What Technology Wants

Details

Author: Kevin Kelly
Published: 2010
Pages: 406

Started: March 5, 2025
Finished: March 21, 2025

Short Review

There are good books and there are bad books. There are also good bad books. Orwell attributes this latter category to Chesterton and describes it as "the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished."¹

I want to extend this category with a different kind of good bad book. The kind that allows "our personal thoughts [to] germinate in authentic and vivid directions" thanks to "the author's ploughing of the intellectual landscape," as Alain de Botton so eloquently puts it.² What Technology Wants is this kind of good bad book.

Kelly uses the word technium to describe "the grand totality of machines, methods, and engineering processes" and argues that it is, in essence, an autonomous living organism. That's a poetic and compelling premise for a science fiction novel. But this isn't a science fiction novel. Kelly's proposing this as fact.

Autonomy, according to Kelly, requires displaying any combination of self-repair, self-defense, self-maintenance, self-control of goals, and self improvement. He writes:

In the technium we don't have any examples of a system that displays all of these traits—but we have plenty of examples that display some of them. Autonomous airplane drones can self-steer and stay aloft for hours. But they don't repair themselves. Communication networks can repair themselves. But they don't reproduce themselves. We have self-reproducing computer viruses, but they don't improve themselves.

But there's a critical difference between the autonomous tech and the autonomy displayed by, say, a snail crawling underneath rock. Autonomy isn't intrinsic to technology. Assembling the bits of metal and plastic into a drone doesn't make it self-steering. It requires input from a programmer. But the snail's DNA—itself a kind of programming—steers the construction of cells into an autonomous being without any input from an external intelligence.

The technium, argues Kelly, is both a product of human minds and an ancient cosmic force with "roots in the life of an atom." (Are we to conclude that human minds were present at the big bang?) It is both an extension of humanity, the same way that you might think of a beehive as the extension of a bee, and the "seventh kingdom of life." (What kingdom of life do beehives belong to?)

This focus on humanity is mistaken. Tool use is not uniquely human. Chimpanzees use tools like rocks and sticks to extract and process food and as weapons of intimidation. Birds collect material and reshape it to make nests. Technology isn't even limited to vertebrates: Octopuses have been observed using coconut shells in self defense!⁵ These examples may not live up to what we call technology. There'd need to be some scientific understanding being applied for us to make that claim. But they show, I think, that the propensity for technology exists in diverse life forms. Either non-human technology already exists somewhere in the universe or it is simply a matter of time.

To further muddy the waters, there's an entire chapter about a force Kelly calls exotropy—the opposite of entropy—that supposedly “flings forward an unbroken sequence of unlikely existences.” This force explains certain inevitabilities, from DNA in biological evolution to the inventions of the light bulb and the automobile. But exotropy, as Kelly presents it, is just a collection of examples of local order. DNA isn't a rebellion against the second law of thermodynamics, as he implies—it’s a product of it. Kelly's new force of nature is really just a basic misunderstanding of physics.³

Misconceptions and inconsistencies make the book bad. But what makes it good bad? Kelly has a unique perspective. He helped found Wired, contributed to the Whole Earth Catalog, and spent years as a nomad with almost no possessions. That perspective pays off in the chapter “Lessons from Amish Hackers,” where he reflects on living with the Amish and how their slow, deliberate approach to technology shaped his own thinking:

Like them, I don't want a lot of devices that add maintenance chores to my life without adding real benefits. I do want to be choosy about what I spend time mastering. I want to be able to back out of things that don't work out. I don't want stuff that closes off options for others (like lethal weapons). And I do want the minimum because I've learned that I have limited time and attention.

Even here, Kelly contradicts himself:

To maximize our own contentment, we seek the minimum amount of technology in our lives. Yet to maximize the contentment of others, we must maximize the amount of technology in the world. Indeed we can only find our own minimal tools if others have created a sufficient maximum pool of options we can choose from. The dilemma remains in how we can personally minimize stuff close to us while trying to expand it globally.

For someone imaginative enough to dream up the technium, it's hard to believe he lacks the imagination to see beyond this shallow logic: that minimal tools require a maximum of options. Here's a man who seems to believe that an individual's preference for peanut butter sandwiches is only possible by humanity collectively sampling every conceivable sandwich on Earth.

Still, his experience leads him to defining a "convivial manifestation of technology"—a set of guiding principles for our relationship with tech. These principles are:

• Cooperation: Technology should "promote collaboration between people and institutions."
• Transparency: The "origins and ownership [of tech] are clear. It's workings are intelligible to nonexperts. There is no asymmetrical advantage of knowledge to some of its users."
• Decentralization: Technology's "ownership, production, and control are distributed. It is not monopolized by a professional elite."
• Flexibility: Users can easily "modify, adapt, improve, or inspect [tech's] core. Individuals may freely choose to use it for give it up."
• Redundancy: There is no "only solution." A technology should not be "a monopoly, but one of several options."
• Efficiency: Tech should "minimize impact on ecosystems" with "high efficiency for energy and materials" and should be "easy to reuse."

Those are some damn good principles, if you ask me.

In his review of What Technology Wants for Boing Boing⁴, Cory Doctorow admits that he had "many quibbles with Kelly's argument." He writes:

It would be impossible not to quibble with a book as grand and grandiose as What Technology Wants. Anyone who attempts to assemble a coherent narrative that starts with the Big Bang and ends in the infinite future is bound to say some things I disagree with.

Doctorow's review is far more positive than mine, but in thus we agree: It is impossible not to quibble with What Technology Wants. It's why I couldn't put the book down. It's why it qualifies as a good bad book. More than anything, this book begs you to re-evaluate your own beliefs about technology and grapple with some truly difficult questions.

What Technology Wants is full of inconsistencies and logical fallacies, is delusional at times, and has a strange obsession with the word ratchet. But it did help sharpen my thoughts on technology and my relationship with it—a great deal, at that. So thank you, Kevin Kelly, for that rare and valuable experience.

Notes

1. Good Bad Books. George Orwell. Tribune. 2 November 1945.
2. How to Think More Effectively. The School of Life. 2022.
3. I remember learning about the second law of thermodynamics in a college chemistry class. I struggled to understand how the solar system, planets, and even molecules, could coexist with a universal law that demands ever increased entropy. So I asked about it. The second law, explained my professor, applies to closed systems, but the solar system, a planet, and a molecule, are open systems. A planet may be more organized than the swirling clouds of gas that birthed it, but its formation released enormous amounts of energy, like heat, into space. Locally, order increased, but the overall entropy in the universe increased even more.
4. Kevin Kelly's WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS: how technology changes us and vice-versa. Cory Doctorow. Boing Boing. 13 October 2010. Special thanks to @setsly@mindly.social for recommending I check out Doctorow's review.
5. Defensive tool use in a coconut-carrying octopus. Julian F. Kinn, Tom Tregenza, and Mark D. Norman. Current Biology, Volume 19, Issue 23. 15 December 2009.