Weedy and Assimilating Technologies
Friday 02 February 2024
I have been thinking about possible technological taxonomies. I noted in last week’s newsletter that how we analyze technology into taxa bears upon our understanding of history, given that contemporary civilization is pervasively technological, and indeed is often called technological civilization. My thoughts remain inchoate, so this discussion will be highly tentative, and I will probably revise my terminology and the concepts I employ many times before I settle on the conceptual framework I will employ for the analysis of technology.
We all know that computing technology has transformed life for those of us in the industrialized world, and it is extending its tendrils far beyond the centers of technological civilization as devices become ever more easily portable and batteries improve. Cell phone technology has brought telephone communications to parts of Africa where no landlines have ever been installed. The cell phone penetration of Somalia, which has not had a functioning central government in decades, is higher than in many other African nation-states, which demonstrates a decentralized aspect of this technology. I say “a decentralized aspect” because this is not the only aspect of this technology. Since it was the smartphone that was the planet-conquering technology, the smartphone comes with the use of software, and this software represents a highly centralized form of technology, in which central computers owned by software vendors (usually coupled with hardware vendors) force software updates on devices whether these updates are wanted or not. And a great many of these software applications store the data of users and send them to centralized collection points where the data of billions is analyzed, the better to flog widgets to the world at large.
We could call it the fundamental theorem of technology that all technology is dual use, meaning that it can be used for good or ill. This is, at bottom, a moral distinction, though when governments designate a technology as “dual use” they mean that it can be used as a tool or as a weapon (more likely, as part of a weapons system), but the idea of technology being used as a weapon or in a weapon doesn’t really have moral connotations, because the whole idea of designating a technology as “dual use” is to control and limit its distribution so new weapons and weapons systems are reserved for the government engaging in such controls. It is not, then, seen as an evil that technology is used to build better weapons; it is only seen as an evil that when the weapons make it into the wrong hands. In my notebooks I call this the tool-weapon equivalence, and I have been planning to write a paper on it for years, but haven’t further developed the concept: any tool can also be a weapon; any weapon can also be a tool.
One of the oldest technologies is also one of the most pervasive technologies, and is obviously dual use: knives. More generally I mean cutting implements, which go back to about two million years ago, and many of these early examples of cutting implements have been called “hand axes” by archaeologists and anthropologists who study these tools and their users. The tool-weapon dichotomy also involves us in a chicken-and-egg scenario: what was invented first, the tool or the weapon? We all recall the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when a human ancestor, more ape than man, picks up a bone, uses it to smash other bones, and then uses it as a weapon to kill a rival human ancestor. In this scenario, we are presented with a “weapon first” scenario, and on the basis of this scenario we could elaborate a history in which the development of weapons used in conflict with rivals are then exapted for use in hunting, and then for use in other activities, so that the weapon is domesticated as a tool. We could just as well construct the alternative scenario in which the tool is developed first, then used in hunting, and then used in conflict with rival individuals and groups, a “tool first” scenario, in which the tool is then eventually exapted for use as a weapon.
Cutting instruments are pervasively present throughout history, long predating any written history or civilization, and we continue to use them. Every kitchen has a set of knives (I used a knife to cut up the steak I ate for dinner), and even in our high technology society it continues to be useful to carry a pocketknife for all manner of daily needs and improvised repairs. A technology that is common like this, pervasively present in both space and time, and has been invented and re-invented so many times in history that it is impossible to trace any history of idea diffusion, given a tangled network of independent invention and diffusion, I have been calling a “weedy” technology in my notebooks. Like weeds, such technologies will sprout wherever the opportunity presents.
Relatively recent technologies are much easier to trace, given the largely intact documentary record, but even with something as recent as automobiles, it would be difficult to trace a single line of development. Carriages were common all over the world prior to automobiles, and a great deal of carriage technology was exapted to serve as autobody technology. That introduces an element of ambiguity into the development of automobiles. Once people began putting engines on carriage frames, whether steam or gas or diesel or electric motors (all were used in early prototypes), the idea was impossible to contain and the industry rapidly became a weedy technology of continual invention interwoven with continual diffusion.
Just as knives are a special case of cutting implements, automobiles are a special case of motorized transport, which latter class of technologies includes trains, shipping, submarines (almost exclusively used as weapons rather than tools, though arguably drug traffickers use submarines as tools; scientists also use submersibles as tools), aircraft, and so on. Trains themselves divide into countless subclasses of rail transportation, including such things as cog railways, funiculars, monorails, and maglev trains. Steam trains and steam boats started the revolution in global transportation in the nineteenth century and became the object of a considerable infrastructure. The British navy had coaling and vittling stations throughout the world, which gave them the ability to project power on a planetary scale. Trains revolutionized land-based transportation, so that every city of any size had a train station, and being on the rail line meant an economic boon for a city. Moreover, the building of railstock and the laying of rail lines was itself a large industry. Not only did the world begin to “shrink” with these transportation technologies, it also began to look the same everywhere as the necessary support industries, shaped by the technologies themselves, came into being wherever these tendrils of industrialization reached.
While steam power began the revolution, automobiles represented something even more revolutionary. Like the electronic devices we carry with us at all times, automobiles were an independent technology, perhaps we could even say an autonomous technology. Yes, significant industrial resources were necessary to construct an automobile, but, once built, it could be driven anywhere, and it was. A not insignificant share of early automobile use was effectively sporting: people wanted to set new records, so they bent every effort to drive their cars to new, strange, and unlikely places. And, of course, they raced their cars as they have always been racing horses. Early aircraft technology similarly was heavily influenced by sporting and daredevil activities.
Due to their (relative) autonomy as tools, automobiles transformed human life in a way that was only hinted at by the development of steam transportation. Light, strong, fast, and affordable cars became common, and life began to adjust around them. Cities were modified and built to accommodate cars. People moved into suburbs because they could commute (a devil’s bargain if ever there were one). People vacationed with their cars, driving across entire continents. Service industries sprouted up. The “motel,” i.e., motor hotel, was born, along with the gas station and repair garage and parking lot. Today, cities are structured around motorized transportation every bit as much as they are structured around human beings, and most “cities” are now urban areas that are strung out over dozens if not hundreds of miles, as cities grow together in uncontrolled urban sprawl.
This has been a dramatic transformation of civilization, and even if this was the only major transformation of the twentieth century, it would still mark a new epoch in civilization. Imagine a counter-factual history in which motorized transport developed as it did, but computers did not develop: we would still see ourselves as inhabiting a radically different world from that of our ancestors. But computers were developed, and they became the new revolutionary technology, especially when combined with telecommunications.
Computing technology, I believe, represents something truly new in the history of technology. Knives I called a weedy technology, and cars are a weedy technology that have transformed civilization, so perhaps they count as a weedy technology plus something else, say, a transformative technology. Computers are a transformative technology plus something even more, and I have started to call them an assimilating technology in my notebooks. By an “assimilating technology” I mean a technology that takes over other technologies and makes all other technologies look like itself. Note that an assimilating technology does not replace prior technologies, but assimilates them: the prior technology lives on, but in a novel form. Steam transportation technologies largely replaced muscle-driven technologies and wind and water powered technologies. Obviously, wind and water powered technologies are still with us, but they are marginal in comparison to the work load shouldered by fossil fuel transportation technologies. When gas and diesel engines were developed, they largely replaced steam technologies.
Computer technology assimilates. Sometimes it replaces, but more often it transforms an existing technology, so that everything looks like and operates like a computer. Today, washing machines and stoves are designed with computers in them, making chirpy little happy sounds to let you know how they are getting along. I have heard Telsas called “rolling computers” because they are so encrusted with computer technology. Telephones are now computers. Harvesting combines are computers. The telos of this computer technology development is for every device we use in every area of life to be transformed into a computer, so that everything looks like a computer and works like a computer. And, of course, we are already familiar with the idea of the “internet of things” in which all of these computers will be networked together.
All of this seems like the set-up for a modern-day version of the “for want of a nail” story, and indeed I believe that this interconnection is making infrastructure vulnerable in new ways. This is of course widely discussed, so I won’t go off on that tangent. The tangent I want to emphasize today is that I cannot think of any historical parallel of an assimilating technology. If there is no historical precedent for an assimilating technology, then computing technology may be the first assimilating technology in history. Given this existence proof of an assimilating technology, we may wonder if some other technology may be invented in the future that is also an assimilating technology, making the world over in its own image, in which case computing technology could be the first of a sequence of assimilating technologies. If not, if computing technology is, effectively, the only form of assimilating technology, then the introduction of computer technology represents a unique historical transformation that can occur only once in history (except in the case of a collapse of technological infrastructure followed by its redevelopment and redeployment at some future time — independent invention in a diachronic rather than a synchronic framework; we could similarly distinguish idea diffusion in diachronic and synchronic frameworks).
We could also view assimilating technologies as a convergent development of the overall technological infrastructure of civilization. Knives entailed little convergence or assimilation. Steamships and trains began the process of assimilation, automobiles took the process of assimilation much farther, assimilating all the world’s cities to a common pattern, and now computer technologies are the final step in the convergence upon a unified technological infrastructure. This interpretation of history presents the introduction of assimilating computing technology not as a unique bifurcation in history, dividing all of history into a before and an after, unprecedented and never to be repeated, but as part of a process that began long ago and is only coming to maturity in our time.
An important qualification needs to be made. The weedy and assimilating technologies I have mentioned so far are artifacts, i.e., spatiotemporal objects in the actual world. Human beings also invent non-material technologies. Language is a technology of cognition, as is mathematics. These non-material technologies are embodied in artifacts, but that is not what is essential to them. If we take the example of non-material technologies, then we may have examples of past assimilating technologies in the form of assimilating non-material technologies. Religion, for example, seems to be a non-material assimilating technology. A robust religion (not all religions are robust) will take over a society so completely that every activity becomes a religious activity and social purpose is understood in religious terms. The ordinary business of life may become encrusted with religion in the same way that a contemporary electric car is encrusted with computers.
If this is an accurate way to think about non-material technologies, and if non-material technologies are to be included under the umbrella of all technologies, then assimilating technologies have been with us since the advent of civilizations with an institutionalized religion serving as a central project. With this additional layer of assimilating technology, we can re-conceive assimilating technologies as appearing much earlier in the development of civilization, and serving as a kind of model (not necessarily a conscious model, but, at the same time, not necessarily unconscious either) for how an assimilating technology can manifest itself within a society. In this way, the convergence of a society upon a telos of technological development in which all technology is assimilated by and subsumed under some master technological regime seems almost inevitable.
