What Technology Wants (12 page)

My interpretation of this newest research—which also matches our intuitive impressions—is that what money brings is increased choices, rather than merely increased stuff (although more stuff comes with the territory). We don't find happiness in more gadgets and experiences. We do find happiness in having some control of our time and work, a chance for real leisure, in the escape from the uncertainties of war, poverty, and corruption, and in a chance to pursue individual freedoms—all of which come with increased affluence.

I've been to many places in the world, the poorest and the richest spots, the oldest and the newest cities, the fastest and the slowest cultures, and it is my observation that when given a chance, people who walk will buy a bicycle, people who ride a bike will get a scooter, people riding a scooter will upgrade to a car, and those with a car dream of a plane. Farmers everywhere trade their ox plows for tractors, their gourd bowls for tin ones, their sandals for shoes. Always. Insignificantly few ever go back. The exceptions such as the well-known Amish are not so exceptional when examined closely, for even their communities adopt selected technology without retreat.

This one-way pull toward technology is either a magical siren, bewitching the innocent into consuming something they don't really want, or a tyrant that we are unable to overthrow. Or else technology offers something highly desirable, something that indirectly leads to greater satisfaction. (It is also possible that all three possibilities are true.)

The dark side of technology cannot be avoided. It may even be nearly half of the technium. Hiding behind the 10,000 shiny high-tech items in my house are remote, dangerous mines dug to obtain rare earth elements emitting toxic traces of heavy metals. Vast dams are needed to power my computer. Stumps are left in the jungle after timber is removed for my bookshelves, and long chains of vehicles and roads are needed to package and market all the stuff in my house and home office. Every gizmo begins with earth, air, and sunlight and a web of other tools. The 10,000 items we counted are only the visible tips of a huge tree with deep roots. Probably 100,000 physical contraptions behind the scenes were needed to transform elements into our final 10,000.

Yet all the while the technium is increasing the transparency of its roots, compiling more camera eyes, more communication neurons, more tracking technologies that reveal its own complicated processes. We have more options to view the real costs of technologies, if we care to. Could these communication and monitoring systems slow unabashed consumerism? It is possible. But great visibility and transparency of the technium's true costs and trade-offs won't slow down its progress. Awareness of its downsides may even refine its evolution and speed up its improvement by shunting energy away from frivolous consumption toward more select meaningful advances.

The third piece of evidence for small, steady, long-term advance resides in the moral sphere. Here metrics for measurement are few and disagreement about the facts greater. Over time our laws, mores, and ethics have slowly expanded the sphere of human empathy. Generally, humans originally identified themselves primarily via their families. The family clan was “us.” This declaration cast anyone outside of that intimacy as “other.” We had—and still have—different rules of behavior for those inside the circle of “us” and for those outside. Gradually the circle of “us” enlarged from inside the family clan to inside the tribe, and then from tribe to nation. We are currently in an unfinished expansion beyond nation and maybe even race and may soon be crossing the species boundary. Other primates are, more and more, deemed worthy of humanlike rights. If the golden rule of morality and ethics is to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you,” then we are constantly expanding our notion of “others.” This is evidence for moral progress.

The fourth line of evidence does not prove the reality of progress but it provides strong support. A large and still expanding body of scientific literature spotlights the immense distance life has traveled in its four-billion-year journey from extremely simple organisms to extremely complex and social animals. Changes in our culture can be viewed as a continuation of progress begun four billion years ago, a key parallel I will develop in the next chapter.

The fifth argument for the reality of progress is the rush toward urbanization. A thousand years ago only a small percentage of humans lived in cities; now 50 percent do. Cities are where people move to live in “a better tomorrow,” where increased choices and possibilities bloom. Every week, a million people move from the countryside into cities, a journey that is less in space than in time. These migrants are really moving hundreds of years forward, relocating from medieval villages into twenty-first-century sprawling urban areas. The afflictions of the slums are highly visible, but they don't stop the arrivals. The hopeful keep coming—as we all do—for the greater number of freedoms and options. We live in urban and suburban environments for the same reason migrants do—to gain that marginal advantage of more choice.

The choice of returning to our early state is always there. In fact, moving back into the past has never been easier. Citizens in developing countries can merely take a bus back to their villages, where they can live with age-old traditions and limited choice. They will not starve. In a similar spirit of choice, if you believe that the peak of existence was reached in Neolithic times, you can camp out in a clearing in the Amazon. If you think the golden age was in the 1890s, you can find a farm among the Amish. We have lots of opportunity to revisit the past, but few people really want to live there. Rather, everywhere in the world, at all historical periods, in all cultures, people have stampeded by the billions into the future of “slightly more options” as fast as they can. With their feet they have voted for progress by migrating to cities.

Global Urban Population.
The percentage of total global population dwelling in an urban area, from 7000 B.C.E. to the present, including the projected percentage by 2050. Percentages are shown on a logarithmic scale.

Cities are technological artifacts, the largest technology we make. Their impact is out of proportion to the number of humans living in them. As the chart above shows, the percentage of humans living in cities averaged about 1 percent or 2 percent for most of recorded history. Yet almost everything that we think of when we say “culture” arose within cities. (The terms
city
and
civilization
share the same root.) But the massive citification, or urbanization, that characterizes the technium today is a very recent development. Like most other charts depicting the technium, not much happens until the last two centuries. Then population booms, innovation rockets, information explodes, freedoms increase, and cities rule.

All the promises, paradoxes, and trade-offs carried by Progress, with a capital
P,
are represented in a city. In fact, we can inspect the notion and veracity of technological progress at large by examining the nature of cities. Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling, rapacious appetites for energy, materials, and attention. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many people wonder if they are eating us as well. Cities, even more than gadgets, revive the eternal tension we feel about the technium: Do we buy into the latest inventions because we want to or because we have to? Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities in cities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Well, every beautiful city begins as a slum. First it's a seasonal camp, with the usual freewheeling makeshift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is deemed a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village or uncomfortable fort or dismal official outpost with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate until the village chaotically swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center—civic or religious—and the edges of the city continue to expand in unplanned, ungovernable messiness. It doesn't matter in what century or in which country; the teeming fringes of a city will shock and disturb the established residents. The eternal disdain for newcomers is as old as the first city. Romans complained of the tenements, shacks, and huts at the edges of their town, which “were putrid, sodden and sagging.” Every so often Roman soldiers would raze a settlement of squatters, only to find it rebuilt or moved within weeks.

Babylon, London, and New York all had teeming ghettos of unwanted settlers erecting shoddy shelters with inadequate hygiene and engaging in dodgy dealings. Historian Bronislaw Geremek states that “slums constituted a large part of the urban landscape” of Paris in the Middle Ages. Even by the 1780s, when Paris was at its peak, nearly 20 percent of its residents did not have a “fixed abode”—that is, they lived in shacks. In a familiar complaint about medieval French cities, a gentleman from that time noted: “Several families inhabit one house. A weaver's family may be crowded into a single room, where they huddle around a fireplace.” That refrain is repeated throughout history. A century ago Manhattan was home to 20,000 squatters in self-made housing. Slab City alone, in Brooklyn (named after the use of planks stolen from lumber mills), contained 10,000 residents in its slum at its peak in the 1880s. In the New York slums, reported the
New York Times
in 1858, “nine out of ten of the shanties have only one room, which does not average over twelve feet square, and this serves all the purposes of the family.”

San Francisco was built by squatters. As Rob Neuwirth recounts in his eye-opening book
Shadow Cities,
one survey in 1855 estimated that “95 percent of the property holders in [San Francisco] would not be able to produce a bona fide legal title to their land.” Squatters were everywhere, in the marshes, sand dunes, military bases. One eyewitness said, “Where there was a vacant piece of ground one day, the next saw it covered with half a dozen tents or shanties.” Philadelphia was largely settled by what local papers called “squatlers.” As late as 1940, one in five citizens in Shanghai was a squatter. Those one million squatters stayed and kept upgrading their slum so that within one generation their shantytown became one of the first twenty-first-century cities.

That's how it works. This is how all technology works. A gadget begins as a junky prototype and then progresses to something that barely works. The ad hoc shelters in slums are upgraded over time, infrastructure is extended, and eventually makeshift services become official. What was once the home of poor hustlers becomes, over the span of generations, the home of rich hustlers. Propagating slums is what cities do, and living in slums is how cities grow. The majority of neighborhoods in almost every modern city are merely successful former slums. The squatter cities of today will become the blue-blood neighborhoods of tomorrow. This is already happening in Rio and Mumbai today.

Slums of the past and slums of today follow the same description. The first impression is and was one of filth and overcrowding. In a ghetto a thousand years ago and in a slum today shelters are haphazard and dilapidated. The smells are overwhelming. But there is vibrant economic activity. Every slum boasts eateries and bars, and most have rooming houses or places you can rent a bed. They have animals, fresh milk, grocery stores, barber shops, healers, herb stores, repair stands, and strong armed men offering “protection.” A squatter city is, and has always been, a shadow city, a parallel world without official permission, but a city nonetheless.

Like any city, a slum is highly efficient—maybe even more so than the city's official sections, because nothing goes to waste. The ragpickers and resellers and scavengers all live in the slums and scour the rest of the city for scraps to assemble into shelter and to feed their economy. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. The city as a whole is a wonderful technological invention that concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint, a city not only provides living quarters and occupations in a minimum of space, but it also generates a maximum of ideas and inventions.

Stewart Brand notes in the “City Planet” chapter of his book
Whole Earth Discipline,
“Cities are wealth creators; they have always been.” He quotes urban theorist Richard Florida, who claims that forty of the largest megacities in the world, home to 18 percent of the world's population, “produce two-thirds of global economic output and nearly 9 in 10 new patented innovations.” A Canadian demographer calculated that “80 to 90 percent of GNP growth occurs in cities.” The raggedy new part of each city, its squats and encampments, often house the most productive citizens. As Mike Davis points out in
Planet of Slums,
“The traditional stereotype of the Indian pavement-dweller is a destitute peasant, newly arrived from the countryside, who survives by parasitic begging, but as research in Mumbai has revealed, almost all [families] (97 percent) have at least one breadwinner, and 70 percent have been in the city at least six years.” Slum dwellers are often busy with low-paying service jobs in nearby high-rent districts; they have money but live in a squatter city because it's close to their work. Because they are industrious, they progress fast. One UN report found that households in the older slums of Bangkok have on average 1.6 televisions, 1.5 cell phones, and a refrigerator; two-thirds have a washing machine and CD player; and half have a fixed-line phone, a video player, and a motor scooter. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5 percent, but 94 percent of their kids were literate.