What Technology Wants (35 page)

That's their choice, which is fine as far as it goes. And because it is a choice, we should celebrate their development of it.

I may not tweet, watch TV, or use a laptop, but I certainly benefit from the effect of others who do. In that way I am not that different from the Amish, who benefit from the outsiders around them fully engaged with electricity, phones, and cars. But unlike individuals who opt out of individual technologies, Amish society indirectly constrains others as well as themselves. If we apply the ubiquity test—what happens if everyone does it?—to the Amish way, the optimization of choice collapses. By constraining the suite of acceptable occupations and narrowing education, the Amish are holding back possibilities not just for their children but indirectly for all.

If you are a web designer today, it is only because many tens of thousands of other people around you and before you have been expanding the realm of possibilities. They have gone beyond farms and home shops to invent a complex ecology of electronic devices that require new expertise and new ways of thinking. If you are an accountant, untold numbers of creative people in the past devised the logic and tools of accounting for you. If you do science, your instruments and field of study have been created by others. If you are a photographer, or an extreme sports athlete, or a baker, or an auto mechanic, or a nurse—
then your potential has been given an opportunity by the work of others
. You are being expanded as others expand themselves.

Unlike the Amish and minimites, the tens of millions of migrants headed into cities each year may invent a tool that will unleash choices for someone else. If they don't, then their children will. Our mission as humans is not only to discover our fullest selves in the technium, and to find full contentment, but to expand the possibilities for others. Greater technology will selfishly unleash our talents, but it will also unselfishly unleash others: our children, and all children to come.

That means that as you embrace new technologies, you are indirectly working for future generations of Amish, and for the minimite homesteaders, even though they are not doing as much for you. Most of what you adopt they will ignore. But every once in a while your adoption of “something that doesn't quite work yet” (Danny Hillis's definition of technology) will evolve into an appropriate tool they can use. It might be a solar grain dyer; it might be a cure for cancer. Anyone who is inventing, discovering, and expanding possibilities will indirectly expand possibilities for others.

Nonetheless, the Amish and minimites have important lessons to teach us about selecting what we embrace. Like them, I don't want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be choosy about what I spend time mastering. I want to be able to back out of things that don't work out. I don't want stuff that closes off options for others (like lethal weapons). And I do want the minimum because I've learned that I have limited time and attention.

I owe the Amish hackers a large debt because through their lives I now see the technium's dilemma very clearly: To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed, we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally.

12

“So the whole question comes down to this: Can the human mind master what the human mind has made?” This, according to the French poet and philosopher Paul Valery, is the dilemma of the technium. Has the enormity and cleverness of our creation overwhelmed our ability to control or guide it? What choices do we have in navigating the technium when it charges ahead, pushed by the millennia of momentum behind it? Within the technium's imperative, do we have any freedom at all? And practically, where are the levers to pull?

We have lots of choices. But those choices are no longer simple, nor obvious. As technology increases its complexity, the technium demands more complex responses. For instance, the number of technologies to choose from so far exceeds our capacity to use them all that these days we define ourselves more by the technologies we
don't
use than by those we do. In the same way that a vegetarian has more of an identity than an omnivore, someone who chooses not to drive or use the internet stakes out a stronger technological stance than the ordinary consumer. Although we don't realize it, at the global scale, we opt out of more technology than we opt in to.

The pattern of our personal nonadoption is usually illogical and nonsensical. On first glance some Amish rejections of technology appear equally weird and nonsensical. They might use four horses to pull a noisy diesel-powered harvester because they reject motor vehicles. Outsiders point to that combo as hypocritical, but it really is no more hypocritical than a famous science-fiction writer I knew who surfed the web but did not do e-mail. It was a simple choice for him; he got what he wanted from the one technology but not the other. When I asked my friends about their own technological choices, I found one friend who e-mailed but did not fax; another who faxed but did not have a phone; a friend who had a phone but no TV; someone with TV who rejected microwave ovens; another with microwaves but no clothes dryer; one with a clothes dryer who had rejected air-conditioning; one who loves his AC but refuses to get a car; a car fanatic with no CD player (only vinyl records); a guy with CDs who refuses GPS navigation; someone who embraces GPS but not credit cards; and so on. To outsiders, these abstinences are idiosyncratic and, arguably, hypocritical, but they serve the same purpose as the choices made by the Amish, which is to sculpt the cornucopia of technology to suit our personal intentions.

The Amish, however, select or deny technology as a group. By contrast, in secular modern culture, particularly in the West, technology choices are made individually, as a personal decision. It is much easier to maintain a disciplined refusal of a popular technology when all your peers are doing likewise and much harder if they are not. Much of the success of the Amish is due to the unwavering community-wide support (bordering on social coercion) for their unorthodox technology lifestyle. In fact, this union of sympathy is so essential that Amish families won't move to an Amish-less region to pioneer new settlements until a sufficient number of other families join them for a critical mass.

Can collective choice work more broadly in a modern pluralistic society? Can we, together, as a nation—or even as a planet—successfully choose certain technologies and refuse others?

Over the centuries, societies have declared many technologies to be dangerous, economically upsetting, immoral, unwise, or simply too unknown for our good. The remedy to this perceived evil is usually a form of prohibition. The offending innovation may be taxed severely or legislated to narrow purposes or restricted to the outskirts or banned altogether. The list of offending inventions in history banned on a wide scale includes such major items as crossbows, guns, mines, nuclear bombs, electricity, automobiles, large sailing ships, bathtubs, blood transfusions, vaccines, copy machines, TVs, computers, and the internet.

Yet history shows that it is very hard for a society as a whole to say no to technology for very long. I recently examined all the cases of large-scale technology prohibitions that I could find in the last 1,000 years. I define “large-scale prohibition” as an official injunction against a specific technology made at the level of a culture, religious group, or nation, rather than as an individual or small locality. I am not counting technologies that are ignored, but only ones that are deliberately relinquished. I found about 40 cases that met these criteria. That is not very many cases for 1,000 years. In fact it's hard to come up with a list of anything else that has occurred only 40 times in 1,000 years!

Large-scale prohibitions against technologies are rare. They are hard to enforce. And my research shows most don't last much longer than the normal obsolescence cycle of accepted technology. A handful of prohibitions lasted several hundred years in an era when it took technology several hundred years to change. The gun was outlawed in Shogun Japan for three centuries, exploration ships in Ming China for three centuries, and silk spinning in Italy for two centuries. Few others in history lasted as long. The guild of French scribes succeeded in delaying the introduction of printing into Paris, but only for 20 years. As the life cycle of technology sped up, the popularity of an invention could fade in a few years, and prohibitions against technology naturally shortened as well.

Duration of Prohibitions.
The duration of a historical technological prohibition in years (vertical axis) plotted in the year of the initial prohibition. Durations are shortening over time.

The chart on the previous page plots the duration of a prohibition against the year when the prohibition started. It includes only prohibitions that have concluded. As technology accelerates, so does the brevity of prohibition.

Bans may not last, but the question of whether they are effective during their duration is a much harder question to answer. Many earlier bans were based on economic considerations. The French banned the manufacture of machine-made cotton fabric for the same reason the English cottage weavers banned wide stocking-frame looms during the Luddite rebellion—it hurt their agrarian household businesses. Economic prohibitions can achieve their goals in the short term but often aggravate the inevitable transition to acceptance later.

Other prohibitions were made for security reasons. The ancient Greeks were the first to use crossbows, which they called “belly shooters” because they were loaded pried against the belly. Compared to the longbow, the traditional bow made of yew wood, the racket-assisted crossbow was far more powerful and far more deadly. The crossbow was the equivalent of today's AK-87 assault weapon. It was banned by Pope Innocent II at the Second Lateran Council in 1139 for the same reason that citizen-owned bazookas are prohibited by law in most countries on Earth today; their speedy, crowd-killing power is considered unnecessarily violent and broad for home defense or hunting. It's a tool good for war but not for peace. But according to David Bachrach, historian of the crossbow, “these bans against the crossbow were not at all effective. The crossbow continued to be the dominant hand-held missile weapon throughout the high middle ages particularly for use in the defense of fortifications and on ships.” The 50-year ban on crossbows was as ineffective as today's ban on assault rifles has been in the underworld.

If we take a global view of technology, prohibition seems very ephemeral. While an item may be banned in one place, it will thrive in another. In 1299, officials in Florence prohibited their bankers from using Arabic numerals in their accounts. But the rest of Italy eagerly adopted them. In a global marketplace, nothing is eliminated. Where a technology is banned locally, it slips away to pool somewhere else on the globe.

Genetically modified foods have a reputation for being outlawed, and indeed some countries do ban them, but the acreage dedicated to growing genetically modified plant crops is increasing at 9 percent per year globally. Although prohibited by some nations, the amount of power delivered by nuclear power plants is increasing globally by 2 percent a year. The only worldwide relinquishment that seems to be working is the reduction of the nuclear weapon stockpile, which peaked at 65,000 units in 1986 and is now at 20,000. At the same time, the number of countries capable of making a nuclear weapon is increasing.

In a deeply connected world, the accelerated pace of technological succession—constant upgrades replacing former versions—renders even the most well-meaning ban unsustainable. Prohibitions are in effect postponements. Some, such as the Amish, find that delay useful enough. Others hope that a more desirable replacement technology might be found during the delay. That is possible. But wholesale prohibitions simply do not work to eliminate a technology that is considered subversive or morally wrong. Technologies can be postponed but not stopped.

Part of the reason that these widespread bans so rarely work is that we generally don't understand new inventions when they first appear. Every new idea is a bundle of uncertainty. No matter how sure the originator is that his or her newest idea will transform the world or end war or remove poverty or delight the masses, the truth is that no one knows what it will do. Even the short-term role of an idea is unclear. History is rife with cases of misguided technological expectations from the inventors themselves. Thomas Edison believed his phonograph would be used primarily to record the last-minute bequests of the dying. The radio was funded by early backers who believed it would be the ideal device for delivering sermons to rural farmers. Viagra was clinically tested as a drug for heart disease. The internet was invented as a disaster-proof communications backup. Very few great ideas start out headed toward the greatness they eventually achieve. That means that projecting what harm may come from a technology before it “is” is almost impossible.