What Technology Wants (11 page)

The Dematerialization of U.S. Exports.
In billions of dollars, the total annual amount of both goods and services exported from the United States between 1960 and 2004.

Dematerialization is not the only way in which exotropy advances. The technium's ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial. For instance, science (starting with Newton) has been able to abstract a massive amount of evidence about the movement of any kind of object into a very simple law, such as F = ma. Likewise, Einstein reduced enormous numbers of empirical observations into the very condensed container of E = mc
²
. Every scientific theory and formula—whether about climate, aerodynamics, ant behavior, cell division, mountain uplift, or mathematics—is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries packed with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated dematerialization. But just as an academic book about the technology of carbon fiber is a compression of the intangible, so are carbon fibers themselves. They contain far more than carbon. The philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an “unhiding”—a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of anything manufactured.

Despite the technium's reputation for dumping hardware and material gizmos into our laps, the technium is the most intangible and immaterial process yet unleashed. Indeed, it is the most powerful force in the world. 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 our minds can be only 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. In this unbounded technological amplification, the immaterial organization of the technium has now become the most dominant force in this part of the universe.

Technology's dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organization that brought galaxies, planets, life, and minds into existence. It is part of a great asymmetrical arc that begins at the big bang and extends into ever more abstract and immaterial forms over time. The arc is the slow yet irreversible liberation from the ancient imperative of matter and energy.

5

Newness is such an elemental part of our lives today that we forget how rare it was in ancient days. Most change in the past was cyclical: A forest was cleared for a field and then a farm was abandoned; an army came and then an army left. Droughts followed floods, and one king, either good or evil, succeeded another. For most humans, for most of time, real change was rarely experienced. What little change did happen occurred over centuries.

And when change erupted it was to be avoided. If historical change had any perceived direction at all, it was downhill. Somewhere in the past was a golden age, when the young respected their elders, neighbors didn't steal at night, and men's hearts were closer to God. In ancient times when a bearded prophet forecast what was to come, the news was generally bad. The idea that the future brought improvement was never very popular until recently. Even now, progress is far from universally accepted. Cultural advancements are commonly seen as exceptional episodes that may at any moment retreat into the woes of the past.

Any claim for progressive change over time must be viewed against the realities of inequality for billions, deteriorating regional environments, local war, genocide, and poverty. Nor can any rational person ignore the steady stream of new ills bred by our inventions and activities, including new problems generated by our well-intentioned attempts to heal old problems. The steady destruction of good things and people seems relentless. And it is.

But the steady stream of good things is relentless as well. Who can deny the benefits of antibiotics—even though they are overprescribed? Of electricity, or woven cloth, or radio? The desirable things are uncountable. While some have their downsides, we depend on their upsides. To remedy currently perceived ills, we create more new things.

Some of these new solutions are worse than the problems they were supposed to solve, but I think there is evidence that on average and over time, the new solutions outweigh the new problems. A serious techno-optimist might argue that the vast majority of cultural, social, and technological change is overwhelmingly positive—that 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of the changes that take place in the technium each year make the world a better place. I don't know the actual percentage, but I think the balance settles out at higher than 50 percent positive, even if it is only slightly higher. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi once said, “There is more good than evil in the world—but not by much.” Unexpectedly, “not much” is all that's needed when you have the leverage of compound interest at work—which is what the technium is. The world does not need to be perfectly utopian to see progress. Some portion of our actions, such as war, are destructive. A bunch of what we produce is crap. Maybe nearly half of what we do. But if we create only 1 percent or 2 percent (or even one-tenth of 1 percent) more positive stuff than we destroy, then we have progress. This differential could be so small as to be almost imperceptible, and this may be why progress is not universally acknowledged. When measured against the large-scale imperfections of our society, 1 percent better seems trivial. Yet this tiny, slim, shy discrepancy generates progress when compounded by the ratchet of culture. Over time a few percent “not much better” accumulates into civilization.

But is there really even 1 percent annual betterment over the long term? I think there are five pools of evidence for this trend. One is the long-term rise in longevity, education, health, and wealth of an average person. This we can measure. In general, the more recently in history people lived, the longer they lived, the greater access they had to accumulated knowledge, and the more tools and choices they owned. That's on average. Since war and strife can depress well-being locally and temporarily, indexes of health and wealth fluctuate within decades and by regions of the world. However, the long-term trajectory (and by “long-term” I mean over hundreds or even thousands of years) is a steady, measurable rise.

The second indicator of long-term progress is the obvious wave of positive technological development we have witnessed in our own lifetimes. Perhaps more than any other signal, this constant surge daily persuades us that things improve. Devices not only get better, they also get cheaper while they get better. We turn around to peer through our window into the past and realize there wasn't window glass back then. The past also lacked machine-woven cloth, refrigerators, steel, photographs, and the entire warehouse of goods spilling into the aisles of our local superstore. We can trace this cornucopia back along a diminishing curve to the Neolithic era. Craft from ancient times can surprise us in its sophistication, but in sheer quantity, variety, and complexity, it pales against modern inventions. The proof of this is clear: We buy the new over the old. Given the choice between an old-fashioned tool and a new one, most people—in the past as well as now—would grab the newer one. A very few will collect old tools, but as big as eBay is, and flea markets anywhere in the world, they are dwarfed by the market of the new. But if the new is not really better, and we keep reaching for it, then we are consistently duped or consistently dumb. The more likely reason we seek the new is that new things do get better. And of course there are more new things to choose from.

The typical American supermarket carries 30,000 varieties of items. Each year in the United States alone, 20,000 brand-new packaged-good items, such as food, soaps, and beverages, are launched, hoping to survive on those crowded shelves. Most of these contemporary products carry a bar code. The agency that issues the prefixes used in bar codes estimates that there are at least 30 million of them in use worldwide. The variety of manufactured products available on the planet is certainly in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions.

When Henry VIII, king of all England, died in 1547, his bursars took an exhaustive inventory of his belongings. They were especially careful in their count because his wealth doubled as the wealth of England. The accountants added up his furniture, spoons, silks, armor, weapons, silver plates, and all the usual possessions of a king at that time. In their final tally King Henry's household (the national treasure of England) contained 18,000 objects.

I live in a large American house that I share with my wife, my three children, a sister-in-law, and two nieces. One summer my young daughter Ting and I counted all the objects in our home. Equipped with a hand tally clicker and a clipboard, we went from room to room pawing through kitchen cupboards, bedroom closets, and desk drawers unopened for years.

I was primarily interested in measuring the variety of objects in our house rather than the total number, so I tried to count the number of technological “genres.” We'd count only one representative of each type. The particular coloration (say, yellow or blue) or superficial ornamentation or decoration would not alter the type. I'd count only the archetypes of books: for instance, one paperback, one hardcover, and one oversized coffee-table tome, etc. All CDs were counted as one genre, all VHS tapes as one, etc. Essentially, the content didn't count. Things made of different materials counted as different species. Ceramic plates counted as one, glass plates as another. Things manufactured by the same machinery were one species. In the pantry all canned goods were one. Closets were a different matter. Most clothes are made by the same technology, but fibers vary. Cotton jeans and cotton shirts were each considered one species, wool pants another, a synthetic blouse another. If it seemed as if different technologies might be needed to make something, I would count it as a separate technological species.

After going from room to room, skipping none except the garage (that would be a project in itself), we arrived at a total of 6,000 varieties of things in our house. Since we have multiple examples of some varieties, such as books, CDs, paper plates, spoons, socks, on so on, I estimate the total number of objects in our home, including the garage, to be close to 10,000.

Without trying very hard, our typical modern house holds a king's ransom. But in fact, we are wealthier than King Henry. In fact, the lowest-paid burger flipper working at McDonald's is in many respects better off than King Henry or any of the richest people living not too long ago. Although the burger flipper barely makes enough to pay the rent, he or she can afford many things that King Henry could not.

King Henry's wealth—the entire treasure of England—could not have purchased an indoor flush toilet or air-conditioning or secured a comfortable ride for 500 kilometers. Any taxicab driver can afford these today. Only 100 years ago, John Rockefeller's vast fortune as the world's richest man could not have gotten him the cell phone that any untouchable street sweeper in Bombay now uses. In the first half of the 19th century Nathan Rothschild was the richest man in the world. His millions were not enough to buy an antibiotic. Rothschild died of an infected abscess that could have been cured with a three-dollar tube of neomycin today. Although King Henry had some fine clothes and a lot of servants, you could not pay people today to live as he did, without plumbing, in dark, drafty rooms, isolated from the world by impassable roads and few communication connections. A poor university student living in a dingy dorm room in Jakarta lives better in most ways than King Henry.

Recently, photographer Peter Menzel organized an expedition to photograph families around the world surrounded by all their possessions. Families in 39 countries, including Nepal, Haiti, Germany, Russia, and Peru, let Menzel and his delegates haul the entire contents of their homes outside into the street or yard to be photographed, inventoried, and published in Menzel's book, called
Material World
. Nearly every family was proud of what they possessed, standing happily in front of their dwelling amid a colorful display of furniture, pots, clothes, and knickknacks. The average number of objects owned by one of these families was 127.

There is one thing we can say for certain about these different pictures of possessions, and one thing we can't say. One thing for sure is that the families living in those regions in previous centuries had significantly fewer than 127 objects. Even families in the poorest countries today have more than those in some of the richest had two centuries ago. In Colonial America when a homeowner died, officials would normally take an inventory of his estate. Typical historical inventories of deceased homeowners from that period totaled up 40, maybe 50 and usually less than 75 objects in the entire estate.

What we can't say is this: If we hold up two photographs of people and their possessions—one of a Guatemalan family with their firepot and looms and not much else, and one of an Icelandic family with their washer/dryer, cellos, piano, three bicycles, horse, and a thousand other items—we can't say which family is happier. Is it the one with all the possessions or the one without?

For the past 30 years the conventional wisdom has been that once a person achieves a minimal standard of living, more money does not bring more happiness. If you live below a certain income threshold, increased money makes a difference, but after that, it doesn't buy happiness. That was the conclusion of a now-classic study by Richard Easterlin in 1974. However, recent research from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania shows that worldwide, affluence brings increased satisfaction. Higher income earners
are
happier. Citizens in higher-earning countries tend to be more satisfied on average.