Tools determine evolution

Marx is best known for the Communist Manifesto, where he put forward the idea of history being shaped by class struggle. He was writing in the early years of the First Industrial Revolution, when technology could still be seen as a secondary effect of human evolution. Since then the mediation of the environment has become so preponderant that the direct effect of technology on social structures and individual behaviour seems obvious. And this has probably been true from the start, with the mastery of fire, tools and language. If no one had learnt to shape hard, shock-resistant stones into axes and hoes, there would have been no agriculture (flint, like glass, is hard, sharp and brittle). Later, metallurgy and phonetic writing changed everything, and so it goes on. Class opposition is an ongoing struggle, because dominion and oppression are never acceptable. But it is technological transformations that bring a new social category into the circle of power. The bourgeoisie came to share power with the landed aristocracy because they mastered trade and finance, and later industry. Merchant bankers became rich and powerful because of evolutions in ship building and accountancy, and industrialists because of fossil energy, electricity and countless machines. Gunpowder also played an important part in changing society, as did printing.

One of the earliest tools invented by humans was language. The upright position had developed vocal cords that could produce an almost limitless variety of sounds. This allowed the distinctive naming of everything, and the oversized brain could remember it all. Language can conjure up presences from the past, from elsewhere and from nowhere by imagination. It transmits ideas, beliefs and knowledge, and has moulded the human mind. Writing changes the perception of language, as sounds become signs. The emphasis is on the eye that transforms the script into an inner voice. Writing also perpetuates words, passing them on through time without the modifications inherent to oral transmissions. Writing means that Iliad, Odyssey, Genesis and Exodus are still very similar to their originals written some two thousand six hundred years ago. Writing passes a message through time, but it also congeals the words and halts their evolution. The invasion of the Western Roman Empire by Goths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons and others put a stop to writing in that part of the world, and destroyed a large part of existing manuscripts. For several centuries writing was confined to copying a selection of mostly religious texts on costly parchment. Books were rare and difficult to consult, but during the 14^th century the technologies of paper making and wood-cut printing were introduced from China via the Middle East, and then Gutenberg had the idea of movable type, which suddenly multiplied the production of books and made them far more accessible.

The Renaissance, which was a revival of Roman and Greek Antiquity, and the Reformation, which was a return to Christian fundamentals, were both made possible by the proliferation of printed words. The bible was translated into spoken idioms, as were the classic works of pre-Christian authors. Europe stepped back into its distant past and then set about transforming its future. The Maccabees and the Gracchus were more inspiring than all the Middle Age saints. The power of diffusing ideas brought by movable-type printing meant that Luther could oppose the Pope, and that Aretino could be “the Scourge of Princes”. Printing spread literacy and more people had access to more information, both official and subversive. But the printed page is more than a set of signs to be transformed into words and meaning, it becomes the form to which the world must comply. McLuhan went into this at length and convincingly in “The Gutenberg Galaxy”. Literacy modifies the mind and the way it perceives the environment, as do numeracy and all the technology that mediates the world, even the most mundane.

For a while the printing press ruled supreme and allowed nobodies such as Diderot, Rousseau or Tom Paine to be very influential. Then the 19^th century industrialised everything, including print with a process for making paper out of wood pulp and the steam driven rotary press. That gave rise to the press barons who shaped public opinion and could make or break a government. By the 1900s printed words were omnipresent, in books, periodicals, newspapers, pamphlets, leaflets and billboards. Then, in the 1920s, sound came back with a bang, in loudspeakers and radio. The psychological shock must have been tremendous. And it meant that the voice in the microphone could be heard by thousands and millions. However, controlling what was said was much easier than controlling what was printed, because radio waves are limited and emissions are by nature centralised. Radio was a powerful propaganda machine and the waveband belonged to governments that decided who could transmit, when they did not monopolise the wavebands themselves.

The 1930s were the aftermath of the 1929 financial crash. But they were also the dawn of electronics, plastics and radioactivity, of accelerating carbon dioxide emissions and the use of insecticides and herbicides, and the prelude to total war, with destructions and deaths on an unprecedented scale. And it was technology that made it all possible. Class struggle was completely overwhelmed by ideologies that used the mesmerising effects of sound on minds structured by print, ideologies intoxicated by the power of machines that could imagine shaping humans to their particular requirements. The notions of ethnic/racial purity and redemption by hard labour were pushed to the extreme, and murderous violence reached a summit in Kolyma, at Treblinka and over Hiroshima. After 1945 the killing abated somewhat to the level of National Liberation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin America, while the US and the USSR teased each other over planetary control and ideological dominion. The 1960s saw a revival of popular movements, such as civil rights, gender equality or nuclear disarmament, that were not founded on class divisions and whose participants were largely middle-class. 1968 was marked by the Tet Offensive, the Prague spring, a massacre in Mexico, political assassinations in the US, rioting and mass student protests. It was followed by the dismal 70s, and its industrial wastelands that offered no future. Then came “government is the problem” Ronnie and “there is no alternative” Maggie. Social militancy had been diverted to minority and gender rights, and class struggle would be reduced to market forces and trickle-down, with worker’s unions in disarray and the political spectrum being displaced to the right. The 1990s witnessed the breakup of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, a military build-up in the Middle East (Desert Storm), the Clinton years of sex, drugs and deregulation, and China’s opening to foreign investments and technology. The US was the start-up nation of get rich quick, as digital went global almost overnight. This high level of inebriety led to a hangover in the new millennium, with the dotcom crash, 9/11, perpetual war and the 2008 banking breakdown.

The middle-class has been under siege since the 1960s, when young radical drop-outs poured scorn on the drab lives of their parents, their moral consensus and their work ethics of a previous age. The middle-class was no longer an aspiration, just a spring-board to personal success. And as it slowly crumbled away, so did the class structures and political balance founded on it. Wealth became the ultimate goal and the unique scale of values. Welfare and social solidarity were swept aside as hindrances. And governments were up for biding by corporate and banking hierarchies, with generous returns in contracts, tax cuts and deregulation. By then the dominant idea was “More”, which brings to mind Schroder’s 1969 film about heroin addiction. However, back in the 1970s, and even earlier in the case of Rachel Carson, some researchers were noting measurable modifications in the atmosphere, the oceans and in animal populations. They warned that if this continued the planet would become uninhabitable for most existing species. Four decades later, human dejections cover the earth and fill the seas and the sky. “More” it has been, with a vengeance and without hesitation, but the catch was that most of it went to those who already had everything, to the inbred addicts who load up at conception.

For most of human history horses and camels offered the fastest form of transportation. But over the past two centuries there has been such acceleration that today’s virtual transportation is almost instantaneous. It began with steam engines and railways. That was followed by internal combustion engines, cars and planes. In the 1870s Jules Verne imagined traveling round the planet in eighty days. It could probably be done now in two or three. Material acceleration was progressive and comprehensible. What has been harder to grasp is the immediacy of electronics, of being here and here at both ends of the line. The analogic telephone was an introduction, but digital technology allows two people to look each other in the eye, to be visibly and audibly present in two or many places at once. This is not some TV talking-head invading peoples’ sitting rooms. It is a two-way egalitarian transmission and it is transforming society in unforeseen and unpredictable ways.

Previous media of information/propaganda (print, movies, radio, TV) were one way transmissions from centre to periphery. They imitated and confirmed the power structures of politics, commerce, finance and industry. Audiences were passive, and the only measure of approval was their numbers. The World Wide Web has opened the way to a torrent of feedback and countless contradictory sources. It has brought back the public meeting, with heckling and insults. Being told what to think by pontifying “experts” is no longer acceptable, and everyone is able to assemble their own tailor-made beliefs. Digital technology has revived the market place, the Roman forum and the Greek agora, where public policies and private transactions were discussed and decided. The concentrated control of print and Hertzian transmissions has been diluted in the internet ocean. Though Big Brother is still watching, he is no longer dictating what is read, heard or seen. Not quite yet, even if Google, Facebook et al, and governments everywhere, are doing their best to filter, censure and obliterate. Their difficulty in regaining control of content is that, on the web, every receptor is also an emitter.

Technology shapes personal habits and social interactions. And the pace of technological change determines the rate of communal and private transformations. As that pace speeds up, as it has over the past two centuries, it becomes more difficult to predict the future. No one can foresee the consequences and permutations of new machines. The incremental change of the past has become a rush into the unknown, utopian literature has turned dystopian, and the notion that minute causes can have massive effects has blurred all perceptions of tomorrow. Humanity has always advanced in the dark, knowing neither where it was going nor why it was going there. But the movement was slow, as imperceptible as continental drift, with occasional violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. At today’s speed, planning the future is an illusion, and there is a strong temptation to bolster the past, which is even more elusory. Parts of the world experienced similar accelerations before, with printing, fossil fuels and analogic electronics, but this time the speed up is greater than ever and global, and it has gone beyond the planet’s capacity to absorb the waste.

Technology developed from the study of nature, of animals, plants and minerals. However, understanding the intricate mechanisms and interactions of chemistry, biology, physics and astronomy, is a recent achievement that is still incomplete. In the past, understanding had been empirical and the unseen was attributed to supernatural forces and beings, whose actions could be benign or evil. Greek and Roman Antiquity was developing a rational interpretation of natural phenomena when Christian myths and dogma put a stop to the process for over a thousand years, until the Renaissance rediscovered ancient knowledge, and polishers of precious stones started polishing glass to make lenses. Telescopes and microscopes increased the eye’s capacity to see distant and small objects, and this completely modified humanity’s perception of its surroundings. At about the same time, universal laws began to be formulated. Reform and religious wars were a setback, but then Enlightenment gave a boost to questioning, research, experimentation and revolution. Absolute monarchy was anointed by an absolute God, their destinies were linked. But the laws that governed the cosmos could not be changed, even by their creator. And if the gods could not act arbitrarily, neither could kings. Technology has constantly brought about the unexpected, and this is more the case today than ever before. Its effects can be catastrophic and extremely deadly, or they can be beneficial, only time can tell. At present the detrimental effects of the Industrial Age are increasingly apparent (nuclear waste, plastics, insecticides, herbicides, CO2, NOx etc.), but the effects of the digital revolution cannot yet be measured. Will they bring solutions, or just accentuate the world’s dire situation?