I realized recently that when my 90-year-old mother tells the stories of her life, which she does with great lucidity and detail, technology, or the lack of it, is almost never a factor in them. When she talks about the important events of her childhood in pioneer Wyoming, there is little to indicate that they took place in a world where there was neither electricity nor phone service, where the only motorized vehicles were the steam locomotives that never came closer than 100 miles to her log house.
It was a world made entirely of atoms. Claude Shannon
had yet to invent the bit. The closest thing they had to mass communications was the Pinedale Roundup, which propagated information even more languidly than did the gossip net, though the latter was restricted to the bandwidth of a galloping horseman. Heaven was the only virtual reality. Interactivity required biological entities on both sides. Despite all that space, there was no privacy at all, and the most socially transforming new technology was barbed wire.
It was a very different world than this, but to hear my mother talk about the adventures and misdemeanors of its inhabitants, there is little to indicate that. What is more interesting to me is that in her stories about more recent times,technology doesn't play a particularly visible role. It remains de-emphasized after a feverish century that has frothed with the greatest explosion of tools in the history of humanity. Surely human beings equipped with all the leverage, extension, and amplification with which the world has been endowed by the 20th century, are very different creatures than the Victorian cowfolks who raised Mim Barlow. But not to hear her tell it.
This is because her stories are about people, as good stories always have been and possibly always will be. Whether they star "Bearface" Dodge, who choked an attacking bear with his fist, or cattle baron Great Uncle Amos and his opera "students" put up at the Hotel Utah, her stories are about the semi-eternal dance that is Life Among the Humans. Whatever the medium, the venue for that dance is less important than the music. Marshall McLuhan
notwithstanding, it's the conversation, not the phone, that counts to my mother.
I mention the technology-free zone of my mother's memories because I find myself making a lot of bold claims these days about the unprecedented changes that the bit and its Net will wreak upon humanity.
We are swiftly creating a world as much of bits as my mother's was of atoms. A world in which everywhere is everywhere (and nowhere) all the time, one where the self disappears toward each horizon. On one end, it fragments into the lesser selves, liberated from the body, whose consensus in committee has created it all along. On the other hand, it coalesces into a greater self, as every synapse on planet Earth strives toward becoming continuously and continually connected to every other synapse in a vast ecosystem of mind, a mind within which the boundaries of the individual might blur to the point of eradication.
Maybe. But if technological change of the magnitude my mother has seen in her 90 years is too unimportant to make the cut into her stories, I'm wondering just how different the outside has to get before the inside starts to disappear.
At what point do the characters of Shakespeare or Chaucer become unrecognizable to what technology has made of "us"? Or we to the likes of them?
This is the issue with technology, of course. As a species, we are beginning to feel technology as a threat not so much to our literal survival - though certainly it's that at times - but to our identity. We perceive virtualization as a threat to those characteristics, less of flesh than spirit, which combine to produce "humanity." We worry, perhaps advisedly, that it imperils those characteristics that are the real actors in both my mother's and Shakespeare's dramas.
Just as bushmen fear soul-stealing cameras, we suspect that technology is sucking the humanity out of us. There are those who say it's time to put the brakes on this blindly accelerating juggernaut of change before we're sucked dry. Most of the loudest detractors are old hippies like myself who are actually pretty comfortable with tools developed before they were 25, but who have otherwise become as obdurately suspicious of the new as the crankiest of their dads. (God, how I love irony.) They are convinced that it's time to do something.
Based in part on my mother's stories, I'm more inclined than my anxious contemporaries to think that humanity is a technologically resistant quality, but I agree with them that big, potentially unpleasant changes are afoot. And since I, along with my contemporaries, cherish the Human Phenomenon - even if I don't share their sense of its peril - I agree that it's appropriate, if a bit academic, to ask some questions.
What are the essential ingredients of humanity? What is technology? How do the two relate, and what, if anything, can we do about any of it? At the outset, the lines inside these questions are more blurry for me than they are for the Neo-Luddites, since in addition to threatening our humanity, technology, I think, is probably humanity's most essential ingredient. What sets us apart is an itch, a permanent, hardwired, unscratchable irritation with the general state of things. We are alone among species in being so dissatisfied with the universe nature gave us that we have created tools to fix it.
We should have called ourselves Homo dissatisfactens. From Homo habilis (Tool-Making Man) to The Sharper Image, we have been trying - unsuccessfully, it appears - to make ourselves comfortable for the last 350,000 years or so. Only a tribe of Australian Aboriginals was hip enough to notice that the more one has, the shorter it feels. So they got off the treadmill when their tool count had risen to a total of five (counting the digeridoo).
Any time you've got a process where more feels like less, you've got a positive feedback loop hung in the "full-on" position. And this describes what I see happening in the areas of technology that I think are most transformative:bandwidth increase, Internet growth, processor speed, digital storage capacity, and even human nervous tissue.
With the exception of the last, which is nevertheless increasing its total mass at an astonishing rate, all of these are growing more or less exponentially, doubling over short periods, fueling one another, sharpening their plotted trajectories toward the perfectly vertical. Headed God knows where and taking us with them. Real fast.
It seems clear that as we ascend we are leaving behind, perhaps not our humanity, but certainly many of the human institutions and stable power relationships from which we derived some security during the Age of Reason (now apparently ending). I don't think there will be a federal-level government left on Earth in 50 years. We might be governed, to the extent we are governed at all, by mayors the size of emperors, tribal chieftains, mob bosses, and general adhocracy all around.
Yow. Maybe these old poops are right. Maybe we'd better stop this thing before it's too late. OK. How do we do that? Who's got control of that big kill switch? Who the hell's in charge here, anyway?
The Neo-Luddites know. They finger the usual suspects: the gray men who run the multinationals, the national security state, the cruel yoke of consumer exploitation. These plutocratic parasites could halt the leviathan of technology any time they wanted to. But, of course, they won't because they get rich from it. And, they care more about money than humanity.
Unfortunately - or fortunately - it's not that simple. Close examination reveals the perpetrators are, in fact, the usual (though rarely suspected) culprits: ourselves. It's us and our itch. It's that little problem over in the corner that we could surely eliminate with a few minor adjustments, one for which we are always willing to buy a solution when the gray men offer to sell us one. Blaming the suits is as ridiculous as blaming ourselves. And as irrelevant. Because any conspiracy that involves 5.5 billion people will be hard to undo. As technology is within us, we are within it. Wherever we go, there it is.
The Luddites lost. Their successors will too. If I didn't believe that wholeheartedly, I might be tempted to join.
But I think we are plunging down a river that has no banks to rest on. Returning upstream to some bucolic 19th-century paradise of honest toil and values is not an option. Believe me, I've tried. You row hard to stay in place, and eventually you go broke there. It's downstream, like it or not.
But like any white-water rafter, we have some other choices, rocks to avoid, cataracts to circumnavigate. What are the shoals in this stream and how can they be avoided? Which brings me back to my initial question: what are the essential properties of humanity, how does technology threaten them, and what is our range of potential response?
I believe that the essential properties of humanity - the central characters in my mother's tales - are semi-independent creatures that inhabit the human spirit. They are virtues like faith, hope, and charity. They are also the Seven Deadly Sins. And they are all the oft-repeated loops of human glory and folly that are negotiations between those two communities of behavior.
But if you look for the native home of these abstractions, virtuous or sinful, you and they don't live solely inside individuals' heads. They live in the spaces between people's heads. They dance in the field of interaction. As with technology, they live inside us and we live inside them. The human virtues are about connection - achieving it, sustaining it, believing in it - while the sins, as Nietzsche held, are about separation. Human sins are creatures whose behavior amplifies the separateness of the flesh until they create a separateness of the soul.
I find it hard to believe that the current explosion of digital technology, which seems to be about connecting everything to everything else, will do anything but pump energy into the space where the virtues live. Given new tissue of glass and electricity to bridge the danger zone between bodies, the old deserts of physical separateness may fall with a psychic rain forest of global interaction.
Or not. Surely this is the dream many once harbored for television, that it would unite humanity into a sense of its greater self. It's easy to forget that some of that dream came true, since, more potently, television became something that separated us from one another, a place where 60 million people could laugh at the same joke and yet remain entirely alone. It also became an extremely fecund habitat for pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, anger, and that other one I can never remember (but of which I must be especially guilty).
Yet, the essence of an engaging story remains the same even in the distorted hugeness of televisionland: Did he kill her? Why? What does this incident tell us about ourselves? Do we harbor such impulses? Should we show him mercy or vengeance? We sit on our sofas watching the new thing, thinking about all the old things.
But in my way of looking at it, the very process of thinking about the old things is more like listening in on the conversations taking place within the committee of our lesser selves - from which the somewhat arbitrary local "Self,"
the Self within the body, is assembled. (I don't believe that Multiple Personality Disorder is a disorder at all, but rather the common, yet generally ignored, state of things.)
The little selves that comprise this inner mob may have many sources and forms. They may be echoes from earlier evolutionary layers; inner reptiles can often be observed operating human bodies, for example. They may be faint replicas of the people who raised and nurtured us, unexplainable hormonal weather patterns, loops of pure habit, or, for all I know, bits and pieces of partially reincarnated souls. There is a lot of room in the human personality, but it can seem a crowded house nonetheless.
Above the meat self, it's crowded as well. Even without believing in some Teilhardian Overself, there are many human-based collective organisms within whose interactions human properties may dwell: the family, the corporation, one's culture, one's religion.
In cyberspace, the range of self broadens and becomes more diffuse, sliding up and down the scale between lesser selves and the greater Self as it is gradually liberated from the body. The question is whether this diffusion threatens the environment of human properties. And, of course, whether the greater Self becomes greater. Will we lose ourselves to these processes? I don't think so.
We should take a look at evolution to inform our thinking here. Life forgets nothing, discards little. At the base of our genetic code is blue-green slime genetic code. We ascend upon depositions of layered complexity through cellular collectivization into vertebrate forms and finally into the anxious, itching consciousness which now appears compelled to create new, overarching forms of a more global consciousness to layer above itself.
Just as the blue-green slime code remains intact at its rudimentary level in the Great Chain of Being, so the old properties as manifested by individual humans will probably survive, largely unmolested, their incorporation into the new whole mind now being born above them, Humanity Itself.
I think of the self, as we understand it, like mitochondria. Mitochondria are freestanding creatures from the primordial goo that gradually became enveloped into the physical structure of multicelled animals. Inside our cells, and still somewhat separate from us genetically, the mitochondria go on about their affairs rather as they did all along, though in doing so, they become like mercenaries in the service of our immune systems. They are part of us and we are part of them, interpenetrating interdependency. From the mitochondria's viewpoint, what have they lost by being subsumed? Not that much.
I suspect the mitochondria in me are little aware of the higher order processes that make it possible for "me" to think and type these words. They're concerned only with the continued vitality of the ecosystem where they live, my body. By the same token, the layer of consciousness - the me - which is entertaining these thoughts, thinking of "myself" at this moment sitting on a beach in Australia, is little aware of the gradually forming thoughts of Humanity Itself. It is concerned primarily with the continued vitality of the ecosystem where I live, my planet. And, of course, lunch.
It may be that Humanity Itself isn't a new creature. Perhaps It has been up and running and thinking Its own great thoughts, unintelligible to us, for as long as we have been thinking ours. Perhaps what Humanity Itself thinks is one especially great thought called Technology.
Let's consider one technological manifestation, Moore's Law, which has been accurately predicting the doubling of processor speed every 18 months since being propounded in 1965. A plot of CPU speed increases over this period, making an unnaturally straight line on a log chart, a line whose undeviating linearity is all the more odd considering that the collected efforts of an entire society contribute to each new doubling. They are not efforts which are, or could be, coordinated by any central engineering authority, and yet they proceed as orderly as proletarian workers in Socialist Realist sculpture. To me, the process described by Moore's Law feels like the mental product of a greater Self.
However the work is guided, it seems clear that we are wiring a better nervous system for Humanity Itself. I don't believe it threatens our own existence by doing so. That It should have an Identity does not diminish our little identities. I can serve Its purposes merely by serving my own central purpose. Which is to connect. To make contact. To wake up, shocked by the voltage of increased interaction between the properties of humanity in my heart and those in yours. To be whole.
Here is the primary choice we're given as we tumble over the falls into the future. When we behold some new species of technology, we should ask ourselves one question: does it connect or does it separate? And since every powerful technology will probably do a lot of both, we should ask which of these properties is naturally dominant. For example, the telephone both connects and separates, but you can argue persuasively that it more often than not connects.
Television both connects and separates, but a close look at America reveals the wreckage of its savage predisposition to separate.
There is another choice as well. As we get older and history mows down our old familiarities and replaces them with phenomena whose virtues and sins we can't immediately discern, we can choose how to greet uncertainty. We can slip into bitterness and resistance, or we can take solace in the fact that, however progress may re-costume the players in the tale, the story, the source, and the repository of my mother's stories and those of a billion other mothers have yet to change much. Maybe they won't.
John Perry Barlow is a retired cattle rancher, a lyricist for The Grateful Dead, and cofounder and vice-chair of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.