The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection by Michael Harris
Authors: Michael Harris
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one far speedier than our genetic model). Evolutionary theory holds that given a million technological efforts, some are bound to be better at making us addicted to them, and these give rise, organically (as it were), to more and more addictive technologies, leaving each generation of humans increasingly in service to, and in thrall of, inanimate entities. Until we end up . . . well, where we are.
Blackmore’s work offers a fascinating explanation for why each generation seems less and less capable of managing that solitude, less likely to opt for technological disengagement. She suggests that technology-based memes—temes—are a different kind of replicator from the basic memes of everyday material culture, the ones Dawkins was describing. What sort of difference is there? I wanted to know. “The most important difference is the fidelity of copying,” she told me. This is important because a meme’s ability to propagate grows as its fidelity rate increases. “Most memes . . . we forget how often we get them wrong.” (Oral traditions of storytelling, for example, were characterized by constant twists in the tale.) “But with digital machines the fidelity is almost 100 percent. As it is, indeed, with our genes.” This is a startling thought, though a simple enough one: By delivering to the world technologies capable of replicating information with the same accuracy as DNA, we are playing a grand game indeed. The fidelity of our earliest memetic acts would have improved significantly with the advent of writing, of course, and then again thanks to the printing press, which might (like us) be called a meme machine. But we now have near perfect replication online.
We are now becoming, by Blackmore’s estimation, teme machines—servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own.
Kevin Kelly takes this notion to the nth degree in his 2010 book,
What Technology Wants,
where he anthropomorphizes technologies and asks what they would like us to do. “The evolution of technology converges in much the same manner as biological evolution,” he argues. He sees parallels to bioevolution in the fact that the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows, for example, multiplied ten times since 1993, becoming more complex as time goes on just as biological organisms tend to do.
But viewed in the clear light of morning, we’ll likely find there was no robotic villain behind the curtain. Your iPhone does not “want” anything in the way that we perceive “want” to exist. Instead of animal “want,” we will confront only the cool, unthinking intelligence of evolution’s law. And, to be sure, our own capitalist drive pushes these technologies, these temes, to evolve (if that’s what they’re doing). Consider the fact that Google tested forty-one shades of blue on its toolbar to see which elicited the most favorable response. We
push
the technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive possible outcome. Yet even as we do this, it doesn’t feel
as though we have any control. It feels, instead, like a destined outcome—a fate.
• • • • •
Blackmore’s conception, if thrilling, is also harrowing. Genes must cooperate with us to get copied into the next generation, and they produce animals that cooperate with one another. And temes (being bits of information, not sentient creatures) need humans to build the factories and servers that allow them to replicate, and they need us to supply the power that runs the machines. But as temes evolve, they could demand more than a few servers from future generations of humans. Blackmore continued:
What really scares me is that the accelerating evolution of temes and their machinery requires vast amounts of energy and material resources. We will go on supplying these as long as we want to use
Blackmore’s work offers a fascinating explanation for why each generation seems less and less capable of managing that solitude, less likely to opt for technological disengagement. She suggests that technology-based memes—temes—are a different kind of replicator from the basic memes of everyday material culture, the ones Dawkins was describing. What sort of difference is there? I wanted to know. “The most important difference is the fidelity of copying,” she told me. This is important because a meme’s ability to propagate grows as its fidelity rate increases. “Most memes . . . we forget how often we get them wrong.” (Oral traditions of storytelling, for example, were characterized by constant twists in the tale.) “But with digital machines the fidelity is almost 100 percent. As it is, indeed, with our genes.” This is a startling thought, though a simple enough one: By delivering to the world technologies capable of replicating information with the same accuracy as DNA, we are playing a grand game indeed. The fidelity of our earliest memetic acts would have improved significantly with the advent of writing, of course, and then again thanks to the printing press, which might (like us) be called a meme machine. But we now have near perfect replication online.
We are now becoming, by Blackmore’s estimation, teme machines—servants to the evolution of our own technologies. The power shifts very quickly from the spark of human intention to the absorption of human will by a technology that seems to have intentions of its own.
Kevin Kelly takes this notion to the nth degree in his 2010 book,
What Technology Wants,
where he anthropomorphizes technologies and asks what they would like us to do. “The evolution of technology converges in much the same manner as biological evolution,” he argues. He sees parallels to bioevolution in the fact that the number of lines of code in Microsoft Windows, for example, multiplied ten times since 1993, becoming more complex as time goes on just as biological organisms tend to do.
But viewed in the clear light of morning, we’ll likely find there was no robotic villain behind the curtain. Your iPhone does not “want” anything in the way that we perceive “want” to exist. Instead of animal “want,” we will confront only the cool, unthinking intelligence of evolution’s law. And, to be sure, our own capitalist drive pushes these technologies, these temes, to evolve (if that’s what they’re doing). Consider the fact that Google tested forty-one shades of blue on its toolbar to see which elicited the most favorable response. We
push
the technology down an evolutionary path that results in the most addictive possible outcome. Yet even as we do this, it doesn’t feel
as though we have any control. It feels, instead, like a destined outcome—a fate.
• • • • •
Blackmore’s conception, if thrilling, is also harrowing. Genes must cooperate with us to get copied into the next generation, and they produce animals that cooperate with one another. And temes (being bits of information, not sentient creatures) need humans to build the factories and servers that allow them to replicate, and they need us to supply the power that runs the machines. But as temes evolve, they could demand more than a few servers from future generations of humans. Blackmore continued:
What really scares me is that the accelerating evolution of temes and their machinery requires vast amounts of energy and material resources. We will go on supplying these as long as we want to use
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