Read Sven Birkerts's classic, elegant book, The Gutenberg Elegies, and you will be enchanted with the prescience and wise insights of this gifted writer as he explores what it could mean to lose the habit of prolonged reading in an age of information. And prepare to be haunted by his stark vision of what he calls "the argument of our time--the argument between technology and the soul." Now twenty years old, this brief meditation on the fate of reading in an electronic age reminds us what we may be losing as we race through the early years of the twenty-first century.

Some contend that the argument is over, the battle decided. Technology has won, they say. It dominates our lives. It dictates how we live, how we work, how we think. The reading chair is empty now. We are tied to our screens, our alerts, our ringtones, our texts.

Twenty years later the vision Birkerts articulated still hits home but it does need some tweaking. First of all I would leave out the soul, which carries too many connotations of specific religious dogmas, especially of an afterlife. Better that we talk about the human spirit with all its physical, mental, and emotional facets. And I think, at best, that we're in a different position vis-à-vis the technologies that permeate our lives.  It should be less an argument, which suggests loud voices taking definite sides and vigorously debating strong positions, and more of a search. We do struggle with the relationship between technology and the human spirit, but it's more of a dialogue than an argument, more of an exploration of how we shall move forward with all this technology we've created. The real question has become how shall we live our lives under the conditions we face and how shall we live them well.

This is why we tell each other stories, stories like The Gutenberg Elegies, that help us understand what it's like to live our lives today.

While many are happily seduced by the wonders and innovations of our contemporary high-tech life, others see danger lurking in our ever-growing reliance on digital technology. Nicholas Carr has a solid piece in a recent Atlantic Monthly about the hazards of progressive automation. One major development he explores is the unintended consequences of airplane autopilot systems. Carr discusses two recent fatal crashes, one a Continental Commuter flight flying between Newark and Buffalo that killed all 49 passengers and crew and the other an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris that crashed into the Atlantic killing all 228 on board. In both cases, the autopilot disconnected, forcing the pilot to take control. And in both cases the pilots reacted by taking the wrong action and actually causing their planes to lose velocity and crash. So it seems that while autopilot systems have contributed to greater air safety over time, they have also contributed to pilot errors and new types of accidents. 
 
Studies show that pilots, and others whose work has been largely automated, become complacent. Workers develop a kind of blind confidence that computers will operate perfectly, and this attitude fails to acknowledge the dangers that increasingly complex computer systems, as they interact with each other, may malfunction. Workers, in effect, become computer monitors, Carr argues. They become less aware of the processes they oversee and often less attentive to the tasks they actually have to do.  Automation can also make workers just plain rusty in performing ordinary tasks so that, when the computer system malfunctions or fails, workers make mistakes. Skills decline when they go unpracticed and workers can actually forget how jobs are supposed to be done. “Knowing,” Carr reminds us, “requires doing.” By separating workers from the work, ends are achieved without workers grappling with the means. “Computer automation severs the ends from the means,” Carr explains. And he claims “it’s the work itself—the means—that make us who we are.” 

Automation, in effect, changes who we are. We become passive, unengaged “creatures of the screen.” I recall the overwhelming public embrace of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger after his spectacular and highly skilled landing of a US Airways plane on the Hudson, which saved the lives of all 155 passengers on board. He was proclaimed a “hero” and showered with honors. But I do not think it was simply "The Miracle on the Hudson” that drew people’s
attention to him and made him into a popular hero. Rather it was the back story—the story of how he had been a strong advocate for safety all his life, he maintained his own skills and practiced alertness. He understood the
limitations of the automated systems he used, and above all he worked hard to live with the integrity, humility, and value system that defined his life and his work. The reviewer of Sully’s autobiography in The Washington Post summed up public perception well:

“Sullenberger’s all-American life story is so compelling that it screams to be required reading for all young people, or anybody else who needs confirmation that courage, dignity and extraordinary competence can still be found in this land.... [A] remarkable life story.”

Carr’s question in the end is the right one: “Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want?” Are we to become “creatures of the screen” or are we to maintain our full humanity, each of us heroes in our own way, by continuing to know and to learn by doing rather than letting our machines work on the assumption that the human being is probably the weakest link in any given system.

Ray Kurzweil incessantly dreams of the future. And it's a future he describes as a "human-machine civilization." In How To Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil looks forward to a time when technology will have advanced to where it will be possible to gradually replace all the parts of the body and brain with nonbiological parts. And he claims that it will not change people's identities any more than the natural, gradual replacement of the cells in our body does now. All this will come about after scientists and engineers, who are currently working on brain models in many different organizations and areas of the world, succeed in creating a complete model of the human brain. Kurzweil contends that the neocortex functions hierarchically and that it works according to pattern recognition. Therefore, he argues, it is possible to write algorithms that will  simulate how the brain actually works. That, in combination with increasing miniaturization, will make such substitution of nonbiological components possible by the 2030s.

That the human brain is akin to a digital computer is still a big and a very contentious issue in neuroscience and cognitive psychology circles. In the January issue of Scientific American, Yale professor of psychology John Bargh summarizes some of the latest thinking about this problem. Specifically he addresses the major role of the unconscious in how people make decisions, how they behave in various situations, and how they perceive themselves and the world around them. There is a complex dynamic between ourcontrolled conscious thought processes and the unconscious, often automatic, processes of which we are not aware. Nobelist Daniel Kahneman explained this phenomenon in Thinking Fast and Slow. Automatic thought processes happen quickly and do not include planning or deliberation.

Even Daniel Dennett, an eminent philosopher and cognitive scientist who has long held that neurons functioned as simple on-off switches that make them a logical switch similar to a digital bit, has recently changed his mind about the analogy of the human mind to a computer: "We're beginning to come to grips with the idea," he says in a recent Edge talk, "that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order,  . . . In fact, it's much more like anarchy. . . ."  Yet even with this concession Dennett is still inclined to use the computer as a metaphor for the human brain. This leads him to make a curious statement, one which actually begs the question: "The vision of the brain as a computer, which I still champion, is changing so fast. The brain's a computer, but it's so different from any computer you're used to. It's not your desktop or your laptop at all."

By his own admission, Dennett's talk is highly speculative: "I'd be thrilled if 20 percent of it was right." What I think he means is that the brain is like a computer that is far more complex than existing machines but that it also has intention. The neurons are "selfish," and they are more like agents than computer instructions, which in turn are more like slaves. "You don't have to worry about one part of your laptop going rogue and trying out something on its own that the rest of the system doesn't want to do." Computers, on  the other hand, are made up of "mindless little robotic slave prisoners." So I'm not sure how helpful it is for Dennett to think of the brain as a computer at all. And Dennett's views on neurons and agents, combined with the more recent thinking about the impact of the unconscious on conscious thought, lead me to conclude that Ray Kurzweil's dream of someday replacing the human brain with robotic switches is just that: a dream.

Big Data. The very concept seems to demand, indeed require, that massive pronouncements and claims of Herculean proportions should follow. Such a concept must inevitably overwhelm previous trends and satisfy even the most unbelievable expectations. But what in truth is the story that proponents of Big Data are (loudly) proclaiming? And is it a fad that's here today, only to be gone tomorrow? Or does it indicate a more deeply embedded belief system, part of a living myth, for our time?

To find an answer to this question, I turned to the latest book on the subject, appropriately entitled Big Data, with one of those absolutely headline-grabbing subtitles that is designed to boggle the mind (and presumably make the casual observer pick up the book and, hopefully, buy it):  A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think. OK, I thought, so what kind of a transformation are we talking about here?

First let me say that the authors come well credentialed. Victor Mayer-Schönberger teaches at the Oxford Internet
Institute at Oxford University and, we are told, is the author of eight books and countless articles. He is a "widely recognized authority “on big data. His co-author, Kenneth Cukier, hails from the upper echelons of journalism: he's the data editor for The Economist and has written for other prominent publications as well, including Foreign
Affairs.

This was a good place to start, I thought, to learn about the story of big data and the kind of changes—oops, I
mean transformations—that it was inevitably going to produce in our world. The major transformation the authors predict is that soon computer systems will be replacing or at the very least augmenting human judgment in countless areas of our lives. The chief reason for this is the enormous amount of data that has recently become available. Digital technology now gives us access to, both easily and cheaply, large amounts of information, frequently collecting it passively, invisibly, and automatically.

The result is a major change in the general mindset. People are looking at data to find patterns and correlations
rather than setting up hypotheses to prove causality: "The ideal of identifying causal mechanisms is a self-congratulatory illusion; big data overturns this. Yet again we are at a historical impasse where 'god is dead.' That is to say, the certainties that we believed in are once again changing. But this time they are being replaced, ironically, by better evidence." 

So there you have it. God is dead, yet again. Only this time the god is the god of the scientific method, of causality.
Out with the "why," in with the "what." If Google can identify an outbreak of the H1N1 flu and specify particular areas of significantly large instances of infection, is there any reason that we should worry about why this is occurring in such places, when we already know the what: there's an outbreak of flue and it is especially heavy in these locations, the authors ask. 

We have, my friends, slid into the  gentle valley of the "Good Enough." Correlation is good enough for now. It's
fast, it's cheap, it's here, let's use it. We'll get around to the why later, maybe, if it's not too complicated and expensive to find out. And here are some of the examples the authors use for proof of the good enough of correlations: “After all, Amazon can recommend the ideal book. Google can rank the most
relevant website, Facebook knows our likes, and LinkedIn divines whom we know.”
Such exaggerated attribution of insight and intuition to computer algorithms is
so common these days that it’s seldom even called out.


That's the transformation, according to the authors, that we have to look forward to. And behind their predictions lies a sense that the movement toward reliance on the results of big data to understand our world is not just inevitable but that the data itself, the vast invisible presence in our modern lives, also contains within itself a power and energy of incalculable value and ever-improving predictive powers. They call it “big-data consciousness”: Seeing the world as information, as oceans of data that can be explored at ever greater breadth and depth, offers us a perspective on reality that we did not have before. It is a mental outlook that may penetrate all areas of life. Today we are a numerate society because we presume hat the world is understandable with numbers and math. . . . Tomorrow, subsequent generations may have a “big-data consciousness”—the presumption that there is a quantitative component to all that we do, and that data is indispensible for society to learn from.”

And the heroes of this transformation? They are the people who can wield this data well—who can write the algorithms that will move us beyond our superstitions and preconceptions to new insights into the world in which we live. These are the new Galileos of our day because they will be confronting existing institutions and ways of
  thinking. In a clever turn of what I like to call "The Grandiose Analogy," the authors compare the use of statistics by Billy Beane of Moneyball fame to Galileo's pioneering observations using  a telescope to support Copernicus’s theory that the Earth was not the center of the universe: "Beane was challenging the dogma of the dugout, just as Galileo's heliocentric views had affronted the authority of the Catholic Church." It's another attempt to elevate by association the comparatively banal practices of putting a winning baseball team together on a shoestring to the level of the world-shattering scientific observation that the earth and by extension mankind is not at the center of God's universe after all.

If you can ignore the hyperboles in this book, however--and given the number of them this is no small challenge—you can come to see the reality of what big data actually is and what kinds of contributions its use might make to our lives. The scientific method isn't going away. The march of science to discover and explain its best hypotheses at any given time will continue. In fact the patterns and correlations unearthed by big-data methods may form the basis for new hypotheses and bring us even closer to understanding the "why" of many things to come. 

Nonetheless, within some contexts, big data can produce actionable information. In marketing,  Amazon, for example, can use knowing that people who read Civil War histories may also like a particular subset of mystery writers to boost sales through their customer recommendation algorithms. Google's ability to detect flu outbreaks
also produces actionable information. The NIH and other medical institutions can take actions based on such findings to make vaccines plentiful in certain areas, produce more vaccines if feasible, prepare hospitals and medical offices for the spike in needs, and publish other public health guidelines.

Still there some real problems with heralding the quantification of everything into digitally manipulatable form as
the answer to myriad issues. The supposition fails to take into account any fundamental issues except those obvious ones involving privacy and surveillance. First of all there are the insurmountable problems that complex algorithms
create. That very complexity produces higher and higher risks for errors in the writing and executing of the code. That same complexity makes it very difficult to judge whether the results reflect reality. The very fact that such algorithms may challenge our intuition makes it difficult to validate their results without having an understanding of the "why," or even a sense of the assumptions and content of the algorithms themselves. 

Statistics can be powerful tools but there was also a wonderful book called How To Lie with Statistics that came out nearly sixty years ago and is no doubt still relevant today. The authors of Big Data claim that knowledge and experience may not be so important in the big data world: "When you are stuffed silly with data, you can tap that instead, and to greater effect. Thus those who can analyze big data may see past superstitions and conventional thinking not because they're smart, but because they have the data." The authors also suggest that a special team of “algorithmists” could oversee all the algorithms to ensure that they do not invade the privacy of individuals or cross other boundaries.  I’m afraid Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier really ought to talk to the SEC about Wall Street
and its algorithms to see how well that’s been working out!

Finally, the proponents of big data want to discount intuition, common sense, experience, knowledge, insight, and even serendipity and ingenuity, never mind wisdom. In their quest to elevate the digitalization of everything, they neglect those very qualities, qualities which cannot be digitized. As Einstein once famously reminded us:  "Not
everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

There’s a semi-apocryphal story about Norbert Wiener, the brilliant, visionary MIT mathematician. It is said that he used to walk around the halls of the campus with his eyes closed and a finger on the wall to ensure that he did not lose his way. One day traveling what is fondly known as the “Infinite Corridor,” which stretches 825 feet from the main lobby of MIT’s central building west to east through 5 major buildings in all housing classrooms and offices. On one particular day, one of the classrooms in session  happened to have its door open and Norbert Wiener simply entered the classroom  and walked completely  around the perimeter and out the door again as he made his way toward his destination—to the silent amazement (and amusement) of the professor as well as
his students. 

Recently the New York Times published an excerpt from a long-lost article that Norbert Wiener wrote in 1949. Originally solicited by the oddball Sunday Times editor, Lester Markel,it was mysteriously either lost by Markel or abandoned by Wiener, or both. In any event, a researcher recently found the  among Wiener’s papers at the MIT archives. In the piece Wiener  about “what the ultimate machine age is likely to be.” He expounded  future automated systems well beyond what then existed and about smart computers and smart gauges that would integrate one machine with another machine various manufacturing processes.

Although he did not foresee the economic shift in the value of information versus manufacturing, the revolution he did envision was profound and his predictions dire: “These new machines have a great capacity for upsetting the
present basis of industry, and for reducing the economic value of the routine factory employee to a point at which he is not worth hiring at any price. If we combine our machine-potentials of a factory with the valuation of human beings on which our present factory system is based, we are in for an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty. . . Moreover if we move in the direction of  making machines which learn and whose behavior is modified by experience, we must face the fact that every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes. The genie in the bottle will not willingly go back in the bottle, nor have we any reason to expect them to be well disposed to us. In short, it is only a humanity which is capable of awe, which will also be capable of controlling the new potentials which we are  opening for ourselves. We can be humble and live a good life with the aid of the machines, or we can be arrogant and die.”

Would that our writers and our thinkers and our leaders of corporations today, instead of blithely hailing the onslaught of robots and marveling at increased productively and the brilliance of our technology, had some of the compassion and wisdom that Wiener possessed in 1949.


  

The nonstop chatter about the power of the Internet has reached a level of cacophony that is hard to dismiss or even ignore. All sorts of people are fascinated with its ever-growing size, with its ubiquity, with its endless
variety, and, of course, with its “promise.” Depending on whom you listen to, the Web promises specific transformative powers, from the spread of democracy to the end of history, from equal access to all information to a repository of the sum of human knowledge that is utterly unfathomable in its size and breadth. The Web’s decentralized structure itself has even become a model for all sorts of peer-to-peer networks, from which “collective intelligence” will emerge to solve many of the world’s thorniest problems. It’s enough to make you think that
surely the cultural equivalent of the second coming is at hand.

The Web has indeed captured the general imagination, but what is actually emerging is a common living mythology for our time. A major component of any mythology is power of epic proportions, recounted in larger-than-life
stories. Today’s ever-expanding Internet of website nodes offers a story of the power of technology and may well provide a symbol that helps us understand the experience of what is like to live today.

In ancient times, humans constructed mythological symbols out of their physical environment and their way of life. In the hunting and herding societies, animals played key roles in the myths and rituals. In the agrarian societies, the planting cycle provided the focus for myths. So it is not surprising that, in a society woven through with various digital technologies that have changed the way we live and work—as well as the way we think and interact with others—that technology should find a central place in the myths of our day.

And by myths here I mean living, vital myths, which are neither true nor false but through their symbols speak directly to what it means to experience life at a particular time in history. The famous mythographer Joseph
Campbell (1904-1987) spent his life studying, writing, and teaching others about the world of mythologies. Whereas dreams are private myths, Campbell would say, myths are public dreams. Mythologies are really stories that contain archetypal symbols, symbols that have been used in countless inflections throughout the
mythologies of the world.

Campbell found remarkably similar and detailed stories of deaths and resurrections, virgin births, heroes’ journeys, and many other images and narratives. Like Jung and many others, Campbell emphasized that these similarities existed and resonated with so many people throughout the ages because myths originate in the unconscious. They are biologically grounded in the psyche, which Campbell defined as “the inward experience of the human body,
which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts, the same fears.”

So one key to the powerful attraction to the Web for many people as they approach it from different angles with varying interpretations and emphases, is that the web, which is sometimes called a net, is itself an archetypal symbol that recurs in other cultures and mythologies as a metaphor for, among other things, interconnectedness. One classic mythical symbol is the Hindu “Net of Indra,” or “Net of Gems.” The Net of Indra is an infinite net that contains a gem at every crossing of one thread with another. Each gem reflects all the other gems. Everything is interrelated and everything that occurs does so in relation to everything else. Campbell sees a similar insight in the nineteenth-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea about the shape of an individual’s life. Schopenhauer observed that towards the end of your life you can look back and see a consistent order, a plan, to it. People you seem to have met by chance become important agents in the structure of your life. And you too have served unintentionally a similar role in the lives of others, so that one gathers a larger vision of the unfolding of life “like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else.” Schopenhauer wrote that it is as if a single dreamer were dreaming a dream in which all the characters dream as well, so that everything links to everything else. James Joyce developed a similar theme in his final work, Finnegans Wake.

Campbell also told an American Indian story where the web again plays a central role in conveying the idea of interconnection. An American Indian chief, Chief Seattle, wrote to the President of the United States in 1852
in response to an inquiry from the government about buying tribal lands to accommodate new influxes of immigrants from Europe. The basic theme was one of the interdependence of all of nature: “But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? . . . The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. . . . Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”

Power, light, vastness, interconnection, transcendence beyond the visible—all these characteristics of the web converge in these various images. And this may explain why our electronic web—with its pulsing light, expanding toward some unknown and unseen space, connecting countless people, institutions, and sources of information through an endless array of light-emitting nodes—captures the imagination of  so many today as they dream the dream of life in the here and now. 

As Joseph Campbell always maintained, myths may evoke mystery and awe, their symbols leading forward. They point to clues of the spiritual potentialities of human life. While Campbell said it was impossible to predict what the next mythology might be, any more than it’s possible to predict what one might dream on any given night, he did believe that any new myth would have to take into account the planet as a whole and include the machines of our
modern life. This is the focus of our mythology: the story of the progress of technology, with the computer engineers as our magicians and the web as the source of all knowledge, both our Delphic oracle and the symbol of the interconnected nodes of the human race.

When something is digitized, whether it is some text, an image, a video, or a series of sounds, it becomes broken up into a language made up of just ones and zeros, the universal language known as the binary code of electronic
communications. Each letter becomes a series of digits. Every image first becomes a series of pixels, each of which is then translated into a series of digits. In the end the whole audio-visual world can be reduced to an infinite series of ones and zeros, and we are swept down a rabbit hole where everything becomes “content,” separated from its forms and often from its context as well. This is the world in which mash-ups are considered high art, and it is also the world in which data, information, and knowledge are jumbled together, morphing into undifferentiated instantiations of the same "content."

Digitalization is the great leveler of meaning and value in our time. It can make entities seem both discrete and connected at the same time. If I search on Google for “paradise,” the first thing that appears will be an advertisement for the Paradise Rock Club on Commonwealth Avenue in Boston (since I live in the environs) followed by bakeries, a small town in Michigan, pictures of tropical islands, and innumerable stores and restaurants that have adopted the popular name. Occasional Wikipedia entries are scattered about alluding to
another world.

It is only in the middle of the fifth page (does anyone ever go that deeply into a search?) that I finally come across what I was really after: information about Dante’s epic poem Paradise. What’s more,  except occasionally for the first entry, all the results appear in the same format accompanied by descriptions of roughly equal length. Rock clubs,  tropical islands, and world-class masterpieces—all appear of equal weight when sorted by search engines such as Google or Bing. (Admittedly Dante’s work appears closer to the top if one searches on “paradiso.” In the world of “Content” (and let’s not forget “Big Data”), life does indeed seem to be getting, as Alice might observe, "curiouser and curiouser,"  by the day. 

“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.


 

“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I  don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think what we’re seeking is an  experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we  actually feel the rapture of being alive. That’s what it’s all finally about,  and that’s what these clues in myths help us to find within ourselves. . . .   Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.   . . . We need myths [today] that will identify the individual not with is  local group but with the planet.” Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

For many today, the Internet seems to be a powerful presence. Why does it have such a deep resonance within our imaginations? How has it become so central to our contemporary life? And what does that say about the lives we live and our values? People find the phenomenon of the Web full of possibilities. Many believe that there’s something magical in its very existence and that it offers access to knowledge and powerful modes of communication that are fundamentally different from what we have had in the past. There is also the pervading sense that the Internet is changing us, both individually and communally, in very important ways. 

One way of understanding the role of the Internet in our culture is to consider it as a metaphor and potentially part of a mythology that expresses some essence of what it means to be alive today. Many envision the Internet as an ever-expanding, boundless entity with near-infinite connections both to other people and to sources of knowledge. And this powerful pull of the Internet seems to me to come from its similarities both to our sense of our
outer world—that ever-expanding universe of which we are such a minute part—and to our inner world—the endless depth of our own psyche, imagination, and unconscious with its potential links to communal metaphors and myths. Both these worlds, the outer and the inner, are ineffable, boundless, and to a certain
extent mysterious, unknowable. 

The Internet shares these characteristics and hence seems to offer a similar potential for knowledge, insight, even adventure. It’s cyberspace, after all, a place for journeys. One clicks on an icon (our computers do have their own “iconographies,” just as mythologies do). Microsoft Windows offers users an “Explorer” program to cross the threshold into the vast and unknown space called the Internet. The potential seen in the boundless, gargantuan phenomenon of the Web leads many people to make large claims: Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired,
calls the Internet a “planetary computer,” a “global computer,” and even a “large-scale sentience” with a distributed and vast intelligence that grows “smarter” by the second as millions of users provide evermore information merely
by clicking on a specific website because, in so doing, they indicate their preferences, their interests.

Is there transcendence here, one might ask, the kind of move beyond our ordinary life toward the ultimate mystery of the universe and the source of life itself? Kevin Kelly and others seem to think this is possible, that there is the promise of ultimate knowledge, the unknowable, in the Internet: “Currently,” he writes in What Technology Wants, “we are prejudiced against machines, because all the machines we have met so far have  been uninteresting. As they gain in sentience, that won’t be true,” Kelly writes. “What technology wants is increasing sentience. This does not mean evolution will move us only toward one universal supermind. Rather in the course of time the technium tends to self-organize into as many varieties of mind as is possible. . . The universe is so huge, so vast in its available mysteries, that it will require every possible type of mind to comprehend it. The technium’s job  is to invent a million or a billion varieties of  comprehension.”

Much hinges on what Kelly means by technium, a word he coined because he found that “culture” was too “small” and does not for him convey a sense of “self-propelling momentum.” (I would point out that the word "culture" is also associated with organic growth.) Kelly reaches towards a new kind of mystical sense in defining his technium: it is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us.” And this is not just
hardware and software, but all “culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations” along with this impulse (and here he quite anthropomorphizes technology) of essentially “what technology wants,” which is to generate more technology, more inventions, more connections. For Kelly, as for many enthusiasts of the Internet, the “technium” seems to be alive. But is it? And is it truly self-organizing, or is it just some version of Larry Paige
 standing behind a curtain like the Wizard of Oz?

But the real question at the end of the day about what this technology “wants” is: does it have any place left for humanity and the spiritual potential that Joseph Campbell alludes to when he talks about the myths human beings create out of their own dreams, their own imaginations, their own psyches. Or is this new myth a myth of the machine as an all-knowing  and all-powerful deity—in short, a god? Or maybe it’s just all that smoke and mirrors, concocting something rather more illusory than elusive.