Not Fighting the Good Fight

Littlefoot
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

From the Paleolithic to the Seselithic, our overlords have always been with us.

Much of human evolution has been driven by humanity’s unique capacity to conceptualize, invent, and create tools. On this long march toward where we find ourselves now, man’s best friends have always been the tools we’ve created. To this extent, Kenneth Oakley, author of Man the Toolmaker once said, “the most satisfactory definition of man from the scientific point of view is Man the Tool-Maker.” Likewise, it wasn’t Jane Goodall’s first reports of rain-dancing, infanticide, or meat eating in chimpanzees which shocked humans the most: it was their ability to create and craft tools.

Part of this attachment to our tools is a naive view that the creation and invention of technology itself is an active and controlled process guided by the intentional hand of humanity, but rather than man being a toolmaker it may be time to view tools as the manmakers. Our modern use of the term “anthropocene” is one such example of this backward thinking. Hockey stick graphs aside, humans didn’t really matter much in guiding the direction of the planet until the Industrial Revolution. And now we are realizing again that tools advance in a cumulative process of their own, in an uncontrolled manner that is detached from our own development (click the link for a recent interesting pre-print). In the same way that culture is an emergent property of biology, it seems our tools may eventually become an emergent property of culture.

The anthropologist Leslie White viewed technology as an ever-increasing constant in human societies. Every evolution and revolution in human systems, every shock to our social structure, every big change in our ability to govern ourselves, was driven by the external push of technology. A good recent example is in Melanie Xue’s research on agency in the women of China after the development of cotton spinning technology. Many other such examples exist which I have highlighted in another post elsewhere. In White’s worldview, human social systems changed, existed, and merely worked around the inevitable constant advancement of tools.

It’s funny that human progress has come full circle. Humanity’s greatest ally since the Stone Age, silicon, is taking on a life of its own. The terrifying dive we are about to take in AI and automation are going to change things forever. This is true both for us and for the 14th element. I have some feeling that many of the weird quirks we see in our ongoing culture war including the intentional muddying of facts about the world, increasing fluidity in identities, and dominance of giant mega corporations are simply signs that another revolution is on the horizon for human progress and that things right now are in a flux being driven by technology.

In a bizarre way, people are internalizing and intentionalizing the changes resulting from shifts in technology and are even taking sides. Cultural progressives, who seem to be siding with history, take it as a point of pride to believe that they have an active hand in this change. Conservatives bravely believe they can stop it. There are other examples of highly intelligent people whose ideas are hard to place who have come to the conclusion independently of White that technology is the culprit and have actually had the hubris to think they could end it (by ending people).

In a sense, I think what’s going to happen is that the result of the West’s culture war aren’t going to matter because things are going to change. In some respect, this isn’t a matter of being on the right or wrong side of history, nor is this a glorification of the “uniqueness” of our times, it’s just a matter of all of this being paleohistory.

Evolutionary Anthropologist. I write about sensory ecology, human and cultural evolution, and laws of scaling. Opinions are my own.

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