question and it's something I grappled.

With a lot in my work because one of the most interesting things to.

Me about barcodes is the first UPC barcode was scanned in 1974 on June 26 at a grocery store in Troy, Ohio and then in Europe. It was a couple years later it went through a similar process.

And it's amazing to me that that.

First UPC barcode which was on a pack of gum, which is now in the Smithsonian in Washington, is essentially the same exact barcode that you would scan at a grocery store today.

It is a 50 year old technology.

That more or less has remained completely unchanged as everything else has changed around it. Like it really hasn't changed.

And in that time we've come up.

With much more advanced identification processes for items. RFID probably being the most famous, which can contain way more data and can be read like wirelessly.

But part of the reason that barcodes.

Have endured for 50 years and not that many technologies manage to endure for 50 years and still be more successful than they ever are, like 6 billion barcodes are scanned every single day now.

Is partly because of their simplicity.

Barcodes were designed from the very start to be relatively simple.

Like I mentioned, UPC barcodes, EAM barcodes.

Most linear barcodes, they don't really contain much data.

All they contain for the most part is a string of numbers just used.

To identify an object. And all the data is stored elsewhere, so in like a back end digital database.

So like there's just not that much in them. So they're relatively simple to code, relatively simple to create, and relatively simple to manage. And one of the advantages they have.

I think, is that simplicity.

They have like incredibly established bureaucratic organizations.

That like manage them and control them.

And two, we have spent so much time developing barcode infrastructure. People are so used to them that more advanced technologies like RFID don't just.

Have to be better than barcodes, they have to be way, way better than barcodes to justify overturning billions of dollars in establishing barcode infrastructure.

Like millions of hours of training people.

How to use barcode infrastructure and, and.

They simply just work for the most part like they're a very successful technology in that most barcodes are easy to scan, whereas RFID is much more powerful.

But it's also much more technologically complex and a lot more can go wrong.

So it's kind of that old adage.

That if you keep something simple, there's not much that can screw up with it.

Wireless identification technologies, you can run into issues with radio waves don't pass well through water or metal or things like that. Whereas barcodes, it's just the same, basically the same type of laser and the same patterns of lines and spaces that people were using in the 70s you.

Can still use today. And so to get rid of them, to replace them.

And lots of people have predicted they.

Were going to get replaced, die and things like that.

So my last chapter is called Misplaced.

Eulogies and it documents like four moments in history where people were like, well, this is going to be the barcode killer and it hasn't happened.

And I think it's just a combination of. Barcodes are pretty simple and work and.

We'Re very used to them.

So replacing everything we've built to support these global barcode structures is going to.

Take a lot of work. And for it to be worth it.

It'S going to have to be something.

That is a lot, lot better than the barcode.

And at least as of yet, nothing.

Has come around, which is why we're.

Still buying groceries with a 50 year old technology.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

If it's not broke, don't fix it.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Right, Yep.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Still doing what it needs to.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah.

And it would cost a lot of money to replace it. And so people aren't that excited to.

Spend money or train people for new things. Right.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Now we've, I've been asking you about the barcode and you've been helping us understand sort of what it is and how it works and with the implicit assumption that what it looks like, even with all the different kinds, the kind of basic one, the one that we all see at the grocery store, isn't something to ask about in and of itself. And of course this is completely wrong because as you document in the book, the fact that it is linear with little black and white lines and a little rectangle was not inevitable. So how and why did barcodes come to look like these barcodes that we've been mainly talking about?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And that was one of my favorite.

Things that I found when I dove into the archives was.

Yeah, as I mentioned as a 40 year old, like barcodes are just barcodes, right?

Like they're black lines on pieces of paper.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I mean, barcode is it. Right? Like bar code, it implies that that's what it must be.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yep. And actually a barcode is just series.

Of lines and spaces that contain numbers. It doesn't have to be in any specific shape at all. It doesn't have to be the black lines in order on a, like, white.

Background or anything like that.

And the lines also don't even have to be black, but it doesn't have to be that. It just has to be series of lines and spaces and it can really be in any shape.

So the first barcode that was ever.

Invented was patented in 1949 by Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver.

And it is, if you look back at that patent, it is completely unrecognizable.

To us today as a barcode. It's in the shape of a bullseye.

So instead of the lines and spaces.

Being this vertical, like horizontal spread, they were concentric circles and the spaces between the circles are what dictated the data.

And when the grocery industry in the us, which was the first one that.

Really pushed the barcode and officially adopted.

It, there'd been a try in the.

Railroad industry that failed before that, which is why it's kind of just a footnote.

But when the grocery industry decided they.

Wanted to use barcodes and they wanted.

To adopt barcodes, they created something called.

The ad hoc committee, which. Which really made decisions that are still being felt today about how barcodes would work.

And the ad hoc committee had three major responsibilities.

The first was just deciding, are barcodes something that we should do? They decided yes.

Then they had to come up with.

The data standard, which is really key to all this, because just like with any technology, it's not just about the technology.

There's all these documents and all these.

Data standards and requirements behind it that make all this work.

But then the final thing they had.

To decide was which barcode they were going to use.

And there were. They came down to a bunch of finalists. And most of those finalists, if you.

Looked at with no context, you would have no idea they are a barcode.

But the two finalists, the two final.

Ones that they were focusing on, and.

The decision came down to the last.

Day of the committee. So this is how close we were to ending up with barcodes. Look completely different, were the IBM barcode, which is what we ended up with. So that's the UPC or EAM barcode, which also looks like code 39 and all these other barcodes, and the RCA bullseye barcode, which as I said before, was based on like concentric circles that went out. And based on that original patent and.

So they came down to the last day deciding between the IBM barcode, which.

Has now become one of the defining.

Symbols of capitalism and people have tattoos of it, and it's all over Sci Fi and Bullseyes. And we came within a couple of votes within that last day of this.

Committee that had been meeting for three.

Years of ending up with a Bullseye barcode. And at the time it was actually.

A really controversial opinion because RCA was very mad that theirs was not selected and, and threatened to pull out of the barcode business altogether.

So, yeah, barcodes are kind of this.

Taken for granted technology.

And once something becomes so taken for.

Granted, it feels inevitable.

So to look back on like the.

History and the meeting notes of the ad hoc committee, it's kind of remarkable to realize how close we came to ending up with something completely different to having Bullseyes all over our products and our tickets and things like that. And it really did come down to that last day of that committee and it was a controversial choice and we could have ended up with something completely different.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

The beauty of archives and what you find in them very much from that bit of information. What else did the ad hoc committee do? What were some of its other key decisions that impact us still?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

One of the key decisions was they decided that the data standard, which was.

The universal product code, which is why they're called the UPC barcode.

Just as a note, Europe a couple.

Years later did the International Article Number barcode. It's kind of the same process, but.

They decided that the standard had to.

Be separate from the symbol. That was a thing that they decided early on. So they decided upon the standard, which is what each one of those numbers.

Mean in a barcode.

And then they decided on the symbol.

But what each one of those numbers mean is really important because that has.

To be tightly controlled for it to work.

And maybe the most important decision they.

Made was to keep it simple. So as I mentioned before, there were talk in that meetings that barcodes were going to contain all this data, like expiration dates, prices were going to actually be in the barcode and things like.

That, which in my opinion, if they.

Had gone with that and there was discussion of it, probably would have killed the barcode in its tracks because it would have all of a sudden become a really technical process.

But they instead decided to go with.

The real simple process of it's just going to be an identification number and all the other important information is going to be stored in a database elsewhere, which is how still to this day most UPC Barcodes work when you scan.

It, you're not scanning it to, like.

Actually pull information off of it. Besides just an ID number that, like, tells you what this thing is and then the data about it is stored elsewhere.

And also they set up the standard.

That tells you what each one of those numbers are. So that's another really important thing that is really tightly controlled to this day by a global committee that controls barcodes. So if you look at a barcode and you see the numbers that are printed on the bottom, if you know.

What you're looking for, you can have.

An idea of kind of what those numbers are saying, because they're very standardized.

And the UPC committee, like, the Universal.

Product Code is a really tight standard.

That basically has allowed grocery stores and.

Then it spread into retail, and they developed other standards. Like, there's all kinds of standards for different products, but what each one of those numbers means and how they have to be tightly controlled so that they.

Will work in any grocery store and that they're required. Right, because one of the risks was.

If they adopt barcodes without a standards and different grocery stores adopt different barcodes, then, like, it's just too expensive and none of this is going to work.

So they set up a very defined standard of what each one of those numbers means. Like, if you look at the first.

Digit in a barcad, that will tell you what country that comes from and then what the next numbers mean. Then it will tell you, like, what the company is, then it will tell you the product class, then there will be a check digit.

And they set up standards for all.

Of that, which were then emulated by other industries that developed their own standards.

And then created global organizations that tightly.

Control how all this works. And all that really goes back to meetings of a bunch of grocery executives in, like, the 1970s, none of whom, from reading archival notes, had any idea that they were doing anything this important. Like, that was another fun thing. Like, they all thought they were doing something important. None of them, based on anything I found, would have imagined that you would be talking to me on a podcast about barcodes more than 50 years later and that this would still be a thing.

But, yeah, they set up the number standards.

They chose the symbol.

And while other industries use different symbols.

Other industries use different numbering standards, most of them are based on those decisions made by a bunch of grocery executives in the early 1970s in random boardrooms. So bureaucracy, hey, like, bureaucracy and meeting minutes sometimes can tell you a whole lot about how, like, the world ends up getting shaped in Ways people probably never realized at the time.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And that's exactly one of the things my own research looks at in a completely different realm. And so it remains very, very true, whether you're talking about barcodes or peace treaties. So fascinating to get a little bit of an insight into those boardrooms. I'd love to pull on a thread. You briefly mentioned earlier the idea that some of these decisions were controversial, that the barcode has faced some opposition later in its life as well. What are some of the controversies and pushback that barcodes faced after these decisions were made and it was launched into the world? And then why do you think that the barcodes weren't taken down?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah, so I had had no idea.

That anyone had ever cared about barcodes.

As, like, a controversial technology until I started my research. And actually, in the 1970s in the.

US they were extremely controversial.

They led to national protests and boycotts.

And Senate hearings and state legislature hearings. Consumer groups came pretty close to stopping barcodes in their tracks.

And part of the problem was reading.

Stephen Brown's really fantastic history of the ad hoc committee. He was actually on the ad hoc committee. The ad hoc committee consulted with a ton of different groups involved in barcodes. So they consulted with grocery store owners.

With retailers, with packagers, with printers who actually had to print these things.

But one group they did not consult with very much was consumers.

And part of the reason was that.

Just no one on the committee thought consumers would care. Right.

But when the barcode was released in.

1974, protests began almost immediately from consumer groups against barcodes.

Led in part. And it's one of those things where, like, it's impossible to kind of tell.

How things would have been different, but it is possible.

Like, if it was not for a.

Woman named Carol Tucker Foreman, these protests might not have gone anywhere.

But Carol Tucker Foreman was the head.

Of the Consumer Federation of America in 1974, and she was someone who the ad hoc committee members later would refer to as a formidable adversary they were unprepared for. And she immediately went on, like, a nationwide tour to warn consumers about barcodes, to protest barcodes.

Within a month of the release of.

The first barcode, she went on the Phil Donahue Show. I don't know if you remember that.

Show, but it was on when I was a kid. Phil Donahue show, to warn consumers that.

The grocery industry was trying to rip them off and things like that.

And it became this huge controversy.

And what's particularly interesting, like looking back from 2023, as someone my age who grew up with barcos is.

It's a controversy that feels kind of abstract because it's a bit hard even now for me to wrap my head around. But most of the controversy focused on.

This thing called item level pricing, which.

Was that before barcodes, price tags were.

All attached to individual items. So if you were at a grocery store, a can of soup would have a price tag on it, a box.

Of Mac and cheese would have a.

Price tag on it.

And part of the reason the grocery store wanted to introduce barcodes was to.

Get rid of that, because that cost a ton in labor.

And they wanted to replace it with.

Shelf pricing, which is the only kind of pricing I've ever known. Right. Like, when you go to a grocery store, there's a price on the shelf for the products. And yeah, it's fine.

But in the 1970s, it was a huge deal. And so she led these protests being like, we can't get rid of item.

Pricing, like, and replace them with barcodes.

Like, if you're going to do barcodes.

You have to keep item level pricing.

She argued that without individual item pricing.

Consumers would lose their agency, we'd lose financial transparency, all kinds of things.

And she was an incredibly forceful figure. She did a national tour debating grocery industry executives.

And, like, it got tons of national coverage, all this controversy about barcodes.

And keep in mind, this is like the mid-70s.

This is before most people had ever seen a barcode because they were slow to take off, in part because of these consumer protests.

And at one point, the grocery industry was like, well, here's a compromise. We'll give you grease pencils and you can write the prices on the thing so it won't be that bad. And she gave this furious interview about how that was the equivalent of the.

Grocery industry telling people, let them eat cake.

So pulling a full Mary Antoinette on that. And so item level pricing became this huge sticking point where, like, people were protesting it.

She was leading these protests, and, like, they were winning. And the grocery industry was not expecting it at all.

And they began to push for legislation to maintain item level pricing. So, sure, you could do barcodes, but.

You also had to tag every item with price tags.

And you had consumer groups being like.

Well, the fact they won't compromise on that is ridiculous. It just shows they don't care. But the reason this was really important for the barcode's history in the 1970s was it was not a little issue.

Because barcode systems cost a ton of.

Money to implement, like, roughly $250,000 per grocery store between the training between the.

Systems and things like that. And so the only way they were financially viable was for them to get.

Rid of item level pricing and replace.

It with shelf level pricing. So they became pretty terrified of her and they began doing their own PR pushback, even as consumer groups began handing out pamphlets about like, the great supermarket Rip off was a 1976 pamphlet I found. And there were editorials like, you'll never know the price of your item till you check out.

Which wasn't really true, but whatever that was like the rhetoric.

And it became this kind of existential threat because as they began pushing for legislate legislation at the state level and the federal level to maintain item level pricing, and if that had passed, they.

Just wouldn't have been able to go forward with barcodes because you wouldn't have been able to save on the retail labor. Right.

So in a few states they actually did get legislation passed temporarily.

Michigan actually had a weird law that like stayed on the books till 2011, but I'm not sure if that actually stayed. But they never got federal legislation passed.

And by the late 1970s, these protests.

Have been like, so successful that you had some grocery industries giving anonymous quotes that they had lost faith in the barcode and they were thinking of abandoning it because it was just too controversial. And if they had to keep item level pricing, it was just not financially viable.

So it's this kind of weird controversy where I'm sure there were reasons people.

Really cared in the 1970s. Like, I don't mean to like downplay the controversy at all, but.

But it is a controversy that for someone who grew up with shelf level pricing, like, it is a little hard.

To wrap your head around, like why people cared so much because I've just.

Never known item level pricing, you know what I mean? But it really did.

It was the greatest threat the barcode ever faced. And it was led by a woman who is really important and very successful and very powerful.

And it's impossible to tell like, how.

Exactly the controversy went away in my book.

Like, I talk about possibly, like, as they finally started going into grocery stores.

Much slower than people expected by the late 70s, in part because of these protests, maybe people got used to it.

But also not to like attribute too.

Much agency to one individual person.

Carol Tucker Foreman became the US Secretary, US Assistant Secretary of Agriculture in 1977, which is around when the national coverage started dying down. So it's also possible that they lucked.

Into her getting a different job because she really was the face of this. She was all over the place fighting this.

And then there were also controversies about.

Retail because barcodes do automate some forms of retail.

Like the retail clerk union protested them.

Because it meant the loss of retail jobs.

But because this is us, and because.

Of when it happened in the 1970s, labor had already started to kind of lose some of their power.

That was never.

That never got nearly as much attention as the consumer protests. But there were like labor protests.

And then there were labor protests later.

In the 90s when the US Postal.

Service introduced barcode sorting systems and eliminated.

Hundreds of thousands of jobs.

So, yeah, there this thing that.

From.

My perspective, I could never have imagined.

Anyone caring about actually was extremely controversial throughout the 1970s and then popped up again in the 1990s, and controversial to.

The point where if a few pieces of legislation that were being considered have.

Been passed, I don't know that we.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Would have barcodes today, which would be very strange.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

It would be very strange. Yeah.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Thank you for taking us through those controversies because as you said, thinking it from today's perspective, you're like, hang on, what?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah. And then you also had like minor controversies pop up every once in a while. Like, I saw some articles in Britain, like occasionally someone would code something wrong. So you'd have these stories, I think in like the late 80s, early 90s.

When barcodes were starting to get big in like the UK where someone would scan a barcode and like a $1 thing would show up as a hundred dollars and then that would be like a front page story on the sun that like the news now, those were.

Like more minor controversies. And also that's not actually a barcode issue.

That's someone entering something into a database. Wrong. Right. And almost certainly like not intentional.

But you'd also have like minor blips.

Of controversies, like of someone just entering data wrong.

Which those were never as impactful.

And also, like, let's be honest, consume, like people typing in prices by hand can type them in wrong too. And barcodes are far more accurate than someone typing each price.

But you'd also have minor ones like that.

But the big ones were the consumer protests about item level pricing and things like that in the 1970s in the US that really came close to like actual, like legislation. Like there was a US Senate hearing that Carol Tucker Foreman was one of the lead witnesses on about the possibility of federal protections of item pricing. And that might have killed the barcode before really it even like started.

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[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Given that background, then given that bit of history, it's even more surprising that from the 1970s, by 1992, by the presidential election, then if we're staying at the federal political level, there's actually a great instance you talk about in the book of even in just that short space of time, barcode's going from, you know, a few bits of legislation away from not existing at all to being so invisible that they cause an incident in the presidential election. Yeah, what happened here?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So, yeah, so that legislation, it might have still worked or barcodes might have.

Still worked, but it's possible it's not.

Because what happened with barcodes was by the 80s, they had begun to pick.

Up in the grocery industry after like disaster in the 70s, like people just weren't adopting them.

And then also in the early 80s.

Based on the grocery store model, they were adopted by like the Department of Defense, by the automotive industry, and slowly spread into logistics into like shipping and stuff like that throughout the 80s.

But by the 80s they began to like grow exponentially in the U.S. so by the late 80s, more than 50%.

Of grocery stores were using barcodes, which was just a massive increase from a decade before.

And in my book I talk about.

Like when barcodes became like mundane and like there's all kinds of things you can point to, you can point to statistics or whatever.

But I actually use the 1992 presidential election to kind of make the case that like at least in the US.

That was kind of when they became like a sign of just everyday America. And what happened, which is actually really interesting. And for people who are a little.

Older, they might actually remember this was the 1992 election was George Bush Senior.

Versus Bill Clinton versus Ross Perot running as a third party candidate and Bush.

Senior at the time for the dynamics of the election, it was almost hard.

To find Democrats to run against him, like in the primary, because post Gulf War, about a year and a half for the election, he had, like a 90% approval rating. He had one of the highest approval ratings of any president ever.

But his approval rating had begun to drop. And there was a fateful event in.

February 1992 where George Bush senior went to a grocery store convention.

And there was only one reporter there.

Covering the convention because it was a grocery store convention. And I can't imagine many people want to cover a grocery store convention.

And there was a front page story the next day on the New York Times by Andrew Rosenthal describing a situation where someone had shown George Bush a barcode. And he told them he was amazed.

By the technology and in wonder of it.

And it talks about a look of.

Wonder flickering across his face that he'd been shown a barcode in 1992.

And that was on the front page of.

The New York Times.

And that story then blew up from there and became kind of the symbol.

Of George Bush being out of touch with regular America because this same technology.

That in 1979 had been so controversial, by 1992, reporters and Democratic operatives were.

Using as, oh, George Bush doesn't even know what a barcode is like. He's not a real American. He doesn't understand the plight of, like, regular Americans, because by then, barcodes were kind of everywhere. And the idea that you wouldn't know how to use one was so shocking.

To people and such a sign of.

Like, out of touch elitism that it became a major political attack on him.

That lasted throughout the election. James Carville wrote a postmortem of the election about how Bush was not able.

To connect with the people, and that's why he lost. And the main example he gave was that he didn't know what a barcode.

Was and shockingly, lost that election in 1992.

It kept going.

In 2011, CNN had an article for biggest presidential gaffes, and they listed Bush.

In the barcode as, like, number one, because it was a symbol that he just didn't understand America. He didn't know what a barcode was.

And the New York Times, in their.

Obituary for Bush, which I believe was in 2018, even mentioned that barcode story as a kind of symbol of his struggles for connecting with the American people.

So the two things I think that are most interesting and illustrative about that are in terms of the barcode, that this technology, that in 1979, grocery industry.

Representatives were, like, giving interviews, that they'd lost faith in it because of Consumer concerns and protests, and we're thinking of abandoning it.

Thirteen short years later, not knowing what a barcode is and being amazed by it became like a kiss of death.

For a president as being too out of touch with the American people. Like, Hillary Clinton gave an interview and.

Was like, we need a president who.

Understands the technology we use in grocery stores.

So in just like over a decade, it had become like just this big symbol of like, everyday American life. And it was an interesting confluence of.

Not just the barcode as becoming kind of mundane that quickly, but also like.

The narratives around Bush, as he'd already established a narrative as kind of elite.

And out of touch because he's from.

A rich northeastern family. He had been in Washington forever. He was head of the CIA, then.

He was vice president for eight years.

He was president, like, if we're being.

Honest, he probably hadn't grocery shopped in like 20 years, because why would he.

So that narrative about him, along with.

Like, the increasing, like, mundanity and acceptance of the barcode, became this huge political story that would not die.

And what was super interesting when I looked into it is that that story.

Which I had grown up as a.

Kid knowing, like, it was such a.

Big story that I even remember it.

From when I was like 9 years old, that story is like, mostly fake. Like, it's kind of just a. It's stretching the truth to the point.

Where it's stretched so far that it's a borderline lie. Because what actually happened was Bush went.

To this grocery convention and someone showed.

Him a new barcode technology that had not even been released on the market.

Which was able to take a torn up barcode and scan it even after.

It had been torn up. And that's what Bush was looking at when he said that this was amazing technology and had a look of wonder across his face.

So he was right to say it was amazing.

It wasn't even released yet. That is kind of remarkable. You could read a torn up barcode.

But Rosenthal, when he published his first.

Front page story, who was not the reporter at the event, he just took it from a one paragraph pool report from a different reporter. Rosenthal didn't know that and didn't note that.

And then it just kept getting picked.

Up by paper after paper without noting the fact that Bush was not talking about an actual normal barcode. He was talking about this, like, cutting edge, like, identification technology. Right?

And even as his people realized within.

A week of the story that this was going to be a major problem and they started doing interviews, his Press.

Secretary gave a press conference explaining the whole situation. All of that, it didn't matter. Like, the narrative was set, and it just kept going. And like I said, it's something that plagued him up until his death. Like, it made it into his obituary.

That because he didn't know what this barcode was, that he was out of.

Touch with the American public.

Which, one, wasn't true because that was not what actually happened.

But two, I think, is even more.

Than any kind of statistic I could throw. The fact that by 1992, the narrative was that if you didn't know what a barcode was, like, you simply just didn't shop.

Is a kind of remarkable turnaround from a technology that had been highly controversial.

Had led to national boycotts, and it almost failed a little over a decade earlier. So it was really, like, kind of that quick. At least in the US it was different in other places, but at least in the US that it made that turn that quickly, that it became a.

Huge part of a presidential election where.

It was just a narrative that wouldn't die and followed George Bush Senior, like, literally into his New York Times obituary 30 years later.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That is pretty intense.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

It is pretty intense, yes.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And definitely makes the point about the ubiquity of barcodes on the point of intensity. Object lessons. For anyone who's not aware of what these books look like, they're quite cute and small. I don't have particularly big hands, but they sort of fit in the palm of my hand quite nicely. These are not the books necessarily where one would open a chapter and go, oh, there's a biblical quotation staring at me in the middle of this book. Why does chapter six start with a biblical quote?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So, yeah, I also am not the type of writer who ever thought I.

Would be starting a chapter with a biblical quotation.

But that particular biblical quotation is from.

The Book of Revelations or Book of Revelation.

And it's two sentences in the Book.

Of Revelation that describe what later became known as the Mark of the Beast.

And the Mark of the Beast is essentially the mark that when the beast.

Rises and the Antichrist, like, comes to.

Earth, which is all this apocalyptic stuff, because the Book of Revelation, I don't.

Know if you've ever read it. I've actually had to read it a bunch of times for my work. Is it totally weird?

I admit it is a totally bizarre.

Book and completely different than every book in the Bible. Like, it is a wild book, and it's just all this apocalyptic imagery of a beast rising from the ocean. And the Antichrist rising and all this other stuff.

And one of the things in it, because the passages.

And he so the beast causeth all.

Both small and great, rich and poor.

Free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand or in their forehead.

And that no man might buy or sell, save that he had the mark.

Or the name of the beast or the number of his name. So it's just that.

It's just these two sentences. But those two sentences later became known.

As the mark of the Beast, which has become one of the most enduring pieces of biblical imagery, especially apocalyptic biblical imagery.

And essentially the way it's interpreted is when the beast rises and when the Antichrist recruits, Recruits his followers, his followers will take a mark, so on their.

Right hand, their forehead or whatever, and.

Then they will need that mark to buy or sell.

So they will not be able to make transactions without that mark. And when God comes down, the people who have that mark, things are not going to end up well for them when everyone else is raptured. So that's the mark of the beast, right.

Now, what does that have to do with barcodes? Well, in the late 70s and then especially in this book by this evangelical.

Author named Mary Ralph, she wrote a.

Book claiming that barcodes themselves were the.

Mark of the beast.

That this was all a global conspiracy to get people to buy barcodes and.

Get them used to this identification technology that eventually would replace.

Replace cash, would replace, like, currency.

And that taking the barcode was the mark.

And it actually had begun even earlier. Like, I found ads for sermons in.

Like, mid-1970s, like, papers, well before most people had ever seen a barcode, warning them that the barcode might be the mark of the beast.

And there were boycotts from evangelical communities and things like that, warning people that if they shop at stores with barcodes that they are essentially like taking the.

Mark of the Antichrist. That, yeah, all of that.

And barcodes weren't the first technology, nor.

Will they be the last. Like, RFID is another one that people have decided as the mark of the Beast.

But it became.

They're the ones that have lasted the longest, right?

So it became a thing where barcodes in some niche evangelical groups became essentially.

The work of the devil, that this ad hoc committee of kind of boring grocery executives were actually leading this global conspiracy to get people to start using these barcodes that would become the mark, with the eventual goal, according to Marie Valf, of eventually tattooing barcodes onto hands so that then there would be no.

More cash and every purchase would have.

To be made through, like, barcode tattoos or anything like that.

So it became hugely controversial. And I have one letter to the.

Editor I'm just going to read really quick. That is short, but, like, just to put this in perspective. And this is from a letter to.

The editor I found in a Cedar.

Rapids, Iowa, paper where a guy wrote in.

And he wrote, while pastors, lay people, and concerned people picket against the evils of pornography, a greater evil is spreading across our land. Behold, Cedar Rapids. You are becoming the birthplace of the.

Mark of the beast, the UPC system.

And I will fully admit, as an objective researcher, I laughed out loud in.

A silent archive at the idea of someone saying, of an evangelical arguing that the barcode was worse than pornography. But that kind of thing was all over the place.

And part of the reason it popped up, interestingly, going back to one of your earlier questions of how barcode works, part of the reason it popped up was because of Marie Ralph and a technologically. Technological illiteracy issue. So, as I mentioned before, barcodes have 15 pairs of lines, but three of those pairs are just guard bars.

They don't have any data in them. They're just to orient the reader.

They're the three longer ones that are.

On the sides in the middle.

She looked at the barcode, and in what she describes as a moment of.

Divine inspiration from God, she decided that.

Those three guard bars all represented the.

Number six, so that secretly, the grocery.

Store had it embedded.

666 and every single barcode you used in the US or Europe as a.

Way for you, when you're purchasing a.

Project product, to essentially engage with 666, the number of the devil. Right?

And so this became a thing of people warning people not to use them. There were all kinds of books written.

About barcodes as secret plot by the Antichrist.

And it still kind of survives to this day. So in part, it's been replaced by.

Like, concerns about RFID or biometric implants.

And things like that. But even to this day, when Joseph Woodland, the father of the barcode, one of the two men on the original patent, when he died in 2012, the comment sections on his eulogy were just.

Filled with, like, kind of vile comments about how he was, like, working for the devil and how he'd introduced the mark and he'd introduce 666 into, like, American society and all of that. So even that has not fully disappeared. But, yeah, barcodes, sign of the Antichrist.

So that same barcode that I have used to buy countless products and never Thought about to some communities represent something.

Much deeper, something like quite literally apocalyptic.

Which I think is just a really interesting example of kind of the malleability of cultural imaginations, of technologies, right. That like, you never know, like certain groups, these technologies, even ones that seem.

So mundane to so many of us.

Can take on these, like, much deeper meaning based on these, like, kind of advanced literacies of biblical texts of like, what the mark means. That to most of us just seems.

Almost like a foreign language. And so, yeah, I have a chapter on the Mark of the Beast and tracing that history and kind of the impacts of it. And it never really like, threatened the.

Barcode, but it is something that still endures. You can still find websites today that.

Talk about the barcode as the mark of the beast. And most of them still use Marie Ralph's thing of misreading the guard bars as each being a six and a.

Bunch of grocery executives embedding 666 in.

Every product you buy.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

I admit I was not expecting that chapter when I opened this book, but it was fascinating to read about.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah, I was not expecting to have to go back and read Book of.

Revelations when I started doing this research.

But it was a fun read and it is wild too, because if you read it, like all the Mark of.

The Beast stuff, it comes from two sentences in the entire Bible, which makes it kind of extra like, wow, that's.

An impactful two sentences that people are.

Protesting, like infrastructure technologies 2,000 years later because of them.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, really. All right, moving on from the Book of Revelations, I wanted to ask you about something that I was expecting you to talk about in the book. And sure enough, you do. The idea that perhaps even if RFID tags have not overtaken barcodes, that there is a looming replacement to the barcode on the horizon, the one that, especially in the west, we've gotten increasingly familiar with over the lockdowns for the pandemic QR codes. And yet reading your book, QR codes cannot replace barcodes. Why not?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Yeah, so QR codes. Because there are lots of articles that.

Are like, QR codes are going to replace barcodes soon and things like that.

But yeah, I mean, the primary reason.

Like, it's impossible is because QR codes are barcodes. Like, they just are.

As I mentioned earlier, the two main.

Categories of barcodes are linear barcodes. So like the lines in order and then 2D barcodes. So matrix barcodes, which can contain way more data because it's being read in different directions.

And QR codes are just a form.

Of 2D barcodes or matrix barcodes.

And so QR codes fundamentally are barcodes.

Like they have different standards dictating what the spaces and like the lines mean, but they work on fundamentally the same principle. It's just that they contain more data because they're far more data dense and the data can be read in different directions.

But yeah, so QR codes are barcodes. And also QR codes are far from.

The only 2D barcode. So QR codes are just one of.

Many types of 2D barcodes. So next time you board a plane.

For example, if you have a mobile boarding pass, you're going to have a 2D barcode.

And that 2D barcode might be a.

QR code, but it also might be.

A data matrix code. There are a whole lot of different.

2D barcodes.

So yeah, part of the reason they.

Can'T replace barcodes is one, they are.

Barcodes and two, they do have advantages.

Over older forms of barcodes in the sense that they can contain way more data, like I said.

And in the 90s there was a.

Whole bunch of articles in the barcode industry about how the 2D wave was going to replace linear barcodes because they were more powerful.

Because that's another thing about QR codes. People talk about QR codes like it's this new technology.

QR codes are from 1994. They were invented by the Japanese automotive industry and they were one of many 2D barcodes, many of which still invented and began being invented in like 1989.

But in the 90s, people began predicting that they were going to replace them because they can just like do more like, whereas a UPC code, you can fit 12 numbers, you can fill a.

Lot more on a QR code. But a QR code still is functionally a barcode.

And part of the reason that like QR codes have taken off is because QR codes, while they're a barcode, they're biggest impact, I think at least so far, has been in an interestingly different way in that unlike barcodes, which are really an data infrastructure that we interact with very little except to maybe scan itself checkout lines. One of the main uses of QR.

Codes is for actual people to access information. We use them so we think about them more.

So they become kind of a bridge.

Between smartphones and other information and QR.

Codes themselves, just like the barcode in.

More traditional, like linear forms, they have a super interesting history as well. So I have a chapter on QR.

Codes where QR codes, they're from 1994. And I don't know if you remember, but in the mid 2000s they started.

Getting hyped as the future of everything.

Like there were all these articles like the future of marketing. And I remember QR codes were like.

Showing up on newspapers.

And I remember when I started as a PhD student in 2008, a professor who is maybe trying a little too hard to be cool had like QR codes on this syllabus. And so they were hyped huge in the mid 2000s and then they died so hard that they became a literal joke because they became a stand in.

For technologies that nobody wanted that were pushed on us. Because if you remember, pre Covid QR codes had mostly disappeared except in a few cases in the West. It's different in China especially. I'll get to that in a second.

But they went from this super hype technology, this new form of 2D barcode.

That people were going to read on their phones everywhere to being like jokes.

In stand up comedy jokes on late night show. There's this great book called QR Codes Kill kittens from like 2013. And it's a book that documents some.

Of the absolute most bizarre ways companies tried to use QR codes that were all way worse than just doing a Google search.

And so by like 2013, 14, there.

Were countless articles, some of which I cite in my book, declaring that the QR code was dead and the QR code was now the stand in for technologies that are pushed on us that no one's ever going to use. Right? And then they came roaring back in the COVID pandemic.

But as a quick aside, like all the eulogies for QR codes being dead, those are all like very Western centric because even as QR codes had become.

A joke in the US they had become like an absolute essential backbone of like the Chinese micro financial system.

So in China they're part of one of their major social media apps is.

Basically how people like exchange money.

And so they're everywhere in China. So even as they were being declared.

Dead in the U.S. they were like absolutely exploding in East Asia and some other parts of the world.

But in the west they came roaring back during COVID Like I'm sure you.

Noticed that now they seem to kind of be everywhere.

You see commercials with them with asking you to scan a QR code, they began popping up on menus, they began being used for Covid like contact tracing protocols. And really it took like a global pandemic for them to come back. And it wasn't just the global pandemic, it was also that Apple and Android.

Made it so that the camera app could scan QR codes without using a separate app.

But what was really interesting to me.

When I was, like, looking at that.

History is part of what led to.

Like, the explosion of QR codes during.

The COVID pandemic was a misunderstanding of COVID from the earliest days of the.

Pandemic that kind of refused to die. And that was the whole Covid spreads through contact.

So I don't know if you remember, like, the first months of the pandemic when, like, our messaging was like, wash your hands 10 times a day, like.

Don'T touch anything, all that stuff.

Like, I remember trying to find hand sanitizer in the town I live in.

And it was sold out everywhere.

And by early summer, it turned out that scientists had realized, like, that probably.

Wasn'T true, that it was airborne or spread through saliva, and that it was not spread through touch. Shaking hands or touching a menu was a very unlikely way you were going.

To get Covid, however, that it's still.

Stuck in people's head. So you still had it and it just wouldn't go away.

So you had menus being replaced, you.

Had business cards being replaced, you had.

QR codes essentially, like, thriving in this.

New touchless society, even after the scientific consensus was that the touchless society was kind of a early understanding of how Covid spread that was later disproven.

And from there, people have gotten more and more used to them, and companies.

Have become less and less silly in how they use them.

And so from 2020 to 2021, I think the number of barcode QR codes.

That was scanned jumped by more than 25%, which is a pretty remarkable number for any technology. But it's an especially remarkable jump for a technology that was 30 years old at the time. Right. Because QR codes are from 1994. They're not new.

And so for a 1994 technology in.

The west, they had already thrived in, like, China. But in the west, for them to.

Have, like, their huge jump almost three.

Decades after they were first invented and first released is kind of remarkable. And it was this big confluence of factors of the focus on no touch.

And then four places, unlike the US.

That did contact tracing and required vaccine.

Thing, vaccine confirmation, a lot of those arose because the more technologically advanced solution.

Like using Bluetooth to track locations of phones, raised privacy concerns that people protested against. So they moved to QR codes that people would scan because that was like a less invasive measure.

So it was like all these things.

Fell into place at once. To have this kind of like rebirth and like this rise from the dead of a technology that had failed so hard that people were writing books about how ridiculous it was in the mid 2010s.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And that story, I think amongst all the other ones, really helps explain the comment you made right at the beginning of this interview of you thought maybe it would be an article and then actually you had to cut loads out because turns out barcodes have so much to talk about. Perhaps this is asking too difficult a question, given that what you've already told us on that point. But if you did get one more chapter to add, for example, or a few pages in addition, if you could add one thing back in that you had to cut, what would it be?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

So if I was writing this is not my one thing, but if I was writing like a much longer book.

Like a 350 page book, I would.

Have looked more like at the history.

In Europe and Japan, which also, like invented barcode standards, even though eventually they were made to be all interoperable. Interoperable. Like, I focused on the US and like the upc because that's what the space was for. And it would have just got really messy.

But actually, if I were to like, I actually have two things that I.

Would have loved to write a chapter on.

One, barcodes are actually a really essential.

Piece in the history of patent trolls because there was this guy who.

Arguably was either, depending on what you read, one of the great inventors of the.

20Th century or a complete scam artist.

And he made millions of dollars off patents.

He has the most patents in history, but he never invented anything. So he just had all these patents and then just didn't like, make anything.

And one of the things, his name was Jerome Lemelson, the patent lawsuits that.

Ended up getting him the richest were.

He started suing, like, Japanese companies and like some American companies that he had a patent for something that kind of described a thing like using barcodes to like scan things in an assembly line.

As they passed by. He never built this thing. And let's just say it's pretty tenuous, the tie.

But he ended up, like, settling with.

These companies for tens of millions of dollars or no, over a hundred million dollars. In the 1990s, he settled for all these companies for suing them related to these, like, barcode systems used in, like, assembly lines. And after his death, actually those cases were overturned.

Right. But so barcodes, like, really, he was.

Arguably like the ur Text for patent trolls. And his biggest thing was suing company over barcodes in the 1990s and these.

Like systems that are kind of similar to something he might have patented in.

The 50s, who knows?

So I would have written a chapter like on, yeah, barcodes in that history of patent trolls. And then the other one which I.

Briefly mentioned in the book, like in the final chapter, but like I can't.

Get into it, is there was this really interesting case of this activist group, recode.com starting a war against Walmart where they were letting people print barcodes because.

Barcodes were never meant to be secure. Like I said, they're just identification numbers that pull up records in a database.

So they started printing the bar, letting people print barcodes to cheap items that they could then stick to expensive items.

And scan them at Walmart and the cheap items would show up.

And they had this website, they were an art collective.

They like started this big fight with barcode, with Walmart and they lost horribly. Like Walmart threatened to sue the hell out of them and like got it taken down.

But it was just this really interesting.

Kind of like side note in barcode history of just like this art activist.

Group, like exposing the design of barcodes.

Which was intentional but was never meant to be secure as a way to.

Like kind of empower consumers and start.

A war with like the world's largest corporations. Right.

So those are two things that I.

Wish I could have spent more time on because I think that's just an absolutely wild story that doesn't have a happy ending and didn't last long. Like Walmart put all their power to getting them shut down.

But I do think, yeah, the patent.

Troll and an art collective trying to use barcodes to go to war with Walmart. Those would be like two that I absolutely like wish I would have covered.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So clearly there is more material on barcodes. Is that what you're working on next, a sequel?

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

I'm not working on a sequel necessarily to this book, but I do think.

I might turn some things into like more public facing articles because I'm trying to write more for the public.

So I have a chapter on like the cultural imaginations of barcodes. So like barcodes and dystopian science fiction. I'm working on an article in that.

Which is in the book Barcodes and Tattoos.

Like there's all these interesting barcodes in architecture.

People have built buildings based on our barcodes.

So I am like kind of working on now that with more space, going into more depth on all those things because while I have a full chapter.

On it, like, there's a lot to cover in those chapters. So that's one thing I'm working on.

And I'm also working on, like, studying this other kind of forgotten infrastructure, the AT&T, like, microwave relay network, which was this hugely important, like, Cold War infrastructure that went through 1950 to 1980s. And some of the towers still stand even though they haven't been operational. And I've actually done field work to visit them. And I'm really interested in, like, what.

I'm calling, like, infrastructural ghosts.

These, like, communication infrastructures that people don't.

Even remember what they were, that they.

Were important, that are still standing kind.

Of as ruins and our landscape that just no one even remembers what they were.

So, yeah, I'm working on, like, different infrastructural projects and also, yeah, working on.

Kind of expanding on some things and like writing for a public audience about some of the things that I do cover in the book.

Cool.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

All right, well, all of that sounds very fun. Thank you for the preview. And of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Barcode. It's just been published by Bloomsbury in 2023. It's part of the gorgeous Object Lesson series. Jordan, thank you so much for being with us on the podc.

[Dr. Jordan Frith]

Thank you so much for having me. And thank you for all the wonderful questions.

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