“Our problem today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour.”  Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)

Some of the best cultural observers in the late twentieth century discerned the initial impact of digital computers on our society and tried to remind anyone who would listen of its dangers. Their thoughts help us remember what’s central to living a full human life in this world full of shiny, wonderful gadgets and always, always, the next new thing.  Joseph Campbell’s life spanned a good part of the twentieth century. Born in 1904, this renowned expert in world mythology lived through two world wars, the Depression, the dropping of the atomic bomb, Vietnam, the domestic mess of the sixties, and the relentless encroachment of machines, first the mechanical ones and then the electronic ones, before his death in 1987. Late in life he spent many hours in interviews with Bill Moyers, the cream of which eventually became “The Power of Myth.” A highly popular, deeply interesting set of interchanges gleaned from those conversations aired on PBS soon after Campbell’s death. Subsequently, the entire set of conversations appeared in book form under the same title.

Although Campbell believed that we live in a demythologized world, he found that students around the country were attracted to his lectures in large numbers, mostly, he speculated, because mythology provided messages
unlike what ordinary course work at colleges and universities offered in his day. Myths are “stories about the wisdom of life. . . . What we’re learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We’re learning technologies, we’re
getting information. There’s a reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects.” 

One major reason for this was increasing specialization, something that has intensified in the twenty-first century. Campbell pointed out that specialization necessarily limits the field in which one considers any problem and tends to eliminate the life values, especially the human and cultural aspects of any specific issue. Generalists, on the other hand, have the advantage of a broader perspective and the ability to make more complex associations and perhaps gain deeper insights as well. They can take something learned in one specialty and relate it to something learned in different specialty. By so doing, they can discover similar patterns or contradictions or discontinuities that aren’t apparent when one specializes in a narrow field.

Growing specialization and a greater focus on the literal, factual level of life, “the news of the day and the problems of the hour,” have only become more commonplace since the 1980s. Information technologies, with its data gluts, information overloads, knowledge “management,” and, most recently, big data, have put an enormous emphasis on the technologies themselves and have changed the pursuit of knowledge into a process of learning how to access the information one might need to know at some point or other in the future. As a result, the continuum of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom has become jumbled, their meanings confused. Some now describe knowledge as “actionable information.” Others, emphasizing dramatic changes in the state of knowledge due to the Internet, claim that the nature of knowledge has changed fundamentally. Knowledge now resides in networks, they maintain. It can’t possibly reside in an individual's head. In fact, knowledge is probably, in David Weinberger words, “too big to know.” As for wisdom, many seem to equate wisdom today with the consensus of a crowd or, even worse, the dynamics of the marketplace.

Like Joseph Campbell, the journalist and medical researcher Norman Cousins lived through the bulk of the twentieth century and observed the onslaught of technology with similar ambivalence and prescience.  "The essential problem of man in a computerized age,” he wrote in “The Poet and the Computer” (1990),  isn’t any
different than it was in previous times. “That problem is not solely how to be more productive, more comfortable, more content, but how to be more sensitive, more sensible, more proportionate, more alive. The computer makes possible a phenomenal leap in human proficiency . . . But the question persists and indeed grows whether the computer makes it easier or harder for human beings to know who they really are, to identify their real problems, to respond more fully to beauty, to place adequate value on life, and to make their world safer than it now is.” 

Computers as electronic brains can help enormously in vital research of many sorts, Cousins wrote. “But they can’t eliminate the  foolishness and decay that come from the unexamined life. Nor do they connect a man to the things he has to be connected to—the reality of pain in others; the possibilities of creative growth in himself; the memory of the race; and the rights of the next generation.” These things matter, Cousins went on to say, because in the computer age “there may be a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there is a tendency to confuse logic with values, and intelligence with insight.” All of which makes that this bright and shiny present and that enchanting next new thing seem quite ephemeral and even trivial in comparison to the really exciting journey of life and the challenge of how to live it fully in the midst of—and perhaps in spite of— all our digital machines.

One day, Carl Jung wrote in a memoir, he suddenly realized that, although he had written extensively about myths and personal transformations, he did not know what myth he himself was living by: “I took it upon myself to get to know ‘my’ myth, and I regarded this as the task of tasks.” In What Technology Wants, former Wired editor and technology writer Kevin Kelly takes on a similar job. He went on his own quest, spending seven years reading and talking to others about what he considers the central personal challenge of our time:  how to understand the “essence” of modern technology and find the appropriate personal relationship to it. What Kelly actually discovered was his own myth, the story he (and many others) grapple with today about the technology that pervades our lives and how to live with it. 

Kelly calls the multitude of technologies that surround us and interact with each other the “technium.” For Kelly, the technium has a life of its own. Because of the countless feedback loops and complex interactions that exist in and between various technologies today, the technium, he claims,  has become a sentient, autonomous entity. It represents “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” More than a set of technologies, the technium has become  “a self-reinforcing system of creation,” from which new perspectives,
relationships, and influences “emerge.”

What should we make of such large claims? To try to put this theory into perspective, I like to place it within the context of the work Joseph Campbell did with the history of world mythologies. He observed that myths are archetypal stories about the common experiences human beings share. As the stories accumulate, they become a symbolic system that expresses the human condition of a certain time. The images of any given system are drawn from  the immediate environment. Thus when a people roam the land in a hunting culture, as the American Plains Indians did, they create myths and rituals concerning the animals. For the Indians, it centered around the buffalo. In an agrarian culture, the myths center on the earth, on seeds, on planting, growing, and harvesting as symbols of birth, life, death, and renewal. Kelly, finding our modern world permeated with machines and their technologies, focuses on the story of those technologies and our relationship to them. 

Campbell observed that even in the 1980s machines were finding their way into our mythology. He pointed out that Star Wars explores the problem of whether the machine is going to dominate humanity or serve it. In fact Campbell praised Star Wars as a story of mythic proportion that said “technology is not going to save us. Our computers, our tools, our machines are not enough. We have to rely on our intuition, our true being.” This was the message Obe Wan Kenobi gives Luke when he tells him to turn off his computer and use the force he has within.
Campbell believed we needed new myths for modern times.  And he thought it would have to be the poets and visionaries who would devise those new myths by listening to the song of the universe and creating new metaphors to express it. “Humanity,” as Campbell reminded his readers and students often, “comes not from the machine but from the heart.” 

With his vision of the technium, Kevin Kelly offers a different interpretation of our current state of affairs. Through his own quest, he says, he has learned to listen to the machines of technology for enlightenment. “Seeing our world through technology’s eyes has, for me, illuminated its larger purpose.” Technology, he finds, is a much larger force than we had previously imagined. It is as large as nature itself and our response to it should be similar to how people have traditionally responded to nature. While in the past people have looked to nature for enlightenment, now they should look to the technium: “We can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog,” Kelly
submits. 

What’s more, Kelly argues, humans have less and less influence over the collective force of technologies, whose power he traces back to the beginning of the universe: “It follows its own momentum begun at the big bang.” In  positing the technium and describing what technology “wants,” Kelly is in effect forging a new myth for  our age:  Technology is a unifying, evolving entity ever increasing in its power and reach. “Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves?”

Joseph Campbell observed that all living myths, myths, that is, that speak to the common human condition at a certain period of time, have one thing in common: They assume some kind of unity that transcends the reality of what we observe in our lives, a unity that connects all:  In the transcendent reality, “everything links and accords with everything else.” Kelly’s quest and his illumination are yet another example of humanity’s quest to envision something larger than ourselves. Even if we actually don’t call it something sacred, the attitude of worship nonetheless remains. It certainly emerges very strongly in What Technology Wants.