When Temple died, his former personal secretary, the young Jonathan Swift, took up the cause in 1704 by publishing an odd allegory in which ancient and modern books engage in a physical battle.18 In the essay, “The Battle of the Books,” Swift ridicules the moderns for overvaluing their own worth, for getting wrapped up in venomous squabbles, and for failing to recognize their indebtedness to the ancients.
“The Battle of the Books” was well received by the traditionalists, but victory was fleeting.19 The modern idea of progress began to take root, bringing changes broad and deep.
But there was still no progress for tools.
The Progress of Things
A jump rope is just a rope. You have to make the jump thing happen.
—MITCH HEDBERG
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot is credited with formalizing the idea of progress in an essay he wrote in 1750 at the age of twenty-three. It’s a beautiful essay, but a modern reader goes through it waiting for him to mention progress in the first place we look for it these days: technology.
After talking about progress in philosophy, politics, the conduct of nations, and more, he eventually does get to tech, citing advances such as the invention of paper, glass, windmills, clocks, eyeglasses, and the compass.20 But he doesn’t see progress in the improvement in technology itself or in how those improvements made our lives better. Rather, progress in technology—or “the mechanical arts,” as he calls it—has to do with the knowledge we gained from those advances. For example, if a clockmaker discovered a new alloy for making a gear, the progress was not in the improved clock but rather in the metallurgical knowledge the clockmaker uncovered. In fact, the only invention that Turgot mentions for what it actually did for us is the printing press, but that’s because its direct effect was to improve knowledge: “At once the treasures of antiquity, rescued from the dust, pass into all hands, penetrate to every part of the world … and summon genius from the depths of its retreats.”21
Tools were just too humble to count for much in the reckoning of how civilization has advanced, for tools were assumed to have no value in themselves. Whatever value they have comes from our projects. Without us, a jump rope isn’t even a rope. It’s just a length of twisted fiber lying on the floor.
Tools gained more significance in the nineteenth century as big new technologies made changes with such broad and significant implications that we began to be willing to see progress in the tools themselves: the steam engine, trains, the telegraph, the early automobile.22 These inventions were lauded—and in many cases, blamed—for large-scale changes in our lives. Yet, even so, tools were not important enough for anyone to bother writing a history of them.
This lack of interest in tools is evident in the series of wildly popular books begun in 1861 by Samuel Smiles about the great feats of engineering accomplished by Englishmen. Smiles tells ripping yarns of the Great Men who, through the force of their manly will, changed the course of the river Thames, drained the swamps of England, and engaged in other monumental struggles against the elemental forces of nature. But the tools these heroes used to accomplish their amazing feats are largely absent from these stories. Focusing on the tools would not only have missed the point, it would have demeaned the story. Tools are nothing. The courage and character of the Great Men who wield them are everything.
It seemed that to think that tools contributed anything to history would be like writing a history of Napoleon’s military genius from the point of view of his saddle.
It took until the 1950s for a full history of tools to be written in English: the five-volume History of Technology. The academic journal Technology and Culture devoted an entire issue to it, hailing it as the very first history of technology, although there were some plausible predecessors.23 Even so, this history did not do much more than list the small improvements that, over the centuries, made the wheelbarrow sturdier and easier to roll, the plow easier for oxen to pull through the land, and timepieces smaller and more accurate.24 Histories like these are essentially a set of verbose time lines for each invention.
So, even once we gave our tools their due, we arranged their histories into simple lines with ticks. It would take computers to make those lines obsolete.
Engines of Generativity
Smiles focused on the steam engine as he did on no other technology, for it provides power “capable of being applied alike to the turning of mills, the raising of water, the rowing of ships, the driving of wheel-carriages, and the performance of labour in its severest forms.”25 That is, the steam engine is an engine: it drives other things. What things? Whatever can make use of the back-and-forth of a piston.
Waterwheels were engines that put circular motion to work grinding flour or sawing logs. Windmills, too. But these earlier engines had to be planted next to their energy sources. A steam engine you could put anywhere—including at the front of a moving train—and bring the energy source to it. This made possibilities real that in the past were mere dreams; Smiles thought Roger Bacon must have had steam engines in mind when, in the thirteenth century, he fantasized about chariots and sea ships being moved “with incalculable force, without any beast drawing them.”26
What excited Smiles about steam engines is at the heart of the significance of computers, too. Both technologies are engines, and engines are a special sort of tool.
Typical tools exist in order to modify the world in some specific way so that we can achieve a particular goal. A saw is a tool because it cuts wood so we can build things. The spice shelf is a tool because it lets us organize our spices so we can find them. The Wenger 16999 Swiss Army knife is a tool with eighty-seven purposes in mind. Tools are integral to our traditional strategy of anticipating and preparing.
So if a can opener is for opening cans, and the steam engine is for doing work that can make use of a rod moving back and forth, what is a computer for?
Let’s see. A computer is a tool for simulating the path of a space probe on its way to Pluto. A computer is a tool for calculating how much butter you need to make mashed potatoes for eight adults and five children. It’s a tool for setting an alarm to remind you to cancel a trial subscription before it automatically starts billing you. It’s a tool for drawing swirling fractal designs to amaze your friends when they’re high. A computer does not have a purpose or eighty-seven purposes. It has whatever purpose one of us programs into it.
That makes computers special in our history. We can’t bring much more to a rope beyond jump, pull, tie, and snap. Steam engines were initially limited to providing back-and-forth physical power for physical tasks. Computers, however, can do whatever can be done by representing the world as bits. This has caused the straight line of progress to sprout exponential curves. And if computers bent the line of progress upward in field after field, connecting those computers to one another is twisting it into knots.
Progress in the Wild
In The Future of Ideas, Lawrence Lessig tells of a piece of plastic invented in 1921 that a user could attach to a phone’s mouthpiece to dampen room noise. Hush-a-Phone’s only mistake was not having been invented by the phone company. It took a Supreme Court decision in 1956 to give customers permission to attach things not made by AT&T to their phones.27 Before that, even something as slightly innovative as a nonblack phone, much less one in the shape of a sneaker or Fred Flintstone, was out of bounds, unless, of course, the phone company itself produced it. Innovation at the pace of the Supreme Court is not what we’re looking for these days.28
This is closer to what we want:
As you might recall from chapter 3, GitHub manages the contributions made by teams of developers working simultaneously and independently—twenty-eight million developers, eighty-five million projects. Developers can reuse portions of other people’s code or even “fork” their own version of other people’s projects posted on the site. What people make out of other people’s work can then become available to still others to fork, mod, and reuse.
The relationship
s among pieces of code can get complicated quickly, so GitHub provides a button that draws a map of the branches representing the use and reuse of a project’s code. That’s fine when a project’s code is reused a few times, but when it comes to something like Google’s TensorFlow machine learning software that was modded over twenty-four thousand times in 2017, GitHub gives up on diagramming it. As forks get forked and snippets get resnipped, the map would look like a jungle of bushes and vines so dense that to characterize its shape, we’d be driven to use words like jungle, bushes, vines, and, perhaps, hairball.
That shapeless shape is the new shape of progress—which is to say, of the future.
The difference between progress’s old, sloping line and its new shape is the difference between incrementally improving a clock by coming up with a new way to fasten a balance wheel, and smashing the mechanism, throwing it into the air, and never knowing all the different ways the scattered parts have been picked up and reused … except in the digital world, you don’t have to smash the clock to enable its pieces to be reused by someone for some purpose you never envisioned. After all, the internet is in the business of disrupting intentions.
If we were to absolutely insist on drawing an upward-sloping line of progress for the internet itself, many of the biggest tick marks would be for what was given away: the collections of ideas and images; the libraries of code to be reused freely; the application programming interfaces (APIs) that make services and data available; the standards and protocols that let all those pieces play well together.
Our traditional tools have had purposes that anticipate needs, from our prehistoric ancestors making their arrow tips, to the steam engine’s repetitive thrusts. The perpetually startling fact of the internet, its most distinctive characteristic, is not its openness to every purpose, for disconnected computers are open in the same way. Rather, it’s the interoperability it enables among everyone privileged with a connection to it. In effect, on the internet, just about anything can become—with varying degrees of difficulty—a general-purpose engine: a tool that enables other tools to be built. For example, even the very earliest web browsers had a “View Source” button to show you the HTML code that produces the formatted page users interact with, turning every web page into a learning experience for the curious and a source of reusable code. Overall, the internet is generative to a degree we have until now only experienced with language.
Generativity is the term Jonathan Zittrain uses in his book The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It to express how easily we can use a tool for our own purposes, despite what it may have been designed for.29 The tiny computer in your digital watch is not very generative because it’s dedicated to a single set of tasks: show the time of day, work as a stopwatch, buzz you awake, and so on. The computer in your smartwatch is at least somewhat generative because it lets developers—perhaps even an open community of developers—create apps for it that the original designers did not anticipate. Your laptop is highly generative because it provides a wide range of powerful capabilities that can be put to use by anyone with the skills. At the system level, open APIs, open standards and protocols, open libraries of code, and open-licensed content are all generative. Generative of what? We can’t know. That’s what makes them generative.
While interoperability refers to the degree to which elements from different systems can work together, generativity is the ability of a tool or system to be used in unanticipated ways. Interoperable systems are generative. Interoperable systems that connect generative systems are especially generative, creative, and unpredictable. Generativity is the degree to which interoperability enables unanticipation.
Generativity on its own does a great job screwing up the simple, clear lines of progress, for every tick mark that represents a new generative tool earned its place by enabling untold and unanticipated uses to spray from it like water bursting through a hole in a high-pressure hose.
This is the environment we’ve been living in since big computers became essential tools for business, and even more so since the personal computer became a standard appliance. Generativity has been supercharged by the constant availability of the ever-interoperable internet. Even if we don’t engage in this environment as coders or remixers, we benefit from it and we’re aware of it. Even if we’re curmudgeons who refuse to use that newfangled Internament or are principled abstainers on the grounds that the net is destroying privacy and is taking civilization down with it, we nevertheless hear the electric crackle as pieces meet other pieces and give rise to new things.
For those of us for whom the internet is our where for much of the day, we feel this in what we take for granted. We expect to be able to comment and to post links. We expect to be able to copy, paste, and reuse. We expect to be surprised. We expect to be confronted with more than we could ever manage. We expect to be able to share with others what we have found. We expect to find ways to make some sense of what we found online or off, settling or unsettling its meaning. We expect that others will put work done by others to surprising uses. We expect to be able to recontextualize what we have found, for the enlightenment or amusement of strangers. We expect, overall, this new environment to enable reuse, plasticity, reframing, and sharing at levels never before experienced in our species’ long tool-using history. And we expect to do all this with the phone in our pocket.
* * *
Our newly interoperable, generative present is undoing our traditional idea of progress.
Traditional progress assumes one thing leads to another: clocks that were pendulum based get windup springs so they can keep time on tilting surfaces such as wrists and the decks of ships. Generativity assumes that one thing leads to an uncountable and unpredictable set of anothers: the GitHub platform gives rise to unmappable interrelationships among its projects; game modding puts gangsters in tutus and turns a first-person shooter into a physics simulator.
Traditional progress assumes there are tick marks, and that each will be improved by the next invention that warrants one. Tick marks are thus like stepping-stones leading up a grassy hill. Generativity certainly understands that some inventions are more tick-mark-worthy than others, and that there are chains of inventions that build on predecessors; developers sometimes call those tick marks “version numbers.” But overall the generative future does not much feel like a sequence of stepping-stones. The most important tick marks are the generative ones that lead in thousands of other directions.
Traditional progress is a line drawn between tick marks. Generativity understands that straight lines are in denial.
Traditional progress assumes a forward thrust: the upward sloping line is going to keep on going. In the realm of technology, which is where these days we generally are most confident that progress is going to continue, this is due at least in part to the fact that, short of an apocalypse, technological advances are irreversible, as Braden R. Allenby and Daniel Sarewitz point out in The Techno-Human Condition: the world’s second smartphone built on the world’s first one, and we won’t forget what we now know about them.30 Generativity shares that optimism, but not because there is some logical and inevitable path for technological items to follow. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn said scientific progress should be seen, like evolution, as “a process driven from behind, not pulled from ahead.”31 What drives generative progress is not a final destination dragging us along an inevitable uphill path but rather the lowering of the barriers to invention—by interoperability, generativity, and an open network of collaborators—so that human ingenuity can be applied to needs, desires, and whims that otherwise would have gone unnoticed and unaddressed.
Traditional progress has been hard. If I say that generativity makes it easy, I don’t mean that we don’t need geniuses devoting years of their lives to breakthroughs that make life better for all of us or that redo our core scientific understanding of how the universe works. Progress still benefits from the “Great Men” of yore, except without the gender bigotry. When progress
is so hard, the tick marks are hard-won and spaced out. But the generativity of the networked world has made it so much easier to collaborate with colleagues or strangers, to collaborate iteratively, to collaborate at scale. It has made today’s advances available to billions of people to be put to new uses tomorrow. Where once there were lonely geniuses standing on the shoulders of giants all looking up and to the right, now there are networks of people alive with ideas keeping one another up late at night.
The result is that the inventor rolling the boulder up the hill of progress is no longer our sole paradigm of progress. Much innovation (but by no means all) is now incredibly easy, and if the results are not worth the flick of our finger across our phone’s screen, so what? With the barriers down, inventing has become fun, even an idle pastime.
Finally, traditional progress has felt like a story because that’s what we wanted it to be. “You see, the first mechanical clocks had no faces and would toll the time to let monks know when to pray, but then …,” and so on until we get to reprogrammable, networked digital watches. But such stories are told by those gazing back from atop the slope. What looks like a path connecting two points on the old time line was actually a storm cloud of trials, errors, frustrations, near misses, and fruitful mistakes. Further, tick marks are often part of their own intersecting time line: the development of pendulum-driven clocks is an important tick mark in the history of timepieces, but pendulums are not just parts of old clocks. They were used to draw beautiful shapes in sand that proved that the Earth rotates on its axis. The invariance of their swing led to an exploration of harmonic motion important to our understanding of the movement of the planets and the behavior of ions.32 The pendulum makes a cameo in the story of the watch, but it is the star of its own movie. Our insistence on seeing progress as a line hides our world’s aversion to straight lines.
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