What Technology Wants

by Kevin Kelly

Last tended to November 22, 2020

It is all at once profoundly curious and seemingly contradictory that [[Kevin Kelly]] should begin his book with a narrative of deep skepticism toward technology and a valorisation of his ascetic minimalist disposition toward it. In ways he paints it as a threat to the ‘self,’ as an invasion be needs to keep at bay.

• “I continue to keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length so that I can more easily remember who I am.” (5)
• There's a couple of things happening in here: technology as a threat to the ‘self,’ also another bodily-spatial reference of technology being within the physical vicinity of a constructed personscape.
• “Once you gain your voice around technology and become more sure of what you want, it becomes obvious that some technologies are superior to others” (2)

It's critical we do not give into the sweeping generalisation of “technology” as a category.

[[Kevin Kelly]] makes reference to the ‘lifting’ and ‘filling’ of his soul numerous times in the opening pages referring to his relationship with effective technology. While this is a considerably common reference to use in order to express deep affection and appreciation, it still plays into the conceptual framework of technology as deified. As possessing transcendental and cosmologically transformative qualities.

This introduction serves as one exemplary version of the mythology of technology, what stories we are telling ourselves about this cultural category. As such, its casually creative and colloquial language can indicate to us the common use categorical frameworks within which we understand this idea of ‘technology.’ In lines like...

• “Machines were becoming our coolies”
• “Mechanical creatures intruded into our farms and homes” (8)

...the technological is continuously anthropomorphised and animated. #Anthropomorphism

[[The Technium]] is [[Kevin Kelly]]'s self-coined term. It is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us” (11)

• This includes culture, social institutions, and ‘intangibles’
• Holds a genuine belief in technium’s autonomy (13)
• “[[The Technium]] shares a deep common root not only with the human mind, but with ancient life and other self-organised systems as well.... so the technium must obey the laws of mind, life, and self-organisation - as well as our human minds. Thus out of all the spheres of influence upon the technium, the human mind if only one. And this influence may even be the weakest one.” (15)

Whole other level happening here. The themes of mysticism and [[Anthropomorphism]] are explicitly pervasive and self-proclaimed.

• “[[The Technium]] wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do. But in addition to those drives, the technium has its own wants.” (15)
• “[[The Technium]] can really only be understood as a type of evolutionary life” (45)
• “We began to see through technology’s guise as material and began to see it primarily as action. While it inhabited a body, its heart was something softer.” (41)

Kelly giving us an entire tour de force through the history of mankind from protozoan evolutionary root speaks to the significance he wishes to imbue his own imminent contribution with. For this community, the legitimate consideration of the technium as a profoundly transformative force within the context of the whole of human story is significant in their cosmological understandings.

He goes so far as to describe the formation of the very first hydrogen atoms (57) for comparative purposes in situating the grand meaningfulness of ‘the technium’. By painting the picture large enough, the significance of the technium is equally aggrandised.

In all of [[Kevin Kelly]]’s narratives about the evolution of [[The Technium]], he’s telling the implicit story of this force as just like the force of the evolution of mankind. But on steroids. Evolution on crack, on speed, happening at an exponential rate compared to how we arrived at a collective state of self-consciousness. He goes so far as to describe the formation of the very first hydrogen atoms (57) for comparative purposes in situating the grand meaningfulness of ‘the technium’. By painting the picture large enough, the significance of the technium is equally aggrandised.

Theme of extremes in the Transhumanist and QS communities. Everything is described as accelerated, exceptional, beyond comprehension.