Dang, Molly got to the Kelly’s whole technology-is-inevitable argument before I did, but that’s OK, I’ll talk about it anyway, because I think it’s a good example of the interesting tension that I felt throughout the entire book. Kelly insists on inevitability to argue against throwing up cautionary roadblocks, what, in chapter 12, he calls the Precautionary Principle. One the one hand, this is, in part, fodder for the six-degrees-of-teleology game that you can play throughout the whole book. (The Precautionary Principle is bad because it slows down innovation. But why is innovation automatically good? See Progress, belief in, pp. 1-359, passim.) But, in casting technological advances as inevitable, he introduces a subtle but interesting disconnect.
Kelly defines inevitability in two ways. Here’s the first (p. 176):
[E]very realizable technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together.
Add the missing agency–that is, some mad tinkerer will choose to cobble together, &c.–and the inevitable is not quite as inevitable. Extraordinarily, even overwhelmingly likely? Certainly–but not inevitable. That’s hairsplitting, to be sure, but that tiny space between likely and inevitable is surprisingly lively philosophical ground.
Kelly’s second characterization of inevitability likens it to genetics–“Who you are is determined in part by your genes,” he writes (p. 177), and technological development is the same way, an inexorable, if sometimes irregular unfolding of a predetermined plan. A strong analogy, but when Kelly writes (p. 179)–
In our lives we have no choice about becoming teenagers
–as a former moody teenager, I am compelled to point out a flaw in his logic; we do have a choice, even if the opt-out is, to put it mildly, extreme. But it’s at those gedanken-ish margins that you can sense how Kelly, even as he sensibly qualifies his argument, nonetheless fairly consistently errs on the side of a view of human nature that I, at least, find too passive.
It’s what’s at the source of Kelly’s repeated post hoc propter ergo hoc assumptions about technological innovation (or, as I called it to my lovely wife, “that thing-following-another-thing fallacy”; she knew the actual term, having paid more attention to The West Wing). Technology begets technology, in Kelly’s view; innovations are the cause of further innovations. It’s highly suspicious, especially if, like me, you’re more inclined to the idea that people cause innovation, not technology itself–the exponential increase in invention could just as well be due to increased population density as some sort of technological Hegelian vector towards the absolute. And it leads Kelly to a bout of untoward mysticism, in the passage that Molly quoted back at the start of the week:
But can you imagine how poor our world would be if Bach had been born 1,000 years before the Flemish invented the technology of the harpsichord? Or if Mozart had preceded the technologies of piano and symphony? How vacant our collective imaginations would be if Vincent van Gogh had arrived 5,000 years before we invented cheap oil paint? What kind of modern world would we have if Edison, Greene, and Dickson had not developed cinematic technology before Hitchcock or Charlie Chaplin grew up?
This manages to be too optimistic and too pessimistic, all at the same time. The optimism is easily seen if you apply the criterion to less morally exalted acts: What kind of modern world would we have if Henry Deringer had not developed pistol technology before John Wilkes Booth grew up? But also, the idea that certain kinds of genius need particular kinds of technology in order to flourish can work against technology as well: if your genius is dependent on obsolete technology, there’s going to be far less opportunity for you to practice it, and far less likelihood that your genius will enrich the world.
But that’s assuming that the technology is what sparks, or even necessarily enables genius. Do you honestly think an imagination as fertile and prolific as Bach’s wouldn’t have found some way to express itself, harpsichord or not? The catch, of course, is that, a thousand years earlier, Bach’s genius might not have been in the position for its products to be passed down to subsequent generations. Does that mean it isn’t genius? Is genius only that which proves useful or beautiful after the creator is gone? And now we’ve opened the door to aesthetics.
And that’s as good a place as any to stop, I think. Because the aesthetics of being a classical musician in the 21st century can sometimes seem to be as much a rebuke to technology as it is enabled by it. Practitioners have shown characteristically human ingenuity in leveraging technological advances in making a musical career at the same time that the actual musical practice–instruments that still demand inefficient courses of mastery, an ideal of live, fallible performance–persistently and joyously occupies a space that, at least from one vantage, exists in spite of the human addiction to technology. Technological advance is neither good nor bad; it’s good and bad, the sort of rich gray area that, even in an era of dazzling technological power, artists will most incisively make their playground.
But that’s assuming that the technology is what sparks, or even necessarily enables genius. Do you honestly think an imagination as fertile and prolific as Bach’s wouldn’t have found some way to express itself, harpsichord or not?
Just so. Had the harpsichord not existed on which to express his musical ideas, Bach would have invented it. He was good at that sort of thing, y’know.
ACD
Oh sigh. Did you hear that? Its tone, duration, heat, changes in inflection, direction? My body is the first technology when it comes to the arts. The need for Art was never in the limbs or vocal chords but in a person’s distinct feeling or sense of meaning or need to move. I have to ask -how transparent is each tool in relation to my soul, or to my art? Every tool we built over history had as its purpose to expand the usefulness of our biological tools to show and tell our art. To try to make the union between tool and our “story to tell” more explicit. Can we seriously say that modern technology is useful to us because it still narrows the gap between soul and tool so that our arts are made even more intimate? By intimate I mean arts that move personal meaning from one biological physical human being with blood and bones and limbs and brain to others who are also biological creatures with blood and bones and limbs and brain?
“[Kelly] manages to be too optimistic and too pessimistic, all at the same time.”
This is a priceless summation of my book! In a million years I would have never thought to say it this way.
I greatly appreciate Mathew’s comments and the many other close readings of the book. I agree that the “art” side of the technium did not get the same focus as the tool side in my book. In particular I should have been clearer in distinguishing between the dynamics of artist expression and the tools behind them.