Responding to the Technium: Anti-Civ or Next Nature?

Kevin Kelly’s book is hardly the first to broach the idea of technology over and above its constituent practices and devices, but his book, What Technology Wants, is worth wrestling with as Kelly makes its pages a veritable salon for transplanted arguments, many decades old; much of the value of the book is seeing these hetergeneous concepts juxtaposed uncomfortably.

This is not to say I didn’t like the book. Kelly’s two-chapter introduction to convergent evolution alone made the read worthwhile; the entire book is a very readable introduction to complex issues that have become inextricably wound up with our own lives. There are three concerns I would like to highlight; two are concerns with Kelly’s project, and one is a critique of his critics, ending with what is (hopefully) an improvement of Kelly’s own argument.

But first, we must establish a few terms. Kelly coins the neologism the technium to describe all human culture, and the emergent push of culture to develop further (seemingly) of its own accord. This holistic conception of technology is not new; Ellul called it technique, and German theorists before that technik, both intending the term to include the social and psychological feedback effects that invention inevitably brings about. This is in stark contrast to the modern use of the term, which largely confines technology to devices that were invented after you were born (to paraphrase Ken Robinson).

Kelly problematizes that definition somewhat, by adding an additional component—a teleology, tendencies that may be delayed but not declined, tendencies of the technium toward ever-increasing:

• Efficiency
• Opportunity
• Emergence
• Complexity
• Diversity
• Specialization
• Ubiquity
• Freedom
• Mutualism
• Beauty
• Sentience
• Structure
• Evolvability

While there is room for unpredictability, Kelly argues that the overall order of invention (fire, then electricity, then communication networks) is inevitable, and that this is largely due to the evolving nature of the technium. Jerry Coyne contests in his review the notion that the development of technology constitutes evolution in any coherent sense, but I’m with Kelly; this is evolution, albeit less in the biological sense and more in the cultural production sense, with once-dead technologies re-emerging to solve new problems (green wizardry, anyone?).

The inevitability of the technium is still a deeply problematic concept, but can be made less so if the ground is shifted somewhat towards the contingent inevitabilities of topological singularities. Manuel DeLanda discusses the concept at length in his book Philosophy & Simulation (for a primer, read my review). For our purposes, envision the possibility space for the emergence and development of the technium as a (grossly simplified) two-dimensional uneven surface, with dips and contours. Marbles dropped at random locations will converge upon one of the lowest settling points or stablilize upon a flat surface. It is in this sense that evolution can be both entirely contingent and yet improbably convergent (assuming a flat probability plane). We’ll return to this point.

Theorists and activists bristle at the idea that the technium is inevitable, in any sense. This is usually posed as an ethical stance, rather than a grappling with technology on its actual terms; only Ellul really seems to grasp both poles in his work, The Technological Society—insisting thattechnique is subsuming humanity and that it must be resisted. The chapter on Kaczynski mirrors Ellul’s concerns, and the concerns of the STS community more broadly, closer than I expected. Nevertheless, Kelly broaches the issues, only to handwave past many of them. Zerzan’s anti-civilizational critique is derided as hypocritical, Perrow’s discussion of normal accidents is brought up, but his policy recommendations are ignored. The dependence of modern society upon fossil fuels is shrugged at, quoting Matt Ridley “If we go on as we are, it’ll be very difficult to sustain things, but we won’t go on as we are. That’s what we never do.”—ignoring the path dependence of that statement, or the many lives that could be made worse for the long short term. Kelly says that the technium’s evolution is slightly more good than it is evil; perhaps just a 51-49% split. I suspect that is true, but Kelly then believes that this split compounds (that there is a primordial “good” 51% that builds and builds upon itself), whereas I suspect each new technique is similarly split; it is in that sense that I am a technical optimist, albeit no where near as optimistic as Kelly. In particular, the social and politic realities of the technium are simply depicted as dust to be swept under the carpet once the technium comes into its own; no mention of how to live in the interim, with assassination drones, state surveillance of social media, evolving botnets or the risks of building an unfriendly AI. Perhaps genetically modified organisms are good; what if Monsanto controlling GMOs isn’t?

However, there’s one area I would like to defend Kelly on. Whatever the solution to a technical society is, it isn’t the anti-civ solution heralded by John Zerzan, Waziyatawin, Derrick Jensen and others; as correct as many of their critiques are. The reason goes back to Kelly’s (mis)understanding of the technium’s inevitability, and the singularities DeLanda describes. Resetting society back to some sort of idyllic hunter-gatherer state would, in the long term, merely be a rewind; given time, the same or similar problems are likely to play out as civilization makes the same mistakes over again.

Better, I believe, to follow Neal Stephenson & Tyler Cowen by investing in technologies that will move us towards a world where we are further empowered, and are able to build healthier and more resilient bodies, societies and ecosystems. But partnered with the proactionary principle would be Perrow’s insistence that proven poor technologies be abandoned. There is not a place in our civilization for every technology, and some are far more trouble than they’re worth.

We may come to notice after the fact that some sort of autocatalytic loop has been initiated. If so, at that point we must hope that our guidance thus far has been sufficient prevent the worst outcomes. This generation is beginning to see a return of creating technologies that go with the grain of the human mind and body; we must also adapt our technium to go with the grain of the larger systems we are a part of.