What Technology Wants (8 page)

Finally, the latest transition in the organization of knowledge is happening now. We inject order and design into everything we manufacture. We are also adding microscopic chips that can perform small amounts of computation and communication. Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind. This all-pervasive flow of information, expanded to include manufactured objects as well as humans, and distributed around the globe in one large web, is the greatest (but not final) ordering of information.

The trajectory of increasing order in the technium follows the same path that it does in life. Within both life and the technium, the thickening of interconnections at one level weaves the new level of organization above it. And it's important to note that the major transitions in the technium begin at the level where the major transitions in biology left off: Primate societies give rise to language.

The invention of language marks the last major transformation in the natural world and also the first transformation in the manufactured world. Words, ideas, and concepts are the most complex things social animals (like us) make, and also the simplest foundation for any type of technology. Thus language bridges the two sequences of major transitions and unites them into one continuous sequence, so that natural evolution flows into technological evolution. The complete sequence of major transitions in deep history runs like this:

This escalating stack of increasing order is revealed to be one long story. We can think of the technium as the further reorganization of information that began with the six kingdoms of life. In this way, the technium becomes the seventh kingdom of life. It extends a process begun four billion years ago. Just as the evolutionary tree of Sapiens branched off from its animal precursors long ago, the technium now branches off from its precursor, the mind of the human animal. Outward from this common root flow new species of hammers, wheels, screws, refined metal, and domesticated crops, as well as rarefied species like quantum computers, genetic engineering, jet planes, and the World Wide Web.

The technium differs from the other six kingdoms in a couple of important ways. Compared to members of the other six kingdoms, these new species are the most ephemeral species on Earth. The bristlecone pines have watched entire families and classes of technology come and go. Nothing we have made approaches the endurance of the least living thing. Many digital technologies have shorter life spans than individual mayflies, let alone species.

But nature can't plan ahead. It does not hoard innovations for later use. If a variation in nature does not provide an
immediate
survival advantage, it is too costly to maintain and so over time it disappears. But sometimes a trait advantageous for one problem will turn out to be advantageous for a second, unanticipated problem. For instance, feathers evolved to warm a small, cold-blooded dinosaur. Later on, these same feathers, once installed on limbs for warmth, proved handy for short flights. From this heat-conservation innovation came unplanned wings and birds. These inadvertent anticipatory inventions are called exaptations in biology. We don't know how common exaptations are in nature, but they are routine in the technium. The technium is nothing but exaptations, since innovations can be easily borrowed across lines of origin or moved across time and repurposed.

Niles Eldredge is the cofounder (with Stephen Jay Gould) of the theory of punctuated, stepwise evolution. His professional expertise is the history of trilobites, or ancient arthropods that resemble today's pill bugs. As a hobby he collects cornets, musical instruments very similar to trumpets. Once Eldredge applied his professional taxonomic methods to his collection of 500 cornets, some dating back to 1825. He selected 17 traits that varied among his instruments—the shape of their horns, the placement of the valves, the length and diameter of their tubes—very similar to the kinds of metrics he applies to trilobites. When he mapped the evolution of cornets using techniques similar to those he applies to ancient arthropods, he found that the pattern of the lineages were very similar in many ways to those of living organisms. As one example, the evolution of cornets showed a stepwise progress, much like trilobites. But the evolution of musical instruments was also very distinctive. The key difference between the evolution of multicellular life and the evolution of the technium is that in life most blending of traits happens “vertically” in time. Innovations are passed from living parents down (vertically) through offspring. In the technium, on the other hand, most blending of traits happens laterally across time—even from “extinct” species and across lineages from nonparents. Eldredge discovered that the pattern of evolution in the technium is not the repeated forking of branches we associate with the tree of life, but rather a spreading, recursive network of pathways that often double back to “dead” ideas and resurrect “lost” traits. Another way of saying the same thing: Early traits (exaptations) anticipate the later lineages that adopt them. These two patterns were distinct enough that Eldridge claims one could use it to identify whether an evolutionary tree depicted a clan of the born or of the made.

Evolutionary Tree of Cornets.
The design heritage for each musical instrument shows how some branches borrow from far earlier models or nonadjacent branches (dotted lines), unlike organic evolution.

The second difference between evolution of the technium and evolution of the organic is that incremental transformation is the rule in biology. There are very few revolutionary steps; everything advances via a very long series of tiny steps, each one of which must work for the creature at the time. In contrast, technology can jump ahead, make abrupt leaps, and skip over incremental steps. As Eldredge points out, “No way did the transistor ‘evolve from' the vacuum tube the way the eyes on one side of a flatfish's head are derived from the original bilaterally symmetrical conformation of the ancestral fish.” Instead of the hundreds of millions of incremental improvements the flatfish endured, the transistor leaped from the ancestral vacuum tube via dozens of iterations at the most.

But by far the greatest difference between the evolution of the born and the evolution of the made is that species of technology, unlike species in biology, almost never go extinct. A close examination of a supposedly extinct bygone technology almost always shows that somewhere on the planet someone is still producing it. A technique or artifact may be rare in the modern urban world but quite common in the developing rural world. For instance, Burma is full of oxcart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning is still thriving in Bolivia. A supposedly dead technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for ritual satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities, or fanatical vinyl record collectors. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or is second rate, but it still may be in small-time use. For just one of many examples, as late as 1962, in what was then called the atomic age, many small businesses on a block in Boston ran machines using steam power delivered to them by overhead driveshafts. This kind of anachronistic technology is not at all unusual.

A Thousand Years of Helmet Evolution.
The American zoologist and medieval armor expert Bashford Dean sketched out this diagramatic “genealogical tree” of the evolution of medieval European helmets starting in the year 600.

In my own travels around the world I was struck by how resilient ancient technologies were, how they were often first choices where power and modern resources were scarce. It seemed to me as if no technologies ever disappeared. I was challenged on this conclusion by a highly regarded historian of technology who told me without thinking, “Look, they don't make steam-powered automobiles anymore.” Well, within a few clicks on Google I very quickly located folks who are making
brand-new
parts for Stanley steam-powered cars. Nice shiny copper valves, pistons, whatever you need. With enough money you could put together an entirely new steam-powered car. And of course, thousand of hobbyists are still bolting together steam-powered vehicles, and hundreds more are keeping old ones running. Steam power is very much an intact, though uncommon, species of technology.

I decided to see how many old technologies a postmodern urban citizen living in a cosmopolitan city (like San Francisco) could lay his hands on. One hundred years ago, there was no electricity, no internal combustion engines, few highways, and little long-distance communication except via the post office network. But through that postal network you could order almost anything manufactured from the Montgomery Ward catalog. The faded newsprint of my reproduction catalog had the air of a mausoleum of a long-dead civilization. However, it became quickly and surprisingly clear that most of the thousands of items for sale 100 years ago, as cataloged by this wish book, were still for sale now. Although the styling is different, the underlying technology, function, and form are the same. A leather boot with doodads is still a leather boot.

I set myself the challenge of finding all the products on a sample page from the 1894-95 Montgomery Ward catalog. Flipping through its 600 pages, I selected one fairly typical page that featured agricultural implements. These types of obsolete tools would be far harder to find today than, say, the stove pots, lamps, clocks, pens, and hammers that populate the rest of the pages. Farm tools seemed like certain dinosaurs. Who needs a hand-powered corncob sheller, or a paint mill, whatever that was? If I could purchase these obsolete tools from the agricultural era it would strongly suggest not much was gone.

Catalogs of Durable Goods.
On the left, page 562 of the 1894-95 Montgomery Ward catalog offering farm implements by mail order. On the right, the equivalent brand-new items offered by various sources on the web in 2005.

Of course it's a no-brainer to find antiques on eBay. My test was to find newly manufactured versions of this equipment, since this would show that these species were still viable.

The results stunned me. In a few hours I was able to find every single item listed on this page of a century-old catalog. Each old tool was available in a new incarnation and sold on the web. Nothing was dead.