Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants
Basically: technology is a force that is increasingly moving forward under its own steam (most obviously by bounding/encouraging human action along certain certain technological lines). As individuals, and as humanity, if we want to be fulfilled and get the most from technology and ourselves, we need to tune in to ‘what technology wants’, as opposed to ‘what we think we want’, in order to align our actions fruitfully.
This is a very interesting book on technology and its role in humanity, and even the universe. Kevin Kelly is clearly an interesting person with an unusual take on things: having spent a large amount of time as a young man travelling in a very minimal way all over the world (including spending time with the Amish, whose technology preferences he critiques and respects at length in the book) he was later close by some keys happenings around the internet’s meteoric rise to global influence.
Basic thesis is: the ‘technium’ is a name for technology as an entire, global ecosystem of interacting artefacts and information, partly manifest in manufactured items, but also manifest in the ideas and culture of human beings. The technium can be seen as the ‘seventh kingdom of life’ (next to bacteria, archaea, protista, plantae, fungi and animalia), undergoing its own unique flavours of evolution.
If you want to understand the fundamentals of technology, rooted in deep time and from a wise, philosophical standpoint, go read this book. The detail in the arguments suffers from frequent inaccuracies, but none bad enough to mess with the overall ideas.
This books is also a nice way to synthesize the pro-technology and luddite views into a more overarching and practical understanding of technology that recognises the inevitability and wonder of technology, but also the ease with which it can unwittingly trample our humanity.
