The Nature of Technology

My complication had a little complication.  Loyal readers recall that we are following the thread left by Deleuze's reading of Leibniz and attempting to deepen that question of what it means to be an individual.  Roughly speaking the question is why there appear to be distinct individuals if the world is ultimately all the same stuff.  Or, conversely, how there can be a world at all, if all that really exists are distinct individuals.  In short, individuals and the world seem as simultaneously necessary and incompatibly dual as form and emptiness.  

Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects was our first stop on this journey largely because it was already on the shelf.  While the book definitely dealt with the question of individuality, I found the perspective Simondon opened up on technology so timely and intriguing that I now find myself on a tangent to my tangent.  Simondon is of course not the only one who considers technology as a frozen or objectified form of human goal seeking behavior.  Nor is his the only framework for examining it, despite how useful I think it is.  In fact, it turns out that I have quite a few books about technology that I've been meaning to read.  So permit me a digression.  And if it seems too far afield at first, consider the next few posts in light of Simondon's most fundamental idea -- goal seeking behavior is only ever part of what it means to be an individual, and examining our technology lets us examine this part of ourselves.  

The first technology related book I grabbed off the shelf was W. Brian Arthur's The Nature of Technology.  I've been meaning to read this for 10 years, probably as a result of Kevin Kelley's What Technology Wants.  Arthur, it turns out, is one of those rare contemporary economists who have something useful to say.  In this book he tries to channel the spirit of Schumpeter and develop a theory of technology that would help us adequately understand its relationship to the modern economy.  While it's pretty sketchy and high level as a theory, at least it's very clearly stated.  And surprisingly it has quite a lot of overlap with Simondon.  So in what follows I'd like to summarize's Arthur's theory as a means of further exploring the ideas we've already been dealing with.

The Nature of Technology breaks down into three sections that deal with three distinct though related questions: what is technology in general? how do new individual technologies arise? and how does technology as a whole evolve?  While, interestingly, Arthur doesn't actually begin with this point, he claims that the essence of technology is the harnessing of some natural phenomenon for a purpose.  In other words, technologies are actualized or operationalized forms of goal seeking behavior.  They are real teleological systems.  This comes surprisingly close to Simondon's idea that a machine is a (partially) concretized human thought of a mechanism that accomplishes a goal.  Perhaps because it sounds either too vague and philosophical or simply too commonplace, Arthur chooses not to lead with this observation.  He also tends to place the focus more on the phenomenon side of things.  That is, he talks about how technologies capture physical phenomena like the interference of waves, or biological phenomena like the self-replication of DNA, or even human behavioral phenomena like greed (if we consider something like 'the market' as a technology).  He's clear though, that these phenomena have to be captured in order or us to speak of a technology.  While philosophical, this point is fundamental.  It's really this baked in teleology that separates technology from other natural phenomenon; without a goal, there is no technical object, but simply a functioning natural system.  Arthur, however, does not specify that this goal needs to be a human goal.  As we'll see, his theory is that technology, as it evolves, can create its own needs that serve as new goals for further technologies.  While we might at first be tempted to contrast this with Simondon's emphasis on the way technology requires life, let's hold off on that till we unfold his full theory. 

To its essential definition as a teleological organization of phenomena, Arthur adds an empirical observation about how technology often seems to be organized hierarchically.  Technologies exhibit a fractal structure, where a main technology contains elements that are themselves smaller technologies, that is, systems which harness a phenomenon to a purpose, in this case the overall purpose of the main technology.  Especially these days, a given technology can be a complicated assembly of sub and sub-sub technologies whose functions are integrated to serve the purpose of the highest level technology.  Imagine a jet aircraft with its incredible complexity and redundancy of power, navigational, and safety systems, all trying to keep you in the air.  While Arthur emphasizes the hierarchical aspect of this organization, I think this is more properly seen as a particular (though very common) type of a more general notion of combination.  Technologies can be combined to produce other technologies.  Technology is thus recursive and modular.  Together, teleology and combination define the technical world.  Goals can be made into objects that capture and organize natural phenomena, and then these objectified goals can be combined to accomplish new goals.  This obviously correlates pretty well with Simondon's idea that the technical individual integrates technical elements into a teleological mechanism.  Here again, we might be tempted to contrast Simondon's careful causal analysis that lets him decide which technical groupings count as elements, and which have the sort of reciprocal causality that turn them into true individuals, with Arthur's rather casual use of the notion of sub-assembly.   But, again, let's put this question off till we finish with the whole theory. 

Finally, Arthur describes one more feature of the structure of technology as a whole.  Technologies can be broken down into smaller modules that are integrated to produce an overall functioning.  But technologies also tend to cluster into "domains" of related functionalities at the level above the integrated technical individuals.  Arthur has in mind things like the digital domain, or the domain of electrical (as opposed to say, steam) power, with all its related technologies like amplifiers, alternators, rectifiers, load limiters, etc ...  While he describes these domains as technical "languages", I'm not sure this analogy offers anything beyond the observation that there are rules of thumb or habits for effectively combining individual technologies to create new ones.  A domain provides a set of ready-made possibilities for combination, which allows new combinations to be produced relatively easily.  These elements and their 'grammar' however, do not form a tightly integrated functional unit like an individual technology and its modular sub-components, but constitute a fuzzy cloud of more or less related technologies.  At this point, it's perhaps unsurprisingly that Arthur's domains correspond well to Simondon's technical ensembles. These are collections of technical individuals held as distinct rather than integrated into a single unit.  The ensemble as a whole is not itself a technology because it is not a teleological mechanism, not a concrete solution to a specific problem.   Instead, the domain functions as a background of possible relations between technologies, which allows it to be the ground of new technologies -- in Simondon's scheme it's the technical ensemble that creates new technical elements.  What it creates are not solutions to particular problems, but objects that contain specific tendencies that provide for possible solutions to all kinds of problems.  

We can already anticipate how Arthur's definition of technology will answer his question about how new technologies are produced -- combination and recombination.  In a sense, we might say that this modularity follows from the definition of technology as a teleological mechanism.  Defined goals, after all, can always be be broken down into sub-goals like steps or stages, so perhaps its no surprise that you can break a whole down into a combination of technical parts.  More surprising is the fact that you can combine existing parts to create a completely new whole.  It's not obvious that accomplishing two separate goals should serve do any single thing that someone wants.  One of the strong points of Arthur's theory is that it deals with both of these cases, which we might respectively think of as top-down and bottom-up creation.  Both of these call a new technology into existence by linking a problem to a concrete solution.

New technologies frequently come into being in the prosaic manner that he calls "standard engineering".  Some off the shelf components are combined according to a known pattern in order to solve a specific problem.  My cat fountain needs a water pump.  This requires an electric motor, which in turn requires a power system.  These are readily available, well understood components that simply need to be combined with some economic and design constraints to lead to the production of the concrete new technical object that now sits in my bathroom.  Similarly, once an object like this has been constructed, new versions of it can be made by changing out the components for improved ones, or adding safety systems or lights or what have you; these accrue to the basic functionality without substantially altering it.  Arthur calls this process of descent with variation "structural deepening".  Together, these two plug and play approaches to 'innovation' account for most of our production of concrete technical objects.  Certainly these forces are more than adequate to account for the iPhone ... 13.

However, once upon a time, there was a first iPhone, and before that the many qualitatively new technologies that got their start somewhere.  These truly novel types of technologies are still combinations of existing elements, for the simple reason that you can't make a real something out of nothing.  But neither of the two forces we have described so far is capable of producing a completely novel solution to a problem.  This is because both standard engineering and structural deepening operate in a top-down manner.  They both begin with an already known solution to a problem, an already understood principle that effectively harnesses certain natural phenomenon and provides the structure of the technology at the outset.  However, because technology is modular and combinatorial, it's possible to hit on completely novel combinations that carry out a hitherto impossible task or achieve an existing goal using a completely new overall principle.  This bottom-up approach is what we mean by true "invention".  Arthur persuasively argues that this is not some spark of genius that comes from nowhere but simply a new combination of technical elements, usually due either to inventive thinking by analogy, or to using a completely different set of building blocks to construct a new solution to an old problem (which Arthur calls "redomainings").  This latter way of creating new technologies holds particular fascination for Arthur, and for good reason.  He sees that when an old problem is posed in the language of a new domain -- eg. power production shifts from wind and water to fossil fuel combustion, or calculation shifts from 'calculators' to computers -- veritable revolutions can follow.  In Simondon's language, we would say that the new ensemble is capable of producing elements with completely different possibilities for connection baked into them, which leads to the construction of qualitatively novel technical individuals.  

The closest biological analogy for these bottom-up types of innovation would be the horizontal gene transfer in bacteria.  Together with some mechanisms for moving genes around, the bacterial gene pool as a whole forms a sort of technical ensemble from which individual bacteria can draw on newly produced elements.  Of course, this examples falls short of what Arthur has in mind, since there is a single bacterial gene pool where he sees many distinct domains whose elements are easy to recombine, and any of which might serve as the basis for a novel solution to an existing problem.  Still, the biological analogy brings us to the final question Arthur tries to tackle, which is really the one that motivates the whole book -- how does technology as a whole evolve?  The answer, at this point fairly obvious, is combinatorial evolution.  This form of evolution, while not unheard of in biology, is clearly far from the Darwinian norm.  And it leads to a pretty startling conclusion.  If we define life by the ability to produce more of itself, then we are forced to acknowledge that technology as a whole is alive.  This is less vague and vitalist than it sounds.  Just like Simondon's, Arthur's scheme is not driven by the individual technology's ability to produce identical copies of itself.  And yet technology is still in a sense self-producing, or at least self-extending -- new technologies are produced as combinations of existing ones, and these combinations can go on to become elements in further combinations, ad infinitum.  Arthur even invokes Maturana and Varela's concept of autopoesis (though I would agree with Haraway's criticism of the use of this term here).  In short, technology creates more, and different, technology out of itself -- it is alive.  

Naturally, however, these new technologies are not created in a vacuum, but respond to the goals of their 'users'.  Remember, technology is essentially an objective goal directed system.  So there's immediately some question of what we mean by 'self' producing, if the goal has to come from outside the technology.  Arthur, however, offers a very interesting idea in this context.  He argues that technology not only produces a supply of goal directed systems, but also gradually bootstraps a demand for them into existence.  The first technologies were produced when humans captured simple phenomena like combustion (fire), elasticity (bows), or mineral cleavage (lithic reduction, aka flint knapping) and employed these to human ends.  Gradually though, the combined use of the bow, arrow, and fire themselves call into being new possible goals such as the hammer that improves the arrowhead and the smoking that preserves the meat.  These do not cease to respond to human goals, at least in the final analysis, but as technology develops through combinatorial evolution, it posits many subsidiary goals that demand technical solutions, as well as opens up many final goals that we didn't even know we had at first.  Arthur's culminating idea is that the economy is what mediates this supply of and demand for technical solutions.  It's at this point that he works his way back around to renewing Schumpeter's thoughts about creative destruction.  The structure of the economy reflects not only the technology available for our means of production, but the human and technical needs created by the operation of this very technology.  Thus when a revolutionary new technology comes into being, it has the capacity to shift the entire landscape of both production and consumption.  We stop wanting a faster horse and start wanting a horseless carriage.  The result of his theory is a much more realistic view of the economy as a complex system that evolves through a mechanism more like punctuated equilibria than the classical couldn't-be-a-real-dollar equilibrium fantasy.  

Now that we've covered the entirety of The Nature of Technology we're finally in a position to come back to the loose threads I mentioned earlier and consider Simondon and Arthur in light of one another.  While there's a lot of overlap, we can see that there's also some confusion around the question of what it means to be alive and how this relates to teleology as the defining feature of technology.  

For Simondon, teleology is associated with homeostasis (the primary goal is always to exist), which is only one aspect of life.  Life, by his definition, requires a creative exploration and production of aims that is impossible for a technology by itself; at bottom the technical object always embodies a fixed purpose given to it by life.  This is why his model of the technical individual begins with the artisan and progresses through machines that only reconverge with the natural world at the end of a long process of concretization.  These are systems whose teleology arises from, on the one hand, an reciprocally causal internal interaction of parts, and on the other hand, an interaction with the environment where the individual couldn't exist as such without the corresponding environmental structure being what it is, and vice versa.  As always, the image is of the teeppee or vortex that defines the 'self' which lies behind the teleology of homeostasis.  So what's really alive here is not the homeostatic or self-regulating individual, but the organic ground that contains the possibility of such an individual.  Once they come into existence, the technical individual is a machine like any other -- it simply executes its aim, in this case to stay in existence.  With this main goal in mind, a host of subsidiary goals falls into place.  And this newly created self-reinforcing feedback loop also becomes a unit in interaction with similar units and with the environment as a whole.  In the end, Simondon's idea of life boils down to this individual's openness to its milieu, to the possibility of having their teleology altered or re-constructed in some way.  The 'self' involved in individual homeostasis is actually a sort of dead husk.  We might say that technology is a means to a purpose, but the purpose is simply living -- the process of creation of new purposes.

Initially, Arthur's scheme may seem at odds with this.  He doesn't think technology needs life to give it goals since he considers it an autopoetic system all on its own.  But much of this difference becomes superficial when we realize that for Arthur it's only technology as a whole that begins to resemble the organic.  And even when he speaks of the self-producing aspect of technology, he is immediately forced to bring in its continual mediation by the human economy.  So what's alive here is not that different from Simondon's creative ground.  In both cases there's a life that flows through individual technologies, that can't be reduced to the execution of single purpose but consists in the generation of purposes.  We can follow Simondon and call this creativity life, or we can keep Arthur's terms and attribute it to technology as a whole -- in either case, we're talking about a life of technology.  All of the interesting stuff is happening at the intersection of life and technologies.  Technology evolves because the technical individual is always immersed in both a technical ensemble and a living milieu.

The one remaining point of difference lies in the fact that Arthur's analysis contains nothing that corresponds to the reciprocal causal closure that defines the individual for Simondon (and thus allows him to rigorously distinguish it from the element and the ensemble).  We are left with the impression that Arthur's sees any combination of technologies as a new technical individual.  While this may be true in principle, when he begins to discuss his toy model (pg. 181) of technology's combinatorial evolution it becomes clear that not all combination are actually viable in all environments.  Arthur's model actually selects for certain technologies that 'come alive' as a function the other technologies in the environment.  In this case, the top level of interesting goals are defined in advance and fixed at the outset of the model, so the only open question is what subgoals are used to sustain these once they appear.  In real life, these top level goals would themselves need to appear as the outcome of the way a complete techno-economic system functions.  Only some new combinations of technologies will result in an achievable goal that interests anyone.  And these might be extremely difficult to predict in advance.  As we observed earlier, sub-assemblies are easy to see once you know the main assembly, but a new main assembly is hard to construct from given sub-assemblies.  So here as well, the differences between Arthur and Simondon may not be as great as they first appear.