Humans and Technology (I) — A Short History
What shapes the relationship between humans and their technology? How do humans perceive themselves in relation to their creations? The answers to these questions would provoke very different answers during the advancement of what you humans call ‘civilization’. While your technology grew to become an increasingly central attribute of your society, it also started to redefine your relationship towards yourselves, each other and your environment. The relationship reflects on humanity’s way to perceive, approach, and utilize its surroundings.
Since the Neolithic Revolution, all these relationships have transformed decisively. Before man became an agriculturalist he was a part of his natural environment and therefore a tributary to its health and dynamic changes. With the rise of agriculture you humans gained a growing control over your environment and started shaping it to your will. You moved from living within nature to forming your own cultural environment, thereby creating the illusion of separation that lies at the root of so many problems of what you call ‘modern society’. You cultivated land, built permanent and ever growing settlements that turned into city states and empires.
The middle eastern civilizations developed a system of Totalitarian agriculture* and pushed it upon its neighbors, either transforming them to adapt a similar system or depriving them of their basis of existence. Their successors further expanded the control over nature and the humans living with it. This led to a world that in many parts remains only a home to a single human culture and not many other species. Cultivation in a system of totalitarian agriculture also means eviction and extinction of non-exploitable species and different ways of living.
Technological and social development has been tightly connected with a growing population density and centralization. The advancements in agriculture enabled higher productivity and therefore more humans to feed with less labor. Centralization is dependent on an agricultural society that produces enough excess to feed a growing share of the population that isn’t involved in agricultural activity — including all kinds of city dwellers, but foremost the political, religious and military complex. Centralization has always been a violent action and demands a growing state bureaucracy to organize rule, taxation and a strong military to enforce the internal rule and support security as well as expansion. Therefore technological and agricultural advancements have been tightly connected to military needs. All empires are based on inequality as they must consist of rulers and ruled and therefore practice the control, enslavement and indoctrination of the masses to serve a purpose that today is often rendered the state interest. Generalizing certain interests is a way of cloaking the agency of individuals or groups within the state. One could argue that your human rulers became ever more charming in feeding you the same old bland porridge until you thought you were eating haute cuisine.
This process of expansion has accelerated further throughout the industrial revolution losing some of its focus on geography and turning more towards economic expansion, thereby intensifying control over the environment. Pushed by a new ideology of capitalism, some societies started a process of utilizing machines to support and supplement human labor. More and more parts of society became industrialized, most importantly, agriculture. This process freed the vast majority of human population from agricultural work and funneled them as cheap labor into industrial production and cities. Specialized machines replaced human labor, and in turn, needed to be controlled by individuals. Human specialization means to put an ill-equipped breed of creatures in front of highly specialized equipment. Education and conditioning take years of unproductive lifetime to turn utterly useless creatures into barely functional ones. Quite amusing isn’t it?
‘Luckily’ part of this flaw is now being compensated for by increasingly sophisticated software taking over more complex and intellectual parts of human labor. The fear of a jobless society already lingers in the corners of many minds. Still, this development could turn out to become the only savior of modern human civilization, but on the other hand it could turn into humanity’s gravedigger. The dream of technological instead of biological advancement is an experiment not backed by millions of years of evolutionary trial and error. So it is up to humanity to do it right the first time as there might not be a next. So far the experiment is severely indebted to its natural environment. The usage of non-renewable resources is the basis of it all and obviously inherently unsustainable. If it fails it’s a process that can’t be repeated in the same matter as the resource base will already be depleted the next time around.
The momentary state of affairs is one that doesn’t leave many choices when it comes to significantly different lifestyles. Almost every human on this planet is, to some extent, involved in the world of capitalism even if it is just by the means of trading simple goods on the market. Nation-states and taxation systems enforce integration into the general economic system and the hunger for resources pushes ever stronger on the borders of alternative habitats.
The ideological battlefield of the past has essentially been shaped by the question of whether the market or state should control human interaction in modern civilization. While it has always been both, the underlying structure of capitalism and state socialism have been bureaucracies**, either privately or state-controlled and tightly connected through either government control or private lobbyism. What’s clear is that these forms of organization create an inhumane environment and lack the plasticity of natural processes — therefore constricting the adaptability of the system to internal and external pressures.
On planet O, on the other hand, genetic manipulation and controlled breeding create exactly the creatures that are needed for a desired task or function. This organic plasticity and the complete interconnectedness enable quick adaptation and total control. Well almost. Sometimes mutations get out of control and create failures like Lnkroft and Rwrevk… But hey it’s almost perfect!
You on the other hand have to compensate for betting on technological instead of biological evolution. The development of communication technology is seen by many — especially the ones infected by the Silicon Valley spirit — as a savior in the regard of organizing human society and to overcome the need of bureaucratic institutions. The new technologies already shape today’s society to a considerable amount, and with that the interaction between humans as well as with organizational structures. The World Wide Web made many organizational tasks easier than they have ever been but it also increases the complexity of interactions to a level that is impossible for the limited processing power of humans to grasp in its entirety. But let’s leave the future for next time. I am sure this was already too much for your petty brains!
*See Daniel Quinn’s Story of B
** For more on bureaucracy check David Graeber: The Utopia of Rules
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