"A power so great, it can only be used for Good or Evil"

As I knew would happen, my earlier unfair review of Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants obligated me to read the thing and give it a real one. I have to say I wanted to pick a fight with this book, for reasons that are unclear to me. Partly it's because it is in some ways very close to my own point of view, yet so different in important respects, and I'm a People's-Front-Of-Judea type of guy. Partly it's that Kelly is selling grand visions, but he seems to be unable or unwilling to also adopt the equally important critical stance. But I was disappointed in my search for an argument, because this turns out to me an essentially religious book, and in my experience there's no point arguing with religion. Either you buy into the vision or you don't. So the subject of this book is not actually technology, but the nature of existence itself and where it is supposed to be going.

You'd think the story of technology would be a large enough subject in its own right, but Kelly's scope is so all-encompassingly vast that he has to devote the a good chunk of the book to a discussion of biological life. This is necessary because a key part of his argument is that life and technology are just different aspects of the same process. Evolution (or whatever you want to call it) may have started with chemistry and nucleic acids but is now working with electronics and silicon. In support of this argument, he compares the evolution of various technological forms with biological evolution (eg, the way variant forms of military helmets or trumpets can be arranged in phylogentic trees), and then elides the differences between them, in order to paint them as just different phases of some grander tendency of the universe to evolve towards complexity/goodness/whatever. Progress, in other words. The technium (Kelly's term for the whole sphere of technological development) is simply an extension of the biosphere, or both are manifestations of some underlying, more abstract tendency.

That's the first part of Kelly's thesis. The second is that the evolution of both life and technology is a strongly convergent process, meaning roughly that while evolution obviously involves large amounts of randomness and contingency, its general tendencies and ultimate destination is in some sense foreordained. It was inevitable that we'd evolve multicellularity, muscles, eyes, and computation, although the exact form may vary across the possible universes. Kelly labels this "ordained becoming" and I believe most of these ideas have their roots in the work of Simon Conway Morris, an evolutionist who (not coincidentally) also has a "theology of evolution" at the core of his thought.

Inventions and discoveries are crystals inherent in the technium, waiting to be manifested. There is nothing magical about these patters, nothing mystical about technology having a direction. All complex, adaptive systems...will exhibit emergent forms and inherent directions. (p 186)

Given the above points, the story becomes not so much "what technology wants" as where technology (and everything else) is inevitably heading. This may be a difference which may make no difference, just as it doesn't matter in some sense whether a sunflower follows the sun because it "wants" to or it has an innate tropism-generating mechanism. Calling the trajectory of technology a "want" suggests, though, that it might want something different, or that it can be induced to go somewhere else. The arguments Kelly advances suggest otherwise.

The third part of the book is devoted to those who think they can escape from technology (such as the Amish) or put a halt to its onslaught (such as the Unabomber). It's a bold choice to make Ted Kaczinsky the focus of a chapter, I thought. Kelly does a credible and fair job of presenting his viewpoint. But the (perhaps unintended) thrust of this is to paint anybody who hopes to argue with or resist the advancement of an autonomous, self-willed technium as a madman. There are many level-headed and sane critics of technology that could have been used as foils. In some ways Kaszinscky is Kelly's mirror-image: both are equally eager to totalize technology, to paint it as a unified and nearly unstoppable force.

The urge for self-preservation, self-extension, and self-growth is the state of any living thing...there comes a moment in the childhood of our biological offspring when their childish selfish nature confronts us, and we have ot acknowledge that they have their own agenda (sic)... Collectively we are at one of these moments with the technium...At a macroscale, the technium is following its inevitable progression. Yet at the microscale, volition rules. Our choice is to align ourselves with this direction, to expand choice and possibilities for everyone and everything, and to play out the details with grace and beauty. Or we can choose (unwisely, I believe) to resist (p187)

It's odd that more reasonable efforts to redirect technology are given short shrift, given that Kelly was an editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which advanced the idea that you could repurpose and redirect technology for alternative purposes. I guess his later career at Wired has overridden that...but he does run a site called Cool Tools which is very close in spirit to the old WEC, so he hasn't abandoned that ethos (in fairness, Kelly does discuss his personal transition from low to high tech).

The fourth part of the book is an effort to characterize the nature of the inevitable progress of technology. "Technology wants what life wants" which is "increasing efficiency, increasing opportunity, increasing emergence, increasing complexity...increasing freedom, increasing mutualism increasing beauty... " (p 270). This is the point where things skidded off the road and into the gauzy, light-filled realm of heaven for me. I've been a technologist all my life, and while I certainly believe in the wonderful things it can do and the beauty it embody, I can't take such a rosy view. Technology is not just your iPhone and Facebook, it's hydrogen bombs, ecological disaster, and the constant radical undermining of human values. It's not just those either, of course, but to consider one side without the other can't be done if you are trying to get an honest picture of the technosphere. It's the same as with biological life, which for all its beauty has no particular interest in your personal well-being and contains many "wanters" that treat humans as so much raw material, from mountain lions to malaria parasites.

Kelly is not oblivious to the possible downsides of technology, of course. But when it comes time to tot up the good vs the bad, it comes down to this:

The message of the technium is that any choice is way better then no choice. That's why technology tends to tip the scales slightly toward the good, even though it produces so many problems...it compounds the good in the world because in addition to the direct good it brings, the arc of the technium keeps increasing choices, possibilities, freedom, and free will in the world, and that is an even greater good.

Argh, this is libertarian rot. A greater availability of choice is not always "good". Would we be better off if anyone could have the choice of obtaining RPGs or nuclear weapons at the local 7-11? More choices can make people overwhelmed and unhappy. And if we are being propelled irresistibly forward into some foreordained attractor, do we really have any choice at all?

Kelly is constantly revisiting the issue of whether technology makes us better people or not. I find this a ridiculous question, and it undercuts his own premise. We do not have the option of doing without technology, with all due respect to Amish refuseniks. As a civilization, a species, we've built ourselves a technological layer that we now live in and can't get rid of (unless we are prepared for an order-of-magnitude dieoff). The question of "is technology good or evil" is a stupid question, frankly. You can talk about a particular bit of technology and what its effects are and what human interests it serves or subverts, but to try to put a moral valence on technology as a whole is like a fish giving a lecture on "water: threat or savior"?

As before, I can't help but compare Kelly to Latour. Both start with what should be a fairly straightforward task of describing the processes of science and technology, but end up going off on wild metaphysical joyrides. The difference is that Latour has a political/sociological view, while Kelly's is primarily religious (not that Latour doesn't get into that now and then). Both are trying to locate agency somewhere other than in its traditional home of individual humans, but while Latour distributes it throughout the material world, Kelly seems to locate it in some transcendent heavenly omega point. That's why ultimately Latour seems to be more of a humanist -- the desires he talks about are human-scaled, even if they inhabit odd objects.

To summarize: this book is the product of a particular kind of vision, of a world that is hurtling despite itself towards a transcendently positive future of increasing complexity and capability. "Technology" is not the real subject, that just happens to be the current edge of the curve. It's an attractive vision, and certainly it's possible to see some of this in the world when approached from the right angle. Evolution and related processes do have a ratchet effect; the world is learning to do what it does better. That's great, but either this happens with human guidance or without it. If technology in truth can't be managed, then we don't really need to think about it, we can just play with our gadgets. If, on the other hand, technology can be shaped and guided by humans, then we need better ways to do just that. Dealing with climate change is the most obvious area where we need more control, not less. Getting transported into ecstasies by the technical sublime doesn't help. The reality of our technological world -- its glories and its disasters, its potentials and ptifalls -- has to be faced squarely. Trying to paint a moral valence on technology as a whole is a mistake; like the humans who propel it forward, it contains multitudes.

[[title courtesy of The Giant Rat of Sumatra by The Firesign Theater]]

Loci of desire

I haven't yet read Kevin Kelly's new book What Technology Wants. I suspect I'll find it mostly annoying -- he has a habit of addressing issues I care and think about, in ways that are sort of like my own opinions, but taken too far or off in some quasi-theological direction that I find grating (OK, and the fact that he reaches orders of magnitude more readers than I do might also contribute to my annoyance). But I did pick it up in the bookstore and look in the index to find no mention of Bruno Latour, which was slightly surprising, since Latour has been talking about investing agency into non-humans for decades.

But then it occurred to me that there is something fundamentally different about Kelly's view and Latour's (disclaimer: I actually have no idea what Kelly's view is, I'm judging the book by its title which may not be fair). Latour grants agency to things, but I very much doubt he would ever imbue technology as a whole with desires, as Kelly does. Latour is interested in the politics of things and the networks that connect things and people; their alliances, their conflicts, their failures and triumphs. His project is to tease out and describe these networks -- for instance, how a mass spectrograph connects the researchers and engineers who developed it, the manufacturer, its purchasers and users, the inscriptions it generates, the actual sample being measured, and the theory it will hopefully support. Under the Latourian view humans and non-humans have ontologically equal status and are connected in networks as equals.

That is an intriguing if difficult idea, but it's very different from Kelly's, which posits some sort of overarching teleology. In Latour's world model, everything (technology included) is radically distributed and radically democratic. In Kelly's, technology is some external, autonomous, and presumably unstoppable force of nature rolling over humanity like a tidal wave of disruption.

I can actually see merits to both views; they can both be useful perspectives. But I think Latour's is subtler, richer, and ultimately more humanistic since it is all about how the desires of humans and technologies are connected.

Damn, now I guess I'll have to read Kelly's book to see if I'm being unfair to it.

The broader issue is one that has obsessed me for some time -- the fact that in the modern era nobody really knows what wants are or where they come from. A whole constellation of forces, from the Freudian unconscious and the Darwinian roots of behavior through the modern-day manipulation of the mass media -- all conspire to make it glaringly obvious that desire is never a simple act of an atomic self. So what is it, and how do we talk about it intelligently?

Here's another critique of Kelly's book, also unfair since it came out more than 30 years before he wrote his.

Review: You Are Not a Gadget

Jaron Lanier's book You Are Not a Gadget is a stimulating but aggravating book. He's grappling with deep and important issues, and has some valuable insights, but for every insight there are three examples of oversimplification, poor metaphors, or wrongheadedness. The book is framed as a critique of technology; an informed antidote to some of the mindless cheerleading that is common in the industry; a plea for humanism amidst what apparently is the soul-crushing nature of the modern digital world. God knows that's an important thing to do, but it needs to be done with more intellectual rigor and less formless whining.

Lanier's book is wide-ranging and even when it treats a topic superficially it is thought-provoking, so this is somewhat of a set of scattered reactions to a variety of points, not a complete review.

Unwired

The book reads somewhat like an extended argument with Kevin Kelly (former editor of WIRED), who is basically the opposite of Lanier: a technological optimist, determinist, and autonomist (his forthcoming book is "What Technology Wants"). Lanier terms his opponents variously "digital Maoists" or "cybernetic totalists", which are pretty good coinages, if not exactly illuminating. I kind of sympathize with Lanier on these points. The gushing cyberutopians of WIRED and the like give me hives. I just don't know how important they are. Presumably anyone over the age of 25 or so can tell that it's just marketing hype, turning tech dreams into lifestyle accessories and VC pitches (remember the "push technologies revolution"?). Ten years ago, when people were less familiar with the internet, such cybergush could get a lot of traction. These days the internet is integrated into our lives (along with pocket phone computers and other sfinana) and my instinct is that people don't need or respond to the gushing as much, which makes Lanier's critique of it seem somewhat dated.

Also exaggerated:

I remember [Ted] Nelson trying to speak and young American Maoists shouting him down because they worried that his system would favor the intellectual over the peasant. (p 101)

Even allowing for Lanier's somewhat nonstandard use of the term "Maoist", this has the flavor of a tale that grew in the telling.

Nostalgia

Something about the tone of the book sets my teeth on edge. I think it's all longing for the good old days of the late 80s or so, when digital technology was free, less commercial, what a joy it was to be young and idealistic in those days, la di fucking da. Translation: Jaron is old now and he's pining for his youth. Believe me, I can sympathize, I do a lot of nostalgic yearning myself, but I'm not under the illusion that it's interesting enough to put into a book. The revolution did not happen just as we envisioned, what a surprise, do revolutions ever work that way?

Standardization

One of the themes of the book is that standardization is bad and dehumanizing. Standardization is a widely-studied phenomenon, there is a lot of interesting things to say about, but I haven't found anything new here (I've learned a lot from bhyde's blog). Lanier's take is reductive and in places just wrong. He opens with some plaints about MIDI, the standard developed in the 80s to link music synthesizers:

Before MIDI, a musical note was a bottomless idea that transcended absolute definition. It was away for a musician to think, or a way to teach and document music. It was a mental tool distinguishable from the music itself. Different people could make transcriptions of the same musical recording, for instance, and come up with slightly different scores.

After MIDI, a musical note was no longer just an idea, but a rigid, mandatory structure you couldn't avoid in the aspects of life that had gone digital. The process of lock-in is like a wave gradually washing over the rulebook of life, culling the ambiguities of flexible thoughts as more and more thought structures are solidified into effectively permanent reality. (p 9)

That is certainly a poignant and evocative image of loss. Computers have killed music, or even worse, they've removed all the subtlety and juice from it. There are several things wrong with this.

First, is it true? Has music really gotten more rigid since the introduction of MIDI? I'm not a musician so it's tough for me to say, but I seriously doubt it.

Second, is the description of the MIDI standard accurate? Partly -- MIDI does impose its concept of a scale on music -- its model is more like a piano than a trombone. But it does permit pitch-bending and is thus not limited to only the fixed tones of a keyboard instrument, which I think is what is implied in the above.

What is most astonishing about the above is that it ignores the (quite interesting) fact that the standard imposed by MIDI is just a modern echo of an earlier process of standardization in music. The equal-tempered Western musical scale evolved through a pre-digitial process of standardization, with the usual accompaniment of politicking and controversy. As a result, pianos can only play 12 notes out of the infinite possibilities in an octave. Did this standardization kill music, make it more lifeless? I wonder if pianos and other keyboard instruments were regarded as dehumanizing, deadening to the spirit of music, when they were introduced. I'll bet they were, yet somehow music survived.

Further: let's say that the MIDI standard did have the negative effects that Lanier attributes to it. Even so, to judge it one would have to balance it against whatever positive effects the standard had, such as allowing a player of one type of controller access to a huge variety of sound synthesizers. This is why standards get defined in the first place, and since nobody forced musicians to use MIDI one would guess that they are realizing actual value from it.

Personhood

Throughout this book, I'll explore whether people are becoming like MIDI notes -- overly defined, and restricted in practice to what can be represented in a computer. (p 10)

This echoes the worries of the early industrial age when we were all going to be turned into cogs in the machine. And those critics were right, in part! Yet humanity survived, personhood survived, was mutated, it gave rise to us.

One of the changes Lanier bemoans is the decline in custom-built home pages what with people managing their online identities through standardized tools like Facebook and blogs. Yeah right -- I really miss all that shitty HTML from 1987. This is one case where I see no problem at all. Anyone can still make a custom web page and many people do. Facebook and blogs have reduced the overhead so hundreds of millions of people can now have a presence.

Facebook and similar social platforms come under attack for what it is doing to the word "friends", among other things. If people are collecting ten thousand Facebook friends and competing on that basis, that is somewhat disturbing. Here's another point with some validity, but it's hardly original, and worse, the built-in assumption that this is somehow diminishing our humanity is so stale. Technology may be changing it, but that is exciting and disturbing and interesting. To assume that all change is for the worse is the mark of a mind that has gone over to the conservative side. This is a terrible thing to observe in someone previously known for creativity.

People have been bemoaning the diminishing effects of cognitive tools on the pristine mind for thousands of years:

Writing, Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, is inhuman, pretending to establish outside the mind what in reality can be only in the mind... Plato'™s Socrates urges, writing destroys memory. Those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on an external resource for what they lack in internal resources. Writing weakens the mind. -- Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy

So Lanier may be in good company but at this point perhaps we can take a broader view.

Hive Economics

The book is on better ground when it talks about the economics of open source and its threat to cultural creators (but that's not terribly original -- everybody's been writing about the death of newspapers; Seth Finkelstein has written a lot about the Wikipedia sweatshop; and it's even been discussed here).

The people who are most screwed by open culture are the middle classes of intellectual and cultural creation. (p 93).

This quote resonated because I posed exactly this question to Richard Stallman in the very early days of the Free Software movement. The answer was vaguely that programmers would no longer be able to have proprietary code but could charge for consulting and similar services (the analog of musicians giving away the digital music but charging for concerts). It didn't convince me, but open-source took off anyway, and some people do make a living in that model but essentially large swathes of the computer industry have been "demonetized".

Jaron has some proposed solutions to demonetization in the arts, but they didn't seem very convincing. Presumably all of them and more are being tried. I'm somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the demonetized in general but it's hard to work up sympathy for artists in particular. The ones that are good will find a way to make a living, and if fewer people can do that I don't think the world will be terribly impoverished. Anyway, they are supposed to be the avant-garde and having your job undermined by technology and capitalism is going to happen to all of us sooner or later; they are just leading the way.

Conclusion

We need more digital humanists. We need technically informed people who are skeptical of the promise of cyberutopians. Lanier's book is a step in a good direction, but is also infuriating because it touches on all sorts of interesting points but in ways that are not terribly insightful and in many cases trivializing. A little more focus would have gone a long way. The book is subtitled "a manifesto" but it reads like a collection of assorted complaints rather than a unified call to action. Many of the points touched upon (the nature of social relations in a wired world; the effect of standardization on expression; the undermining of revenue models for content creators) are worthy of a book in themselves and of course some have them.

The unifying theme of the book, such as it is, is that technology has the potential to undermine our humanity and has in fact done so already in many respects. It seems to me that humanity has already weathered much more severe and damaging transitions than digital networks (agriculture, the printing press, industrialized war, global capitalism, to name a few). All of these have shaken up and changed what humanity is, but they have not destroyed it. Computers will be the same. Whatever the core of humanity is, it can survive Facebook's standardization of social relations and even the death of newspapers. Humans have a way of humanizing technology which is stronger than technologies' ability to dehumanize us.

[[Update: Here's a much more entertainingly deranged version of essentially the same thesis:

The Noosphere is not, as we hear among the ignorant jabbering belched from the bowels of the blogosphere, some sort of mystical "living tissue of collective consciousness"; it is not the "Mind of Gaia"; it is not what Sir Julian Huxley⁶a close collaborator of H.G. Wells, describes as "a global unification of human awareness," an "organized web of thought, a noetic system operating at high tension, a piece of evolutionary machinery capable of generating high psychosocial energy." Huxley's image of the Noosphere as "the union of the whole human species into a single inter-thinking group based on a single self-developing framework of thought," is actually the idea of Wells' "World Brain" blogosphere. This sort of garbage, which could only be the product of people brainwashed by too many so-called "cyberdelic experiences" in virtual reality, is intended to twist the scientific optimism of Vernadsky, ⁷obscuring the domain of Vernadsky's real science, and maliciously weaving him into the anti-science, Green Cybernetics cult promoted by Al Gore and his fellow pro-British heirs of H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell.

Courtesy of the LaRouche Youth League!]]

Victorian Data Processing

This sounds great. When I wrote my dissertation, I was aware that "computer" originally referred to a human agent, but didn't really know that such computers had already been organized into large scale distributed processing networks.

Victorian Data Processing - When Software Was People
Martin Campbell-Kelly

To most people the phrase Victorian Office conjures up an image such as in Dickens' A Christmas Carol - with Bob Cratchit, the solitary clerk, seated on a high stool, quill-pen in hand. Indeed, many Victorian Offices were like this, but by the 1850s a quite different type of office was emerging - the industrialized office employing several hundred clerks. These offices were the ancestors of the modern computerized bureaucracy. In these huge organizations, clerks performed tasks that would later be done by office machines, and are today performed by computers.
In this paper the historical and economic context of the development of the industrialized office will be described. The paper will include a "tour" of a number of Victorian data processing organizations: the General Register Office, the Railway Clearing House, the Central Telegraph Office, the Prudential Assurance Company, and the Post Office Savings Bank. The data processing techniques and labor processes will be explained, and the changing gender and structure of the workforce described.
The Victorian Office can be viewed from today’s perspective as a collection of human agents, obeying procedures stored in the organizational memory. Parallels are drawn between today’s software and Victorian clerical processes in terms of dependability, evolutionary change, and the boundaries of determinacy and autonomy. Some general conclusions will be made about the nature of "information revolutions."

From a workshop on the origins of computation.

Unfortunately in a truly retro move, the paper does not seem to be available online without a subscription.