The Technium and How Kevin Kelly Changed His Mind

Author: Jeannette Cooperman (The Common Reader, Washington University in St. Louis) URL: https://commonreader.wustl.edu/the-technium-and-how-kevin-kelly-changed-his-mind/ One-line: A sympathetic skeptic reads Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants and finds the argument that technology is an outgrowth of life rather than an alien imposition genuinely unsettling — because if it is true, blaming human greed for the technological imperative is a comfortable evasion.

The argument

This is an essay about being persuaded against your instincts, which is why it is more useful than a straight review. Cooperman is upfront about her prior: she has “always drawn heavy lines between cells and bytes, blood and electricity,” and technology feels to her like something other, inhuman, distracting from what should matter. She is equally upfront about Kelly’s limits — “pushed too far, his musings hollow out” — while crediting him with a genius for the sweeping statement that lets her see things whole.

The central concept is the technium: Kelly’s coinage for the whole of human invention taken as one interacting system rather than as a pile of separate tools. He needed a new word because “culture” would not do the work, and the reason it would not is the essay’s pivot. At some point, Kelly argues, the system of tools, machines and ideas became so dense with feedback loops and complex interactions that it began to exercise a degree of autonomy — a persistent system with agency, carrying its own biases, urges and attractors that bend it in certain directions, independent of what we want.

Cooperman follows the move that actually changes her mind. Asked what life’s fundamental essence is, Kelly answers information — that the essence of life resides not in DNA or tissue or flesh but in the intangible organisation of energy and information contained in those forms, and that both life and technology rest on immaterial flows of information. The consequence he draws is not reductive but the opposite: because the technium is an outgrowth of the human mind, it is an outgrowth of life, and by extension of the physical and chemical self-organisation that produced life in the first place.

This is the “changed his mind” of the title, and Cooperman registers what it costs her. She has always blamed human greed and hubris for the technological imperative. If Kelly is right, the imperative has its own momentum and the moral accounting is harder, not easier.

The back half walks Kelly’s list of what technology wants — and the verb is doing deliberate work, meaning tendency rather than intention. It wants to copy, promiscuously, which he thinks is bad news for intellectual property and good news for anyone who embraces the easy flow of copies. It wants to specialise, to build mutualism and interdependence, to increase diversity and freedom and choice while simultaneously increasing complexity, to be ubiquitous, and eventually to be sentient. Cooperman is a fair critic here: she flags the claim that the technium wants beauty as the weakest link in the chain, and the essay is better for saying so.

What the piece leaves you with is not a verdict but a reframing. Kelly’s technium is the argument that technology is neither a neutral tool nor an alien imposition, and Cooperman’s honest resistance to it is the most useful part of the essay for a reader who starts where she did.

Notable quotes

Pushed too far, his musings hollow out, but as jolts to the world view, they help me see things whole.

The technium is “a persistent system with agency.”

I always blamed us — our greed, our hubris — for the technological imperative.

Archived text

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Connections

• Kevin Kelly — the subject. Read alongside Flounder Mode, which is a portrait of how he works rather than of what he thinks.
• Out of Control — the 1994 book where the machines-as-biology argument first appears; the technium is that thesis carried to its conclusion.
• What Technology Wants — the book under review, published 2010.
• Wired — Kelly was its founding executive editor, and the technium is in many ways the house worldview of early Wired stated explicitly.
• Innovation — Kelly’s claim that the technium has its own directional tendencies is a strong version of technological determinism, and worth holding against accounts that treat invention as purely contingent.
• Open Source — “innovations, agents, companies, and laws that embrace the easy flow of copies will prevail” is, in 2010, an argument for openness made from first principles about information rather than from ideology.
• Stewart Brand — Kelly’s long-time collaborator and the other pole of the same intellectual lineage.