Unnatural Selection: Technological Evolution
The ordinary person senses the greatness of the odds against him even without thought or analysis, and he adapts his attitudes unconsciously. A huge passivity has settled on industrial society. For people carried about in mechanical vehicles, earning their living by waiting on machines, listening much of the waking day to canned music, watching packaged movie entertainment and capsulated news, for such people it would require an exceptional degree of awareness and an especial heroism of effort to be anything but supine consumers of processed goods. -- Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
The 21st century is a revolutionary era for humanity and technology, but not in the way most think. We watch, and most are simply watching, technology increasingly developed in reaction to environments created by previous technology. Going back millions of years in the history of hominids, from the capture of fire and flaking of stone tools, technological innovation was about altering the environment of the planet which birthed us. Recently, by historical measures in the last second, after two centuries of industrial development, humanity develops more and more technology in response to environments created by older technology.
The FT has a good piece on using genetic engineering in response to climate and ecological changes effected by industrial technologies. A Dutch farmer succinctly sums up, “Climate change is coming faster than we are developing new crops. We need new techniques. There is a big danger to food production in Europe.”
The FT explains further,
“Widespread drought has cut harvests across Europe, with Spain losing half its olive crop. The war in Ukraine has reduced exports from a country dubbed the bread basket of Europe. The drought and conflict, combined with high energy costs, have driven up food prices and caused shortages in the developing world.”
Initiated ten-thousand years ago, the Agrarian Revolution was humanity’s greatest technological innovation, altering much of the planet's environment, and in the process creating new societal organization – tilled lands instituted cities. With the introduction of industrial technologies and techniques, agriculture was radically transformed.
The technologies and techniques of industrial agriculture are shaped and powered by fossil fuels. They can be divided into three main categories: 1) mechanization of sowing and reaping; 2) mass application of petrochemical herbicides and pesticides; 3) manufactured fertilizers, particularly from ammonia — an energy intensive process combining atmospheric nitrogen and hydrogen from natural gas. These processes transformed farming, radically altering the greater ecological systems, much of them detrimentally. Most of these impacts are just beginning to be accounted.
The FT's Dutch potato farmer's crop is dependent on both irrigation — supply limited due to recent drought — and the rising price of fossil fuels — supply impacted by an egregiously stupid and needless war. The farmer's “outlays were up 25 per cent, he says, because of the high price of gas. Fuel for tractors, fertilisers and pesticides all got more expensive.”
The article's main thrust is the agricultural industry, dominated by a handful of massive corporations, wants to meet problems manufactured by industrial technology with new biological technologies. Specifically, the article examines the technology of gene editing, “A form of genetic engineering where genes can be deleted or added from the same or similar species. It is distinct from genetic modification, which introduces DNA from foreign species.”
The FT continues,
“There has been greater progress in gene editing to improve yields. Inari, a US agritech company set up in 2016, has been working on gene editing to increase yields on wheat, corn and soyabeans as well as reducing the necessary water and nitrogen fertiliser.”
So, new technology derived from genetic engineering seeks to meet problems caused by technologies introduced with industrialization. Completely unrecognized is this is a major difference from the past where technologies were introduced to alter the greater environment from which Homo sapiens evolved. Today, we create new technologies in reaction to the environments created by older technologies.
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In Understanding Media, the great historian of technology Marshall McLuhan stated, “Environments are not passive wrappings but active processes.” This is not an industrial understanding of technology but a biological one, a Darwinian understanding. It is the recognition no technology stands alone. All technology impacts and becomes part of their greater environments – social, political, ecological, and now technological. The introduction of new technologies influences these greater environments, creating new environments that in various ways reciprocally impact the technologies themselves.
The process is perpetual. Call it unnatural selection, technological change in one place instigates change in another. The idea of perpetual change is not new to human understanding. It’s an ancient one, take Heraclitus and his river for example. Yet it was lost for thousands of years then reintroduced by Darwin, but still having little impact on how we develop technology or on greater societal thinking.
For most recorded civilization, particularly concerning politics, the idea of permanence was fostered, a belief in eternal kings, laws engraved in stones, and empires upon which the sun never set. The idea of life as a constantly changing complex interrelationship, where any particular organism is only truly defined in regards to its greater environment, remains absent from both our politics and any ethos of technological development.
The FT article unknowingly or does not acknowledge the greatest of problems it documents; the complete inability of our established political structures and processes to beneficially address the questions of technological development. The FT reports massive powerful corporations advocating technologies, powerless NGOs offering limited alternatives, all to be decided by national and supranational government institutions largely controlled by the corporations.
Today, the unaccounted impact of two-centuries of industrialization demands increasing attention. In the last half-century, new knowledge fosters our ability to manipulate the very foundations of life. Unnatural selection instantaneously meets the immutable forces of Natural Selection.
In an early 1970s interview, McLuhan stated,
“When Sputnik went around the planet, nature disappeared. Nature was hijacked right off this planet. Nature was enclosed in a man made environment and art took the place of nature.”
This always struck me as a most frightening perspective, one I didn't particularly care to adopt. It was extremely limited, though it can’t be denied it was acutely astute. Such a perspective demanded a much better breed of artist than the technologists of the last couple generations. Along with a significantly more sophisticated, not just technologically clever civilization with a much greater respect for the nature it seeks to replace.