What Technology Wants (42 page)

In a world of converging global standards, a recurring fear among minority cultures is that their niche differences will be lost. They need not be. In fact, the increasingly common carrier of global communication can heighten the value of their differences. The distinctive foods, medicinal knowledge, and child-rearing practices of, say, the Yanomamo tribe in the Amazon or the San Bushmen in Africa were only esoteric, local knowledge before. Their diversity constituted a difference that did not make a difference outside the tribe, because their knowledge was not connected to other human cultures. But once connected to standard roads, electricity, and communications, their differences can potentially make a difference to others. Even if their knowledge can be applied only in their local environment, wider knowledge of their knowledge makes a difference. Where do wealthy people travel to? Places that retain differences. What eateries attract customers? The ones with distinctive characteristics. What products sell in a global market? Ones that think different.

If such local diversity can remain distinctively different while it is connected (and this is a very big
if
), then that difference becomes steadily more valuable in a global matrix. Maintaining that balance of connected-but-different is a challenge, of course, because much of this cultural difference and diversity originated via isolation, and in the new mix it no longer will be isolated. Cultural differences that thrive without isolation (even if they were born out of it) will compound in value as the world becomes standardized. One example is Bali, Indonesia. The rich, distinguished Balinese culture seems to deepen even as it becomes interconnected with the contemporary world. Like other inhabitants of old and new, the Balinese may wield English as their universal second language while speaking their own tongue at home. They make their ritual flower offerings in the morning and study science at school in the afternoon. They do gamelan and Google.

But how does widening diversity square with the equally pervasive trend I addressed earlier: the inevitable sequence of technologies and the convergence of the technium upon certain forms? At first glance, it would seem as if the channeling of the technium's direction would work against its outward spreading in new directions. If technology converges into a single global sequence of innovations, in what way does this encourage technological diversity?

The sequence of the technium is akin to the development of an organism as it grows through a scripted series of stages. All brains, for instance, progress through a growth pattern from infancy to maturity. But anywhere along that line the brain can generate a remarkable diversity of thoughts.

For the most part, technology will converge to uniform usage around the globe, but occasionally some group or subgroup will devise and refine a type of technology or technique that has limited appeal to a fringe group or marginal use. Very occasionally, this fringe diversity will triumph in the mainstream and overwhelm the existing paradigm, thus rewarding the processes the technium has of encouraging diversity.

Anthropologist Pierre Petrequin once noted that the Meervlakte Dubele and Iau tribes in Papau New Guinea had been using steel axes and beads for many decades but their use had not been adopted by the Wano tribe a “mere day's walk away.” This is still true today. Cell-phone use is significantly broader, deeper, and changing faster in Japan than in the United States. Yet the same factories make the gear for both countries. Similarly, automobile use is broader, deeper, and changing faster in the United States than in Japan.

This pattern is not new. Since the birth of tools, humans have preferred some forms of technology over others for irrational reasons. They may avoid one version or one invention—even when it appears to be more efficient or productive—simply as an act of identity: “Our clan does not do it that way” or “Our tradition does it this way.” People may skip an obvious technical improvement because the new way does not feel right or comfortable, even though it is more utilitarian. Anthropologist of technology Pierre Lemonnier has reviewed such patchy interruptions in history and says, “Time and again, people exhibit technical behaviors that do not correspond with any logic of material efficiency or progress.”

The Anga tribesmen of Papua New Guinea have hunted wild pigs for thousands of years. To kill a wild pig, which may weigh as much as a man, the Anga construct a trap using little more than sticks, vines, rocks, and gravity. Over time the Anga have refined and modified trap technology to fit their terrain. They have devised three general styles. One is a trench lined with sharp stakes camouflaged under leaves and branches; one is a row of sharpened stakes hidden behind a low barrier protecting bait; and one is a deadfall—a heavy weight suspended above a path that is tripped and released by a passing pig.

Technical know-how of this sort passes easily from village to village in the West Papua highlands. What one community knows, all know (at least over decades, if not centuries). You have to travel many days before variation in knowledge is felt. Most groups of Anga can set any of the three varieties of traps as needed. However, one particular group, the Langimar, ignore the common knowledge of the deadfall trap. According to Lemonnier, “Members of this group can name without difficulty the ten pieces that make up the dead-fall trap, they can describe its functioning, and they can even make a rough sketch; but they do not use the device.” Right across the river, the houses of the neighboring Menye tribe can be seen; they use this type of trap—which is a very good technology. Two hours' walk away, the Kapau tribe uses the deadfall, yet the Langimar choose not to. As Lemonnier notes, sometimes “a perfectly understood technology is voluntarily ignored.”

It's not as if the Langimar are backward. Further north of the Langimar, some Anga tribes make their wooden arrow tips barbless, selectively ignoring the critical technology of injurious barbs that the Langimar use, despite the fact that the Anga “have had many occasions to note the superiority of the barbed arrows shot at them by their enemies.” Neither the available wood type nor the available type of game hunted explains this ethnic dismissal.

Technologies have a social dimension beyond their mere mechanical performance. We adopt new technologies largely because of what they do for us, but also in part because of what they mean to us. Often we refuse to adopt technology for the same reason: because of how the avoidance reinforces or shapes our identity.

Whenever researchers look closely at the dispersal patterns of technology, both modern and ancient, they see patterns of ethnic adoption. Sociologists have noticed that one group of Sami rejected one of the two known types of reindeer lassos, while other Laplanders used both forms. A peculiarly inefficient type of horizontal waterwheel spread all over Morocco, but nowhere else in the world, even though the physics of waterwheels are constant.

We should expect people to continue to exhibit ethnic and social preferences. Groups or individuals will reject all kinds of technologically advanced innovations simply because they can. Or because everyone else accepts them. Or because they clash with their self-conception. Or because they don't mind doing things with more effort. People will choose to abstain from or forsake particular global standards of technology as a form of idiosyncratic distinction. In this way while the planetary culture slides toward convergence of technologies, billions of technology users will diverge in their personal choices as they edge toward using smaller and more eccentric selections of available stuff.

Diversity powers the world. In an ecosystem, increasing diversity is a sign of health. The technium, too, runs on diversity. From the dawn of creation the tide of diversity has risen, and as far as we can look into the future, it will continue to diverge without end.

Evolution moves from the general to the specific. The first version of the cell was a general-purpose survival-machine blob. Over time, evolution honed that one generality into multiple specialties. In the beginning, the domain of life was restricted to warm ponds. But most of the planet was far more extreme: volcanoes and glaciers. Evolution devised cells that specialized in living in boiling hot water or within freezing ice and special cells that could eat oil or trap heavy metals. Specialization enabled life to colonize these major, but varied, extreme habitats and also to fill millions of niche environments—such as the insides of other organisms or the dimples of dust particles in the air. Very soon, every possible environment on the planet sprouted a specialized variety of life making a living there. Presently there are no sterilized places anywhere on the planet, except in a very few temporary spots within a hospital setting. The cells of life keep specializing.

The trend toward specialization holds for multicellular organisms as well. Cells within an organism specialize. The human body has 210 different types of cells, including the specialized cells in the liver and kidneys. It has distinctive heart muscle cells, different from ordinary skeletal muscle cells. The original omnipotent egg cell that initiates every animal divides into cells with greater specificity, until after less than 50 mitotic cell divisions you and I wind up with a unified assemblage of 10
¹⁵
bone cells, skin cells, and brain cells.

Over evolutionary time, there is a significant rise in the number of cell types in the most complex organisms. In fact, these organisms are more complex in part because they contain more specialized parts. So specialization follows the arc of complexity.

The organism itself also tends toward great specialization. Over the course of time, for one example, barnacles (comprised of 50 specialty cell types) evolve into specialty barnacles: The six-plated barnacle spe-cializes in extreme high-tide locations that are flooded (with food to eat) only several times a month. The
Sacculina
barnacle grows only inside the egg sac of a living crab. Birds focus into specialized types of seed eaters with specialized beaks: fine ones for small seeds, big fat beaks for hard seeds. A few plants (we call them weeds) are opportunistic and will occupy any disturbed soil, but most plants dedicate their survival skills to a particular niche: dark tropical swamps or dry, windy alpine peaks. Koala bears are famously specialized on eucalyptus trees, and pandas on bamboo.

Specialized Cell Types
.
The maximum number of different cell types found in an organism has increased over evolutionary time.

The trend toward specialization in life is propelled by an arms race. More specialized organisms (such as a clam thriving on sulfuric emissions in lightless deep-sea vents) present more specialized environments for competitors and prey (such as crabs that feed on the sulfuric clams), which breed more specialized strategies (such as parasites on the crabs) and solutions and in the end yet more specialized organisms.

This urge to specialize extends into the technium. The original tool of the hominins, a roundish rock with a broken edge, was a general purpose object used for scraping, cutting, and hammering. Once taken up by Sapiens, it morphed into specialty tools: a separate scraper, cutter, and hammer. The variety of tool species increased over time as specialty tasks increased. Sewing required needles; sewing hide required special needles, sewing woven fabric another. When simple tools were recombined into composite tools (string + stick = bow), specialization increased further. The astounding diversity of manufactured items today is primarily driven by the need for specialized parts of complicated devices.

At the same time, just as in organic life, tools tend to start out being useful for many things and then evolve toward specific tasks. The first camera with photographic film was invented in 1885. Once incarnated, the idea of the camera started to specialize. Within years of its birth, inventors devised tiny spy cameras, extra-large panoramic cameras, compound-lens cameras, high-speed flash cameras. Today there are hundreds of specialty cameras, including those for use deep underwater, those designed for the vacuum of space, and those able to capture the infrared or the ultraviolet. While one can still purchase (or make) the original general-purpose camera, those count for an increasingly small fraction of cameradom.

This sequence from general to specific holds true for most technologies. Automobiles start off appealing broadly, and over time they evolve to specific models, while the general-purpose variety fades. You can choose among compacts, vans, sporty models, sedans, pickups, hybrids, and so on. Scissors are specified for hair, paper, carpet, mesh, or flowers.

As we look into the future, specialization will continue to increase. The first gene sequencer sequenced any gene. The next step is a specialized human DNA sequencer that does only the DNA of humans or another specific species, say, the mouse for researchers. Then we'll see sequencers that specialize in racial genomes (say, for African Americans or Chinese) or extremely portable ones or ones that are extremely fast and sequence in real time, letting a person know whether pollutants are damaging their genes right now. The first commercial virtual-reality consoles will serve up virtual realities for all purposes, but over time, VR consoles will evolve special versions with special gear for games or military practice or movie rehearsals or shopping.