What Technology Wants (31 page)

I've been reading the literature of the anticivilization collapsitarians to find out what they have in mind after the collapse of the technium. Anticivilization dreamers spend a lot of time devising ways to bring down civilization (befriend hackers, unbolt power towers, blow up dams) but not so much on what replaces it. They do have a notion of what the world looked like before civilization. According to them it looks like this (from the
Green Anarchy Primer
):

Then came civilization and all the ills (literally) of the Earth:

Among the green anarchists there's talk of recovering your soul, of making fire by rubbing sticks together, discussions of whether vegetarianism is a good idea for hunters, but there is no outline of how groups of people go beyond survival mode, or whether they do. We are supposed to aim for “rewilding” but the rewilders are shy about describing what life is like in this rewild state. One prolific green anarchy author whom I spoke to, Derrick Jensen, dismisses the lack of alternatives to civilization and told me simply, “I do not provide alternatives because there is no need. The alternatives already exist, and they have existed—and worked—for thousands and tens of thousands of years.” He means, of course, tribal life, but not modern tribal; he means tribal as in no agriculture, no antibiotics, no nothing beyond wood, fur, and stone.

The great difficulty of the anticivilizationists is that a sustainable, desirable alternative to civilization is unimaginable. We cannot picture it. We cannot see how it would be a place we'd like to move to. We can't imagine how this primitive arrangement of stone and fur would satisfy each of our individual talents. And because we cannot imagine it, it will never happen, because nothing has ever been created without being imagined first.

Despite their inability to imagine a desirable, coherent alternative, the anarcho-primitivists all agree that some combination of being in tune with nature, eating low-calorie diets, owning very little, and using only things you make yourself will bring on a level of contentment, happiness, and meaning we have not seen for 10,000 years.

But if this state of happy poverty is so desirable and good for the soul, why do none of the anticivilizationists live like this? As far as I can tell from my research and personal interviews with them, all self-identifying anarcho-primitivists live in modernity. They are living in the trap identified by the Unabomber. They compose their rants against the machine on very fast desktop machines. While they sip coffee. Their routines are only marginally different from mine. They have not relinquished the conveniences of civilization for the better shores of nomadic hunter-gathering.

Except, perhaps, one purist: the Unabomber. Kaczynski went further than other critics in living the story he believed in. At first glance his story seems promising, but on second look, it collapses into the familiar conclusion: He was living off the fat of civilization. The Unabomber's shack was crammed with stuff he purchased from the machine: snow-shoes, boots, sweatshirts, food, explosives, mattresses, plastic jugs and buckets, etc.—all things that he could have made himself but did not. After 25 years on the job, why did he not make his own tools separate from the system? Based on photographs of his cabin's untidy interior, it looks like he shopped at Wal-Mart. The food he scavenged from the wild was minimal. Instead he regularly rode his bike to town and there rented an old car to drive to the big city to restock his food and supplies from supermarkets. He was unwilling to support himself without civilization.

Besides the lack of a desirable alternative, the final problem with destroying civilization as we know it is that the alternative, such as it has been imagined by the self-described “haters of civilization,” would not support but a fraction of the people alive today. In other words, the collapse of civilization would kill billions. Ironically, the poorest rural inhabitants would fare the best, as they could retreat to hunting and gathering with the least trouble, but billions of urbanites would die within months or even weeks, once food ran out and disease took over. The anarcho-primitives are rather sanguine about this catastrophe, arguing that accelerating the collapse early might save lives in total.

Again the exception seems to be Ted Kaczynski, who reckoned with the die-off with very clear eyes in a postarrest interview:

Presumably Kaczynski personally “faced up to” the logical conclusion of taking down civilization; it would kill billions of people. He must have decided that murdering a few more people up front in the process would not matter. After all, the techno-industrial complex had snuffed out the humanity from him, so if he had to snuff out a few dozen humans on the way to snuffing out the system that enslaves billions, that would be worth it. The death of billions would also be justified because all those unfortunate people in the grasp of technology were now soulless, like he was. Once civilization was gone, the next generation would be really free. They would all be in his Freedom Club.

The ultimate problem is that the paradise that Kaczynski is offering, the solution to civilization, so to speak, the alternative to the emerging autonomous technium, is the tiny, smoky, dingy, smelly wooden shack that absolutely nobody else wants to dwell in. It is a “paradise” billions are fleeing from. Civilization has its problems, but in almost every way it is better than the Unabomber's shack.

The Unabomber is right that technology is a holistic, self-perpetuating machine. He is also right that the selfish nature of this system causes specific harms. Certain aspects of the technium are detrimental to the human self, because they defuse our identity. The technium also contains power to harm itself; because it is no longer regulated by either nature or humans, it could accelerate so fast as to extinguish itself. Finally, the technium can harm nature if not redirected.

But despite the reality of technology's faults, the Unabomber is wrong to want to exterminate it, for many reasons, not the least of which is that the machine of civilization offers us more actual freedoms than the alternative. There is a cost to running this machine, a cost we are only beginning to reckon with, but so far the gains from this ever-enlarging technium outweigh the alternative of no machine at all.

A lot of people don't believe this. Not for a second. I know from many conversations that a certain percentage of readers of this book will reject this conclusion and side with Kaczynski. My arguments that the positive aspects of technology slightly exceed the negative don't persuade them.

Instead they believe—very strongly—that the expanding technium robs us of our humanity, and it steals our children's future. Therefore, the so-called benefits of technology that I outline in these chapters must be an illusion, a sleight-of-hand trick we perform upon ourselves to permit our addiction to the new.

They point to the vices that I cannot deny. We seem to be less content, less wise, less happy the “more” we have. They rightly point out that this unease is captured in many polls and surveys. The most cynical believe that progress simply extends our lives so that we can be unsatisfied for decades longer. Some year in the future, science will enable us to live forever, so we'll be unhappy forever.

My question is this: If technology is so rotten, why do we keep grabbing it, even after Ted Kaczynski has exposed its true nature? Why do really smart, committed ecowarriors not give it all up, as the Unabomber tried to do?

One theory: The technium's rampant materialism outlaws greater meaning in life by focusing our spirits on stuff. In a blind fury to find some kind of meaning in life, we consume technology madly, energetically, ceaselessly, obsessively buying the only answer that seems for sale—more technology. We end up needing more and more technology to feel less and less satisfied. “Needing more to be satisfied less” is one definition of addiction. According to this logic, technology is, therefore, an addiction. Instead of a compulsive obsession with television or the internet or texting, we have a compulsive obsession with the technium as a whole. Perhaps we are addicted to the dopamine rush of the new.

That might explain why even those who intellectually despise technology still buy stuff. In other words, we are aware of how bad it is for us, and even of how it enslaves us (we scanned the Unabomber's tract), yet we continue to amass vast doses of gadgets and things (perhaps guiltily) because we can't help it. We are powerless to resist technology.

If that was true, the remedy is a bit unsettling. All addictions are fixed by effecting change not in the offending pleasure but in the person addicted. Whether it is via a 12-step program or medication, the problem is resolved in the heads of the addicted. In the end they are liberated not by changing the nature of television, the internet, gambling machines, or alcohol but by changing their relation to it. Those who overcome addictions do so by assuming power over their powerlessness. If the technium is an addiction, we can't solve this addiction by trying to change the technium.

A variant of this explanation is that we are addicted but unaware of our addiction. We are bewitched. Hypnotized by glitter. Technology, by some black magic, has impaired our discernment. In this account the technology of media disguises the true colors of the technium behind the front of utopia. Its shiny new benefits instantly blind us to its powerful new vices. We operate under some kind of spell.

But this global spell must be a consensual hallucination, because we all want the same new stuff: the best medicines, the coolest vehicle, the smallest cell phone. It must be a most powerful spell, because it affects all members of our species without regard to race, age, geography, or wealth. This means that everyone reading this text is under this hex. The hip college-campus theory is that we are duped and cast under this curse by corporations peddling technology and presumably by the executives running corporations. But that would mean that the CEOs are aware of, or above, the hoax themselves. In my experience, they are in the same boat as the rest of us. Believe me, having consulted with many of them, I know they are not capable of such a conspiracy.

The unhip theory is that technology is duping us itself of its own accord. It uses technological media to brainwash us into thinking that it is wholly benevolent and then removes its downsides from our minds. As one who believes the technium has its own agenda, I find this theory plausible. Its anthropomorphism doesn't bother me at all. But by this logic we should expect the least technologically cultured people to be the least duped and to be the most aware of the plainly visible dangers. They should be like the children who see the emperor without clothes. Or with wolf's clothing. But in fact, those disenfranchised people not under media's spell are often the most eager to trade in the old for the new. They look the juggernaut of the technium in the eye and say to it: Give me it all, right now. Or if they consider themselves wise, they say: Give me only your good stuff, none of that addictive crap.

On the other hand, it is often the most technologically mediated people, those experts driving Priuses, blogging, and twittering, who “see” or believe in the presence of the technium's spell. This reversal does not add up for me.

That leaves one remaining theory: We willingly choose technology, with its great defects and obvious detriments, because we unconsciously calculate its virtues. In an entirely wordless calculus, we note the addictions in others, the degradations in the environment, the distractions in our own lives, the confusion about character that various technologies generate, and then we sum these up against the benefits. I don't believe this is a wholly rational procedure; I think we also tell each other stories about technology, and these are added in with as much weight as the pluses and minuses. But in a real way we do a risk-benefit analysis. Even the most primitive shaman trying to decide whether to trade a wild skin for a machete will make such a calculation. He's seen what happens when others get a steel blade. We do the same with unknown technologies, too, just not as well. And most of the time, after we've weighed downsides and upsides in the balance of our experience, we find that technology offers a greater benefit, but not by much. In other words, we freely choose to embrace it—and pay the price.

But as irrational humans we sometimes don't make the best possible choice for several reasons. The costs of technology are not easily visible, and the expectations of virtue often hyped. To improve our chances of making better decisions, we need—I almost hate to say it—more technology. The way to reveal the full costs of technology and deflate its hype is with better information tools and processes. We require technologies such as real-time self-monitoring of our use, transparent sharing of problems, deep analysis of testing results, relentless retesting, accurate recording of the chain of sources in manufacturing, and honest accounting of negative externalities such as pollution. Technology can help us reveal the costs of technology and help us make better choices about how we adopt it.