Recovering Luddite Kevin Kelly, who later became the first editor of Wired Magazine, offers his worldview on technology, its tendencies, what it has done to us, and what it will do to us in the coming generations. The first third of the book really makes the reader think, the last third of the book tests the reader's patience as the author wanders on tangents ranging from intriguing to unnecessary.
Some chapters are more stimulating insightful than others, and at certain points the author truly loses his thread and devolves into word salad. I couldn't help notice the unintentionally amusing comment in the book's acknowledgments, where the author thanks an editor who "rescued his book from verbosity." More likely that editor gave up in frustration two thirds of the way through.
Read the first half of the book closely, skim the rest for the occasional intriguing idea. This book will give you several new ways to think about technology's effects on you and your civilization.
Notes:
1) "Bossy technologies" that require you to adapt to it rather than other way around; Also "the circular logic of technology" (cars that create a lifestyle, early broadcast TV that captures your attention on its timeframe not yours, TV creating consumer culture, etc.)
2) "Technium" as the author's neologism to describe the interconnected global system of technology.
3) One way to read this book is to view it as a 300+ page anthropomorphization of technology.
4) Does technology do only what we permit it to do? Is it inert, just a pile of hardware? Is it only what we want and does it only do what we want? Or is the ecosystem of technology more than this? Is it somehow more powerful and self-generating than we realize? Is it somehow autonomous, almost like an organism?
5) "We might say that an entity is autonomous if it displays any of these traits: self repair, self-defense, self-maintenance, self-control of goals, self-improvement." Systems can have their own momentum even if someone created that system.
6) "The technium is now as great a force in our world as nature, and a response to the technium should be similar to our response to nature.... In order to decide how to respond to technology, we have to figure out what technology wants."
7) [It's a weird feeling to see this kind of anthropomorphization, but yet it is an interesting way to think about it. It also gives the author (and reader) a navigational strategy for how to manage technology in our lives, or as the author phrases it "deciding where to place myself in its embrace.")
8) "Inventing ourselves" via tool use, via trade, via the invention of language. Note that tools, trade, language are all technology ecosystems.
9) "The creation of language was the first singularity for humans." Language accelerates learning, permits communication and coordination, helps ideas spread. "But the chief advantage of language is not communication but autogeneration. Language is a trick that allows the mind to question itself...[it] turns the mind into a tool... without the cerebral structure of language we couldn't access our own mental activity."
10) The Paleolithic rhythm, bursts of hard work followed by periods or even days of rest, not doing much, etc., at various scales of time, day, week, season.
11) Coevolution--genetic coevolution--with technology to the point we are now symbiotic with it. Maybe more accurately put: we are parasitic to technology, because the minute all technology disappears humanity would only last a few months...
12) Moral progress is a type of technology. (!) We can decide that slavery is not a good idea, and promulgate this idea through writing, treaties, laws, etc., all of which themselves are technology ecologies too.
13) The technium branching off from ideas in the human mind, extending a process of evolution to branch off into its own physical form: tools, refined metals, domesticated crops, quantum computers, genetic engineering, the internet etc. Most technology items have short lifespans, it's expected that there will be many exaptations (accidentally useful adaptations, like feathers on reptiles for warmth which later became useful for flight), except in technology the evolutionary pathway can double back to formally dead ideas and formally lost traits and repurpose them or reuse them. See photo below on the history of the cornet as an example:
Biology usually uses incremental transformation while the technium can you use incremental steps but also transformative or revolutionary jumps.
14) In asserting that "few technologies have disappeared forever from the face of the Earth" the author seems to make a very basic logic error of forgetting about technologies that have disappeared, were never noticed nor remembered and as such are no longer part of the sample of technologies we even know about. :)
Chapter 4: The Rise of Exotropy
15) A strange digression here with the birth of the universe in the context of energy flow density, where technologies like semiconductor chips are enormously energy dense. I see what he's doing here though, he's trying to differentiate the universe's tendency towards entropy from the exotropy of technology or evolution.
16) Think of exotropy as negative entropy or some measure of self-organization. The universe moving from energy to mass and then to ordered information (molecules, genes, beings, life forms, devices, technology, etc.).
17) Increasing dematerialization, sale of intangible goods, digitization.
18) On scale across multiple generations of technology, and how scale/adaptation/usefulness compounds much faster than biological evolution: "We tend to think of the human brain as the most powerful force in the world (although we should remember what is telling us that). But the technium has overtaken its brainy parents. The powers of her mind can only be slightly increased by mindful self reflection; thinking about thoughts will only make us marginally smarter. The power of the technium, however, can be increased indefinitely by reflecting its transforming nature upon itself. New technologies constantly make it easier to invent better technologies; we can't say the same about human brains."
Chapter 5: Deep Progress
19) "Newness is such an elemental part of our lives today that we forget how rare it was in ancient days."
20) Even though most things are crap, there's an accumulated benefit of just a small percentage of things that are not crap, cumulatively.
21) Comparing King Henry VIII's wealth, and his entire exhaustive inventory of his belongings, counted by the bursars of England, as a mere 18,000 objects, comparable to a middle-class household today. And of course King Henry could not purchase air conditioning or an indoor flush toilet, or antibiotics. Rockefeller's vast fortune as the world's richest man 100 years ago would not have gotten him the cellphone that poor person in Mumbai uses today. Nathan Rothschild died of an abscess that would have been cured by inexpensive antibiotics. And so on. Making the case for increases in wealth and progress and the quality of human life, which is an easy case to make to be honest.
22) Urbanization as a signifier of progress. Various discussions of population growth as driver of progress, different forecasts future populations of the earth etc.
Chapter 6: Ordained Becoming
23) In evolution there are certain emergent patterns or convergences that happen, like the eye develops in multiple species with similar designs (see also bilateral symmetry, etc.), various characteristics seem to be repeatedly "arrived at" via the mechanism of evolution, and this has implications for the evolution of technology that it will arrive at similar types of convergent/emergent solutions.
24) Technology has the same physics/chemistry and evolutionary boundaries of matter and energy, plus many of the same "positive constraints" that help push evolution along: that variations and mutations are not always purely random, they are directed or governed by natural laws (chemical bonds/physical laws etc).
25) Three vectors of evolution: the adaptive (classic agent) the contingent (basically luck) and the inevitable (driven by exotropic force, emergent self-organization, recurring patterns, etc).
26) Skeuonym: an expression left over from a technology no longer used. "Let's rewind the tape."
27) Interesting tangent of Simon Conway Morris's work studying the Burgess Shale in Canada: Steven J. Gould talked about in Morris's work in his book Wonderful Life, concluding that evolution had no inevitability or tendencies ("homo sapiens is an entity, not a tendency"). This became "orthodoxy" in evolutionary theory, but later it was discovered that his "new" biological forms were actually old forms, and he himself became a champion for convergence and inevitability in evolution.
28) Because there's so many recurring archetypes in evolution it seems that evolution "wants" to create certain designs. E. Coli experiments that converge on similar phenotypes despite multiple evolving lines, implying evolution repeats itself at certain levels of structure and pattern. Likewise there are tendencies and convergences in technological invention that converges on recurring forms, just like biological evolution. This leads to "inevitable inventions."
Chapter 7: Convergence
29) Discoveries of the same thing by multiple people at exactly the same time, inventions of similar technologies by multiple people around the same time, etc.: strong indications that there's convergence and inevitability in technological invention, similar to convergence and inevitability in evolutionary biology. See also many, many examples in archaeology/prehistory of various technologies being invented in parallel in different regions of the world: domestication of animals, agriculture, steel, etc.
30) Incandescent light bulb as an invention: the general concept is like an archetype in biology, but the specific materialization of the concept is like a species.
31) The idea that "invention in technology is inevitable" is repulsive to some, because it obviates human choice or human direction. But it's kind of interesting that every inventor discoverer always rushes their idea into the public domain because they're worried about someone else beating them! Why would this be the case if there weren't simultaneous discovery?
32) "The inverted pyramid of invention": at different stages of invention (conceiving a possibility, how to do it, details, working device, etc.) there are far fewer coinventors. See photo below:
Chapter 8: Listen to the Technology
33) Advantages when things get smaller: airplane models flew better when they were made in models of smaller sizes, semiconductors as an obvious example, they work better and faster with less power and more reliability the smaller they get. "The efficiency of a chip increases by the cube of the scale's reduction."
34) Moore's law as a belief, as a self-fulfilling prophecy.
35) Kurzweil extended Moore's law back 109 years, looking at calculation costs across five eras of computation. Implies this is "baked into the technium."
36) The author gets religiously exegetical with Moore's law... "prepare for the gift" and "meet the ordained trajectories ahead."
Chapter 9: Choosing the Inevitable
37) The original "picture phone" which was both inevitable and yet didn't have to happen.
38) Technology has evolution but with intelligent designers (humans!).
39) The idea that technology has reached a sort of adolescence, and it's now maturing and now has its own agenda, its own nature and independence. It is a superorganism which includes us. (!)
Chapter 10: The Unabomber Was Right
40) Ted Kaczynski saying technology is selfish, has its own agenda, that it is akin to an organism. The author dismayed to find Kaczynski's manifesto to be one of the most astute analyses of technology.
41) Per Kaczinsky, tech demands servitude, it never releases what is in its hold, it imposes a sense of powerlessness on the average person. "Technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it."
42) The author mocks anticivilizationalists like Kaczinsky for not living outside modernity, sipping coffee while typing manifestos on laptops. "Based on photographs of his cabin's untidy interior, it looks like he shopped at Walmart."
43) Basically the author concludes that we should coexist with technology, that it's good, but we have to know more about it, about its addictiveness, about its negative externalities like pollution, we need to have a true accounting of its virtues and its costs, not the hype that promotes it.
Chapter 11: Lessons of Amish Hackers
44) Thrift, self-reliance, outdoor activity, favoring technology they can either build or repair themselves, the Amish use technology with these values. More importantly, Amish culture does not depend on collapsitarian thinking: applying or requiring the death of billions etc. Amish set the default to "not yet", not "no" and certainly not "yes".
45) The whole idea of being "tied to the grid" as the true liability, and dependence on those things as the true liability. For example solar panels are an interesting solution that is non grid-based.
46) "Holding the line" as a concept of making volition-based decisions about technology after understanding what the impact will be on the society and the individuals, and then making a choice.
47) The Amish are also very good at relinquishing technologies, this is something that the rest of us struggle with.
48) "Curiously, Amish life offers more leisure than contemporary urbanity does."
49) Note also the externalities of Amish communities: they don't mind the metal in their mowers or tools, they don't manufacture solar panels on their roofs or grow or weave the cotton in their clothes. They depend on the technium too!
50) Considering minimalism or the avoidance of technology as a phase of life, even a recurring phase. A "technology Sabbath" for example.
51) "Wendell Berry and the Amish see our multi-million choices as illusory and meaningless, or as choices that are really entrapments."
52) One of the ironies of Wendell berry's perspective on what technology he's willing to use, like horses and other things, is that is it really true that the peak of humans satisfaction could be around 1940? Hence the expression "technology is anything that was invented after you were born."
Chapter 12: Seeking Conviviality
53) Difficulty and prohibiting and banning technologies, typically it just results in a delay. We also don't know what the result of a technology will be, we're usually mistaken about what they'll even be used for. Relatively boring discussion of technology bans, the precautionary principle, risks and second-order effects of technology. The book is getting bogged down here.
Chapter 13: Technology's Trajectories
54) This chapter is the longest, the weakest, the purplest, and the most meandering of the book.
55) Technology wants what life wants. Basically survival and exotropy (the opposite of entropy).
56) Certain of his presumptions are observably wrong. For example the assumption that complexification, which is a characteristic of biological life, is also a characteristic of the technium, and giving an example of complexification as the exploding lines of code in Microsoft Windows' operating system. That's not complexification, that's bloat, and this is one of the primary reasons why Windows was disintermediated by Android's and Apple's simpler, more functional operating systems.
57) Empheralization: "A term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller: the ability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing,” that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.)."
58) "Haves" and "have laters": a concept from Marvin Minsky where the haves (the early adopters) overpay for crummy, early editions of technology, and thus finance cheaper, better versions for have-laters. Interesting way to think about it.
59) "A few isolated manifestations of a technology can reveal its first-order effects. But not until technology saturates a culture do the second- and third-order consequences erupt. Most of the unintended consequences that so scare us in technology usually arrive in ubiquity."
60) The passage where he rhapsodizes about the internet sounds like it's from a different author, the writing is weirdly purple, in fact the writing is so masturbatory I feel like I'm reading one of Michael Pollan's books.
61) Technology as the further evolution of evolution, us increasing our own evolvability.
To read:
Eric Brende: Better Off
Wendell Berry: The Gift of Good Land
Wendell Berry: The Gift of Good Land