I ask myself this question sometimes, and I think, in the end, it’s because I don’t want to be liberated in the way that they do. Liberation is a word that occurs again and again in the writings of the apostles of the technium. In this reading, life is a project of progressive liberation, of the throwing off of shackles, of being the best we can be. Evolution is like a giant self-help manual. Ray Kurzweil wants to liberate us from ‘the outdated software of our bodies’. Kevin Kelly wants to go even further: the technium, he says, can free us not only from our limiting physical frames, but from nature and time itself:
Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in the same self-organisation 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.
Advanced technology, in other words, will one day liberate us from the universe. It’s an astonishing claim, and it’s worth dwelling on, because this is the point at which the technium becomes a religious concern. Kelly acknowledges that its advance will lead to – indeed, already is leading to – the ‘erosion of the traditional self’ and that the advance of the machine and our increasing dependence on it ‘chips away at human dignity’. The ultimate endpoint of this is likely to be the abolition of humanity as we know it, but the flip side of the bargain is that this ‘liberation’ will lead to ‘increasing the options, choices and possibilities’ of all living things.
A transcendent force exists that is beyond the power and understanding of humanity, though it is also entwined closely with it. This force can liberate us from earthly misery and transport us into an eternal paradise in which we shall be changed, but only if we surrender to its will. Doesn’t this sound like a certain kind of religious story? I can’t help seeing the narrative being spun out by Kelly and Kurzweil and all of their Silicon Valley stablemates as a new story of silicon transcendence: a story, in the end, about the death of God and His replacement in the modern mind by machines that can do His, and humanity’s, job better.
The technium will become God. Or perhaps God was always in the technium. Kelly seems to think so. In the last three pages of his book, something extraordinary happens: it’s as if he can no longer contain himself, and what has been posing up to this point as an investigative enquiry into our relationship with technology becomes, rather like the technium itself, what it had always wanted to be: a mystical text. ‘If there is a God,’ writes Kelly, ‘the arc of the technium is aimed right at him … the technium is the way the universe has engineered its own self-awareness … the smallest thought could not exist unless the entire universe and the laws of physics were in some way encouraging it.’
*
Planting my trees was a technological endeavour. In using even the basic tools, even the spade and the scythe and the mattock, I was locking myself into a global web of technological interdependence. Does that mean that the innocent project of planting trees is itself a part of the technium, rather than an escape from it? Kevin Kelly would say so, and in one sense he’d be right. There is no escape from our tools, from our technologies, from the part of ourselves that we have put into them. We are what we do and what we make and what we use, and everything is dependent on everything else.
But there is something missing from this perspective; some nuance, some flicker of truth. Yes, I was tied into the industrial economy when I planted my trees. But if the industrial economy were to disappear tomorrow, could I still plant them? Yes, I could, though I may not want to. Both may give you sore arms, but there is a difference between a keyboard and a spade. A spade can still be made fairly simply. It doesn’t need constant energy to keep going. It can last a long time, if you treat it well, rather like your body. A keyboard and a spade are both products of an industrial economy, but not to the same extent, and they do not have the same purpose. One can exist independently, the other cannot. This might be a matter of degrees, but the degrees matter – and so does the intent.
There’s another point too, though, and perhaps it is a more important one: nobody ever got addicted to a spade. Yet we are surely addicted to the technium. Walk down a street in any city and count the number of people whose eyes are glued to their smartphones as they walk. Sit in a cafe and count the number of two- and three-year-old kids who are staring at tablet computers instead of into the eyes of their equally net-bound parents. We are stuck in a web, caught in a net, and I’m not sure we could escape now if we wanted to. But we don’t want to. Our astonishing ability to accept virtually anything the digital world throws at us without questioning its downside for an instant sometimes sends shivers down my spine. I may not share Kevin Kelly’s perspective, but I think he is right about the nature of the technium. I think there is something bigger than us, rearranging itself around us now like a prison. It’s a prison we don’t seem to want to escape from, because there’s so much fun to be had in it; and anyway if we did want to escape we couldn’t, so why bother trying?
I don’t want to sound as if I’ve read too much science fiction, but I’m on board with both Kelly and Kurzweil to this extent: this thing is bigger than us now. It is developing a degree of autonomy, and it is using us, somehow, to create itself. I know this sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it’s not really a theory, it’s more of a hunch: a conspiracy feeling. We are surrendering the freedom to be human in exchange for the freedom to live in confected dreams: dreams in which nature is dead, except for the pretty bits, and bad things never happen, and nobody dies, and there is nothing to life but entertainment and everything we see we can control, because we have created it. On Ray Kurzweil’s Mediterranean beach, there will be no poisonous jellyfish, there will be no litter on the tide, and nobody will mug you as you walk home at dusk. Maybe we long for this pseudo-life. Perhaps we want the beauty and the transcendence without the darkness and the danger. Maybe that’s what the promises of heaven were always about, in the end.
Nature itself, real nature, the one that evolved without us controlling it, is messy. For most of the history of civilisation we have had to fight it off. Planting trees is painful and clearing ground is backbreaking, yet it can offer us meaning. But maybe the technium, as it advances, will give us meaning, too: perhaps the nanobots in our brains will create a simulacrum of it in a virtual-reality nature in which we get all of the beauty and none of the cowshit on our boots. That, I suppose, is the dream. Transcendence without the effort. The business of being human without the work that brings it about. What is the project of modernity if it is not a product of liberating the individual from the mass, liberating the body from work and pain, liberating the mind from fear and confusion? Liberation, freedom, eternal life in a simulated heaven. God may be dead, but it seems religion isn’t.
Still, there is more to the technium than its salvational draw. At its simplest, it promises us heaven here on Earth, and what it promises us goes with the grain of contemporary Western culture, which increasingly means global culture. In an age in which people conflate desires with rights, and in which whole generations have grown up seeing themselves as consumers in a marketplace, demanding their money’s worth, it is well placed to deliver. Want to have babies at the age of seventy, or clone yourself, or create children from the genetic material of five different people, or have a nanobot resequence your genes so you can live to five hundred, or download your consciousness into a machine that will go on for ever? The technium is your friend. And who has the right to tell you that you can’t do these things? Priests? Ethicists? Environmentalists? Luddites and reactionaries, all of them. If it is what you want, you should have it, because that is what freedom now means. How long can it be before cheating death becomes a human right?
Politically, the technium also looks well placed to satisfy the current cultural desire for total human equality. Advanced technology, comb
ined with capitalist markets, is a far greater leveller of difference and distinction than communism ever was. It destroys cultural and geographical differences, abolishes traditions and creates a one-world factory floor cum marketplace in which everyone is equal in the eyes of the machine. Left to its own devices, the technium will doubtless abolish poverty, create gender and racial equality and remove any of the ‘discriminations’ associated with awkward, local, specific or traditional ways of being human in the world. Marx, I think, would have been impressed. If you have ever wondered why supposedly ‘radical’ thinkers on the left rarely question technology, your answer is here. If you seek a world of perfect sameness, the technium is poised to give it to you. The price it will extract will be the abolition of human nature. At the moment, it seems we are willing to pay it.
*
Sometimes I’m kept awake at night by a chicken-and-egg question: which came first, the science or the science fiction? It seems to me that my society is reaching towards a real-world version of the science-fictional universes that we grew up with. The robot butlers, the holodecks, the lunar colonies, the invisibility devices, the machines that do our thinking and even our moving for us: these are all on the drawing board, or at a later stage than that. Perhaps the science fiction was never fiction at all: perhaps it was a foreshadowing; the implanting in our minds of ideas that we would later bring to reality in the service of the Machine we are creating.
Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil don’t agree on everything, but what they do agree on seems to be shared by the team running Google, by the masters of the hyper-real universe who work in Silicon Valley, and by the intellectual classes across the Western world and increasingly beyond. What they agree on is that the future is hyper-digital, web-embedded and increasingly virtual. We are in for a world of wearable technology and smart homes, self-driving cars, synthetic lifeforms in the fields and forests and an accelerating merger between carbon and silicon, human and machine, natural and artificial, until the boundaries have blurred so much that nobody can tell the difference, and everyone has long since stopped caring. The geeks who run the world’s biggest web corporations have this in common with the ranks of the neo-luddites: they all think the technium is coming, and none of them knows how to stop it. What they argue about is whether we should want to.
I’m sure it’s unfair to Kevin Kelly, but halfway through his book I found myself suddenly remembering the anti-modern denunciations of Oliver Mellors, the randy gamekeeper in D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I went to look up the exact words, and they made me smile:
Motor-cars and cinemas and aeroplanes suck that last bit out of them. I tell you, every generation breeds a more rabbity generation, with India rubber tubing for guts and tin legs and tin faces. Tin people! It’s all a steady sort of bolshevism just killing off the human thing, and worshipping the mechanical thing … All the modern lot get their real kick out of killing the old human feeling out of Man …
When I read Kelly on the technium or Kurzweil on the Singularity, when I hear Sergey Brin enthusing over his Google Glasses or see Mark Zuckerberg predicting wearable technology or smart fridges, I can’t helping thinking how many more rabbity generations we are further on from old Mellors and his Lady. My generation ‘needs’ technologies my parents never did, and my children’s will ‘need’ even more. Perhaps in the overdeveloped West we’ve just forgotten what it means to be human in the world. Or perhaps this is what it means to be human: innovating, remaking, building until the foundations give way. Perhaps we will all end up as tin people, or silicon people, all the old human feeling killed, and we’ll not know that it was ever different. Perhaps that has already happened. Perhaps ‘the mechanical thing’ that Mellors could see being worshipped was the technium rising, building its walls, bricking us in.
Maybe Kevin Kelly would say that I have less faith in humanity than he does, but I think I have more. Being human is hard work. It hurts. Being a machine must be a lot easier. Maybe this explains the apparent desire of some of us to merge with our creations. We are becoming machines, and our machines are becoming gods; or we think they are. Or we want to think so. Kelly certainly does, and I suspect he is not alone. ‘We can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog,’ he contends in his book’s fascinating and disturbing climax:
The phone extends the frog’s four billion years of learning and adds the open-ended investigations of six billion human minds. Someday we may believe the most convivial technology we can make is not a testament to human ingenuity but a testament of the holy … the intricate, unfathomable layers of logic built up over a century, borrowed from rainforest ecosystems, and woven together into beauty by millions of active synthetic minds will say what redwoods say, only louder, more convincingly: ‘Long before you were here, I am.’
It’s a few weeks now since I began writing this essay. It’s sunny this morning, beautifully so. There are three white mares cropping the grass in our field, and today I spent an hour mowing the grass around the young trees with my scythe. My elbow still hurts, but I have found some exercises that seem to be improving it. We dug a pond next to the alder trees last week and it’s full of water beetles already. I don’t know where they came from. Nature’s ability to rejuvenate itself, to be born and born and born again never ceases to come in at me when I least expect it.
You can spend too much time with thoughts of the future. The future, after all, doesn’t exist. Step away from those thoughts, get blisters on the heels of your hands and yes, mess up your arms, and you begin to see what actually does. Your perspective adjusts. Today, sitting here in the sun, I can’t see anything of God in my mobile phone, but He, She or It seems to be dancing all over the buttercups and red clover in the meadow before me. Watching the dance, I think we have far less control over the world than Ray Kurzweil believes we do, and that the future is less ordained than Kevin Kelly wants it to be. I don’t know what’s coming, but I just saw a heron fly past my open window on its way to the river. The grasses are moving in the wind that is coming in from the west. Soon enough, we’ll see.
Dark Mountain, issue 8, 2015
EPILOGUE
Uncivilisation
The Dark Mountain manifesto
Paul Kingsnorth and Dougald Hine
REARMAMENT
These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it seem monstrous
To admire the tragic beauty they build.
It is beautiful as a river flowing or a slowly gathering
Glacier on a high mountain rock-face,
Bound to plow down a forest, or as frost in November,
The gold and flaming death-dance for leaves,
Or a girl in the night of her spent maidenhood, bleeding and kissing.
I would burn my right hand in a slow fire
To change the future … I should do foolishly. The beauty of modern
Man is not in the persons but in the
Disastrous rhythm, the heavy and mobile masses, the dance of the
Dream-led masses down the dark mountain.
Robinson Jeffers, 1935
I: WALKING ON LAVA
The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilisation.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Those who witness extreme social collapse at first hand seldom describe any deep revelation about the truths of human existence. What they do mention, if asked, is their surprise at how easy it is to die.
The pattern of ordinary life, in which so much stays the same from one day to the next, disguises the fragility of its fabric. How many of our activities are made possible by the impression of stability that pattern gives? So long as it repeats, or varies steadily enough, we are able to plan for tomorrow as if all the things we rely on and don’t think about too carefully will still be there. When the pattern is broken, by civil war or natur
al disaster or the smaller-scale tragedies that tear at its fabric, many of those activities become impossible or meaningless, while simply meeting needs we once took for granted may occupy much of our lives.
What war correspondents and relief workers report is not only the fragility of the fabric, but the speed with which it can unravel. As we write this, no one can say with certainty where the unravelling of the financial and commercial fabric of our economies will end. Meanwhile, beyond the cities, unchecked industrial exploitation frays the material basis of life in many parts of the world, and pulls at the ecological systems which sustain it.
Precarious as this moment may be, however, an awareness of the fragility of what we call civilisation is nothing new.
‘Few men realise’, wrote Joseph Conrad in 1896, ‘that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings.’ Conrad’s writings exposed the civilisation exported by European imperialists to be little more than a comforting illusion, not only in the dark, unconquerable heart of Africa, but in the whited sepulchres of their capital cities. The inhabitants of that civilisation believed ‘blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion’, but their confidence could be maintained only by the seeming solidity of the crowd of like-minded believers surrounding them. Outside the walls, the wild remained as close to the surface as blood under skin, though the city-dweller was no longer equipped to face it directly.
Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays Page 21