book club

By Marc Weidenbaum

With music, as well as more broadly culture, as the context in which we’re reading Kevin Kelly’s book, the (entirely hypothetical) evolution-like course of the development of musical instruments is something I’ve been especially interested in.

I understand that Kelly defines “technology” as broadly as to include written language (which is something that Julian Dibbell, it’s worth mentioning, also emphasizes in his introduction to this year’s Best Technology Writing collection), and by extension cultural production.

Early on in his What Technology Wants, Kelly discusses two things that play into an understanding of where musical instruments came from, and where they’re headed.

First is an anecdote, in which Kelly talks about the paleontologist Niles Eldredge’s interest in the trumpet. (I read the book via the Kindle software on my iPod Touch, so I can’t give a specific page number for this.)

As a hobby he collects cornets, musical instruments very similar to trumpets. Once Eldredge applied his professional taxonomic methods to his collection of 500 cornets, some dating back to 1825. He selected 17 traits that varied among his instruments–the shape of their horns, the placement of their valves, the length and diameter of their tubes–very similar to the kind of metrics he applies to trilobites.

Second is Kelly’s emphasis on progress as mapped by a move from what might be described as from physical to virtual goods–from an industrial economy to a service economy, and hence in instrument terms from physical instruments to software-based ones. Of course, the virtuality of software-based instruments is a hedge, since they’re predicated on a physical object, namely some sort of computing device, be it a conventional computer or a mobile device like an iPhone.

In the end, I’d love to know what Eldredge–which is to say, by extension, we–thinks about how virtual instruments will affect the projected development of the trumpet.

I also read the new Kelly book in the context of recent perceived about-faces by one-time technology evangelists, like Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget and Douglas Rushkoff’s Program or Be Programmed, but that’s a separate line of inquiry.

This week (November 15-19) members of our friendly music and culture blogger think tank are once again gathering around the computer, this time to reflect on Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants. This wasn’t in the book, but I sure hope technology wants 3-D printers that produce wine and cheese so these things can have sharable snacks in the near future.

In the meantime, to get everyone’s appetite whetted, what the book does cover is not just the recent explosion of new technologies and how they are impacting our lives for better and worse, but how their increasing sophistication ties into the really long trajectories of evolutionary development reaching back to the Big Bang. In so doing, Kelly attempts to get a glimpse down the road a pace and see what various examples might indicate about where we and technology are headed. In Kelly’s view, trying to put on the brakes is futile and, in fact, an active anticipation and embrace of these “wants” is to be encouraged. Technology is not a neutral force. There are bad and good uses, but new technology increases choice (which for Kelly is always a good), adding just enough weight to the plus side of the equation that over time such progress is always more good than bad.

If you need a concrete musical/cultural example as to why we should be champing at the technological progress bit, consider this one which Kelly offers towards the end of the text:

If the best cathedral builder who ever lived was born now, instead of 1,000 years ago, he would still find a few cathedrals being built to spotlight his glory. Sonnets are still being written and manuscripts still being illuminated. 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?

When this book first hit the shelves, I knew I wanted to read it but that without the chance to dig around in its ideas with colleagues, I’d probably miss out on some of the valuable meat of the exercise. I admit that I had a bit of an ongoing debate with myself as I read, wondering if I had made a bad call in picking this as a good selection for what is ostensibly a music and culture blog. In the end, however, Kelly’s ideas–whether I agreed with them or not–really scratched my interest in occasionally pulling the musical discussion back far enough that we can see the issues and ideas impacting the much wider human picture. We are then free to apply them as we desire to our own narrower work. I think What Technology Wants offers us that in spades, and I hope everyone enjoys the conversation this week.

Some resources:

Kelly’s review of his own book, pointing out what he sees as its major arguments.

Jerry Coyne, professor of ecology and evolution, reviews the book for the NYT Sunday Book Review, pointing out what he sees as some of its major flaws.

An audio interview with Kelly about the book.

Kelly’s TED talk on related themes: