(I thought this would become something better, it didn’t work out, but I have a promise!)
A non-controversial statement: Computing is about references.
You’d like to refer to something that exists and do something with it. Now you can’t stop there: You need to be able to refer to non-existence, null. Maybe you are someone who can think of 0 as something other than a reference to non-existence. If you need to represent something electrically (utimately), you will need first and foremost have to distinguish presence and absence of electricity. If you find yourself in the sad profession of representing things electrically, you will realise that you need to give up. Forget about all those “other things 0 can be.” You will call “that doesn’t exist” 0 and “that exists” 1, and move on.
Once you have 1, and 0 so that you can have 1, you have infinitely many references that you can use. That you are using.