What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Guinea, tribesmen were making stone axes for their own use until the 1960s. They still make stone axes the same way for tourists now. And stone-ax aficionados study them. There is an unbroken chain of knowledge that has kept this Stone Age technology alive. Today, in the United States alone, there are 5,000 amateurs who knap fresh arrowhead points by hand. They meet on weekends, exchange tips in flint-knapping clubs, and sell their points to souvenir brokers. John Whittaker, a professional archaeologist and flint knapper himself, has studied these amateurs and estimates that they produce over one million brand-new spear and arrow points per year. These new points are indistinguishable, even to experts like Whittaker, from authentic ancient ones.
    Few technologies have disappeared forever from the face of the Earth. The recipe for Greek warfare was lost for millennia, but there is a good chance research has recovered it. The practical know-how for the Inca system of accounting using knots on a string, called quipu , is forgotten. We have some antique samples, but no knowledge of how they were actually used. This might be the single exception. Not too long ago, science fiction authors Bruce Sterling and Richard Kadrey compiled a list of “dead media” to highlight the ephemeral nature of popular gadgetry. Recently vanished gizmos such as the Commodore 64 computer and the Atari computer were added to a long list of older species such as lantern slide projectors and the telharmonium. In reality, though, most of the items on this list aren’t dead, just rare. Some of the oldest media technologies are maintained by basement tinkerers and crazy amateur enthusiasts. And many of the more recent technologies are still in production but under different brand names and configurations. For instance, a lot of the technology first introduced in early computers is now found inside your watch or toys.
    With very few exceptions, technologies don’t die. In this way they differ from biological species, which in the long term inevitably go extinct. Technologies are idea based, and culture is their memory. They can be resurrected if forgotten, and can be recorded (by increasingly better means) so that they won’t be overlooked. Technologies are forever. They are the enduring edge of the seventh kingdom of life.

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    The Rise of Exotropy
    The origin of the technium can be retold in concentric creation stories. Each retelling illuminates a deeper set of influences. In the first account (chapter two), technology begins with the Sapien mind but soon transcends it. The second telling (chapter three) reveals an additional force besides the human mind at work on the technium: the extrapolation and deepening of organic life as a whole. Now in this third version, the circle is enlarged further, beyond mind and life, to include the cosmos.
    The root of the technium can be traced back to the life of an atom. An atom’s brief journey through an everyday technological artifact, such as a flashlight battery, is a flash of existence unlike anything else in its long life.
    Most hydrogen atoms were born at the beginning of time. They are as old as time itself. They were created in the fires of the big bang and dispersed into the universe as a uniform warm mist. Thereafter, each atom has been on a lonely journey. When a hydrogen atom drifts in the unconsciousness of deep space, hundreds of kilometers from another atom, it is hardly much more active than the vacuum surrounding it. Time is meaningless without change, and in the vast reaches of space that fill 99.99 percent of the universe, there is little change.
    After billions of years, a hydrogen atom might be swept up by the currents of gravity radiating from a congealing galaxy. With the dimmest hint of time and change it slowly drifts in a steady direction toward other stuff. Another billion years later it bumps into the first bit of matter it has ever encountered. After millions of years