in the cut-and-thrust of late 18th-century northern Europe, and has since spread throughout the world from there, bringing a mix of great benefits and serious challenges that we take to be an inevitable concomitant of progress. It’s further assumed that the vehicle for this revolution was the capitalist company.
Taking Brian Arthur’s definition of technology as ‘a phenomenon captured and put to use’, it’s pretty clear that technology is a lot bigger than that, and a lot older than that. It’s now becoming apparent that the people of so-called ‘primitive societies’ were and are great and pioneering technologists – and none of today’s technologies would be conceivable without what they achieved (so the ‘giants’ whose assistance the great Isaac Newton modestly acknowledged were themselves ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’: the Human Pyramid itself).
Richard Rudgley, an anthropologist, has described the scale of these discoveries in a book published in 1998, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age.11 Long before the first cities appeared, leaving their large and durable remains for the first archeologists to ponder over, humans in all parts of the world were developing highly efficient tools and techniques for making tools, had elaborate cuisines, were great explorers and expert navigators, artists and students of the natural world, including the sky. They even practiced surgery. We know this because evidence has been found in prehistoric remains from all over the world, of the challenging form of cranial surgery known as trepanning (to relieve pressure on the brain caused by blood clots); one of the few forms of surgery that leaves unambiguous skeletal evidence. It is reasonable to assume from this that they also knew many other kinds of surgery.
Martin Jones, a pioneer of the new techniques of molecular archeology, makes the point that humans are not even viable without at least minimal technology, such as fire. In his book Feast: Why Humans Share Food, Jones says that ‘human evolution may have something to do with reducing the costs of digestion’.12 Humans have relatively small teeth and jaws, and our guts are not long enough to cope well with a diet composed entirely of uncooked food. Cooking also neutralizes the toxins in many otherwise inedible plants, increasing the range of foods humans can use. All of this requires highly co-operative sociality – which is in turn facilitated by the large, anthropoid brain that became possible through reduced ‘metabolic expenditure’ on jaws and guts: a self-reinforcing feedback cycle that, at a certain point, produced the intensely sociable, essentially technological, highly successful human species. Humans, their technology and their distinctive social order all seem to appear simultaneously in the archeological record 100,000 or more years ago.
TECHNOLOGY EMERGES FROM EGALITARIAN KNOWLEDGE ECONOMIES
Throughout nearly all of their first 100,000 or so years, the dominant characteristic of human communities has been egalitarianism, and we can work out a lot about how these egalitarian societies functioned not only from the physical evidence they have left, but also from modern people who live radically egalitarian lives: today’s hunter-gatherer and foraging peoples. Many of these communities have brought the art of egalitarian living to a level of impressive perfection, and have independently developed many of the same social mechanisms for maintaining equality – particularly significant because they are so widely separated from each other, on the furthest and least-accessible margins of all the inhabited continents in the world. One of these characteristics, which almost everyone who meets them comments upon, is an unshakeable commitment to sharing knowledge. To borrow a useful phrase, they are the ultimate ‘knowledge economies’.
But there is much more to this than ‘sitting around all day talking’, which is what so many Europeans see when they come across indigenous communities. There is an extraordinary commitment to accuracy and truth. Hugh Brody – an anthropologist who has worked on land-rights campaigns with hunter-gatherer communities, and made documentaries with them – has reflected on this at some length in his book The Other Side of Eden.13 George Dyson, whose work on computer history will be mentioned later, has also written about the extraordinary technological traditions this kind of knowledge economy can support, in his book about the Aleuts and their kayaks, Baidarka.14 Aleut kayaks are made in some of the most resource-poor places on earth, and are technological miracles that defy long-accepted wisdom by travelling at speeds once considered theoretically impossible for a human-powered craft.
The hunter-gatherer knowledge economy also supports a healthier kind of person. Physically, hunter-gatherers have always been healthier and often taller than their civilized counterparts (see Chapter 3). Explorers and anthropologists constantly remark on their happiness and ‘robust mental health’. Brody attributes this to a complete absence of anxiety about being believed, or listened to, or being completely honest, or whether the other person is telling the truth. This has a utilitarian dimension – such societies simply cannot afford deceit and lives depend on absolutely accurate information – but it runs deep: this is how we evolved. Evolution made us radically honest people, and going against this hurts.
Wherever it is found, the egalitarian ethos is maintained through what another anthropologist, Christopher Boehm, identified as ‘counter-dominance’ strategies.15 We can readily recognize these at work everywhere in modern communities in the extensive repertoire of strategies for ‘taking someone down a peg or two’, ranging from friendly ribbing, to gossip, to ostracism and, in the extreme, to homicide. There is also the array of self-effacement strategies used by those who do not want to seem domineering: ‘honestly, it was nothing’; ‘I’m completely hopeless with computers’, etc. Even within the most hierarchical and unequal modern societies, personal life is lived as much as possible within egalitarian or would-be egalitarian social bubbles (families, peer groups, work-groups, neighbors and, in wartime and warlike situations, nations).
In fact, we seem to need these even more as societies become harsher and more stratified, and it is now gradually becoming recognized that the evils that arise from inequality are largely the effects of group inequality – ‘us’ against ‘them’.16 We gravitate towards groups where we can have this experience of solidarity and, what is more, we do it without being aware that we are doing so. This is why evil is so banal; why ordinary people who see themselves as decent folk (and are, in most situations) are capable of genocide.
Solidarity is a fundamental phenomenon of human nature – and dominant forces have learned down the centuries to exploit it. If technology is ‘a phenomenon captured and put to use’ then all our formal and informal social systems are some kind of technology, and ‘social engineering’ is what they do. We need social systems that maximize our chances of ‘not doing evil’, to borrow Google’s motto – which is precisely what Google’s practice of segregating its creative elite in pretend-Utopias, separate from the society around them, can’t possibly do.17
Theologian-turned-neuroscientist Heidi Ravven has documented the fairly new but already impressively large body of research into this phenomenon, and the vast and terrible historical evidence of its workings and effects, in her book The Self Beyond Itself. She concludes:
On the societal scale, our freedom lies in developing institutions and cultural beliefs and practices and families that shape our brains toward the greatest good rather than toward narrow interests, and toward health rather than addictive habits and other limitations, starting early in life.18
THE MYTH OF CREATIVE COMPETITION
In the Northern world, there has been a dominant idea that human nature is fundamentally competitive and individualistic. Innovation is said to be driven by the lure of wealth; hence, if we want nice things like iPhones, we need an unequal society, where there is a chance to get ahead. But when we actually see innovation in action, that is not how it works.
Some
