What Technology Wants (29 page)

In the apt phrase of futurist Paul Saffo, we often confuse a clear view of the future with a short distance. But in reality, technology creates a worrisome dissonance between what we can imagine and what we can do. I can't think of a better explanation of this than filmmaker George Lucas's rendition of technology's eternal dilemma. In 1997, I interviewed Lucas about the new, high-tech method of filmmaking that he had devised for his prequel
Star Wars
films. It entailed stitching computers, cameras, animation, and live action together into one seamless cinematic world, building up layers of images, almost like painting in film. It has since been adopted by other avant-garde directors of action films, including James Cameron in
Avatar
. At the time, Lucas's radical new process was the apogee of advanced technology. But while his innovative technique was futuristic, many viewers claimed it didn't make his newer films any better. I asked him, “Do you think technology is making the world better or worse?” Lucas's answer:

I think we underestimate the strain of that gap. In the long term, the erosion of the traditional self may prove to be a larger part of the technium's cost than its erosion of the biosphere. Langdon Winner suggests there is a kind of conservation of life force: “Insofar as men pour their own life into the apparatus, their own vitality is that much diminished. The transference of human energy and character leaves men empty, although they may never acknowledge the void.”

That transference is not inevitable, but it does happen. As machines take over more of what humans once did, we tend to do less of the familiar. We don't walk as much, letting our autos do our walking. We don't dig anymore, except with backhoes. We don't hunt for food, we don't gather. We don't hammer or sew. We don't read if we don't have to. We don't calculate. We are in the process of offloading our remembering to Google, and we are eager to stop cleaning as soon as those cleaning bots get cheap enough. Eric Brende, an engineering student who spent two years living like an Amish, says, “Duplicating vital human capacities can have one of only two consequences: atrophying the capacities or creating competition between
Homo sapiens
and machine. Neither of these is savory to self-respecting members of the former.” Technology chips away at our human dignity, calling into question our role in the world and our own nature.

This can make us crazy. The technium is a global force beyond human control that appears to have no boundaries. Popular wisdom perceives no counterforce to prevent technology from usurping all available surfaces of the planet, creating an extreme ecumenopolis—planet-sized city—like the fictional Trantor in Isaac Asimov's sci-fi stories or the planet Coruscant in Lucas's
Star Wars
. Pragmatic ecologists would argue that long before an ecumenopolis could form, the technium would outstrip the capacity of Earth's natural systems and thus would either stall or collapse. The cornucopians, who believe the technium capable of infinite substitutions, see no hurdle to endless growth of civilization's imprint and welcome the ecumenopolis. Either prospect is unsettling.

About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet's ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium's ability to alter us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don't think we have a good name for it yet. Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature' far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.”

Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, killing three of them, was right about one thing: Technology has its own agenda. It is selfish. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, echoes the arguments of Winner and many of the points I am making in this book, claiming that technology is a dynamic, holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather, it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather, the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his sprawling, infamous 35,000-word manifesto, the Unabomber wrote:

I, too, argue that the technium is guided by “technical necessity.” That is, baked into the nature of this vast complex of technological systems are self-serving aspects—technologies that enable more technology, and systems that preserve themselves—as well as inherent biases that lead the technium in certain directions, outside human desire. Kaczynski writes, “Modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can't get rid of the ‘bad' parts of technology and retain only the ‘good' parts.”

The truth of Kaczynski's observations does not absolve him of his murders or justify his insane hatred. Kaczynski saw something in technology that caused him to lash out with violence. But despite his mental imbalance and moral sins, he was able to articulate that view with surprising clarity. Kaczynski set off 16 bombs and murdered 3 people (and injured 23 more) in order to get his manifesto published. His desperation and despicable crimes hide a critique that has gained a minority following among other Luddites. Here, in meticulous, scholarly precision, Kaczynski makes his primary claim that “freedom and technological progress are incompatible” and that therefore technological progress must be undone. The center section of his argument is clear, remarkably so, given the cranky personal grievances against leftists that bookend his rant.

I have read almost every book on the philosophy and theory of technology and interviewed many of the wisest people pondering the nature of this force. So I was utterly dismayed to discover that one of the most astute analyses of the technium was written by a mentally ill mass murderer and terrorist. What to do? A few friends and colleagues counseled me to not even mention the Unabomber in this book. Some are deeply upset that I have.

I quote at length from the Unabomber's manifesto for three reasons. First, it succinctly states, often better than I can, the case for autonomy in the technium. Second, I have not found a better example of the view held by many skeptics of technology (a view shared by many ordinary citizens less strongly) that the greatest problems in the world are due not to individual inventions but to the entire self-supporting system of technology itself. Third, I think it is important to convey the fact that the emergent autonomy of the technium is recognized not only by supporters of technology like myself, but also by those who despise it.

The Unabomber was right about the self-aggrandizing nature of the technium. But I disagree with many other of Kacyznski's points, especially his conclusions. Kacyznski was misled because he followed logic divorced from ethics, but as befits a mathematician, his logic was insightful.

As best I understand, the Unabomber's argument goes like this:

In short, Kaczynski claims that civilization is the source of our problems and not the cure for them. He wasn't the first to make this claim. Rants against the machine of civilization go back as far as Freud and beyond. But the assaults against industrial society sped up as industry sped up. Edward Abbey, the legendary wilderness activist, considered industrial civilization to be a “destroying juggernaut” wrecking both the planet and humans. Abbey did all he could personally do to stop the juggernaut with monkey-wrenching maneuvers—sabotaging logging equipment and so forth. Abbey was the iconic Earth First warrior who inspired many fire-throwing followers. The Luddite theorist Kirkpatrick Sale, who, unlike Abbey, railed against the machine while living in a brownstone in Manhattan, refined the idea of “civilization as disease.” (In 1995, at my instigation, Sale bet me $1,000 in the pages of
Wired
magazine that civilization would collapse by 2020.) Recently, the call to undo civilization and return to a purer, more humane, primitive state has accelerated in pace with the rapidly thickening mesh of global connections and always-on technology. A rash of armchair revolutionaries has issued books and websites announcing the end-times. In 1999 John Zerzan published an anthology of contemporary readings focused on the theme called
Against Civilization.
And in 2006 Derrick Jensen penned a 1,500-page treatise on how and why to topple technological civilization, with hands-on suggestions of the ideal places to start—for instance, power and gas lines and the information infrastructure.

Kaczynski had read earlier jeremiads against industrial society and arrived at his hatred of civilization in the same way many other nature lovers, mountain men, and back-to-the-landers have. He was driven there in a retreat from the rest of us. Kaczynski buckled under the many rules and expectations society put up for him as an aspiring professor of mathematics. He said, “Rules and regulations are by nature oppressive. Even ‘good' rules are reductions in freedom.” He was deeply frustrated at not being able to integrate into professional society (he resigned from his position as an assistant professor), which he and society had groomed him for. His frustration is expressed in these words from his manifesto:

Kaczynski suffered these indignities, which he blamed on society, and escaped to the hills, where he perceived he could enjoy more freedoms. In Montana he built a cabin without running water or electricity. Here he lived a fairly self-sustained life—away from the rules and the reach of technological civilization. (But just as Thoreau did at Walden, he came into town to restock his supplies.) However, his escape from technology was disturbed around 1983. One of the wilderness oases Kaczynski loved to visit was what he describes as a “plateau that dated from the Tertiary Age,” a two-day hike from his cabin. The spot was sort of a secret retreat for him. As Kaczynski later told a reporter from
Earth First! Journal
, “It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply into cliff-like drop-offs. There was even a waterfall there.” The area around his own cabin was getting too much traffic from hikers and hunters, so in the summer of 1983 he retreated to his secret spot on the plateau. As he told another interviewer later in prison,

It is easy to sympathize with Kaczynski's plight as a dissenter. You politely try to escape the squeeze of technological civilization by retreating to its furthest reaches, where you establish a relatively techno-free lifestyle—and then the beast of civilization/development/industrial technology stalks you and destroys your paradise. Is there no escape? The machine is ubiquitous! It is relentless! It must be stopped!