By recovering the history of simple finger counting techniques and their relevance to a wide range of enumerative and calculative technologies, this article argues that human fingers have long shaped the digital, and more importantly, that the digital has long shaped the fingers. The interfaces of calculating machines from the Roman abacus to the touchscreen calculators mathematize the body in very specific and consistent ways, such that the fingers have come to connote human reason just as fluids such as tears have come to connote human feeling. This embodied digitality naturalizes and humanizes the digital in ways that we have too often taken for granted. Digital calculating machines are not just utilitarian instruments under human control, but engines of hominization that, across much of the world today, define what it means to be human.
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