Staff Book and Media Recommendations

What Technology Wants

Kevin Kelly

Technology has goals in the sense that a star has goals: a star "wants" to consume fuel, and technology "wants" to develop toward complexity. Technium (the author's personification of technology) is a selfish, grasping blob that seeks energy, input, development; it's the same as any evolutionary force. It's predatory, too: it eats other blobs of technologies along the way to become mashups of whole new inevitabilities. Technology is an inescapable force. Kelly makes technology seem like it is preordained on a teleological trajectory. This sounds cultish to me - messiah in the machine - but I'll go along with the premise to see where it leads.

So do we serve Technium, or does it serve us? Both. Kelly is a bit too chirpy about the advantages of disruptive technologies without considering (very much) the quality-of-life issues that arise with them. He admires the Amish, for instance, for knowing when to say "no," but then he says that in the larger sense, none of us can say "no" because progress is inevitable. Prepare for the singularity with a smile on your face! Technium loves you! That's just creepy.

Kelly says that humans are the reproductive organs of Technium - we help it procreate and if we didn't cooperate (if we pulled the plug out of the wall socket), it would eventually die out. But we do cooperate because, Kelly the hard determinist says, it's inevitable. Double creepy.

Summing up: It's a long book with too many digressions, but even the digressions are interesting, for example, my favorite illustration is "A Thousand Years of Helmet Evolution." Kelly needs more documentation to back up his assertions, but this book has a lot of thinkiness that you will feel compelled to post on your social media. You will post.

Related books:
You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto - your online identity is NOT you

Better off : flipping the switch on technology - modern family lives in a non-electronic world for a year

Google: The End of the World As We Know It - how the end of the world is not necessarily a bad thing

Reviewed April 2011