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The Fallacy of the Future

This is a response I wrote to an article about the dangers of micro-engineering organisms and restricting the flow of information. A lot of the references are to the original article by Sheldon Pacotti, which you may be able to find here. The original newsgroup discussion can be accessed here.

While manifestly summed up in the claim “The open pursuit of knowledge is actually our greatest weapon against the dangers taking shape around us”, Pacotti’s article is actually more of a meditation on the “word made flesh”. Starting with the example of spoken voice being translated into computer code, he goes on to explore the premise that if the trend in technology is to make language more easily translatable into other forms, this very mutability of language may prove to have disastrous results, particularly if the paranoid reaction to the growing power of language to take material forms is to try and limit control over it by limiting access to it.

In other words, free speech is good, and censorship is bad; equality and democracy are good, totalitarianism and police states are bad. In the process of debating a topic as contestable as the wholesomeness of mom and apple pie, not only does he set up a veritable chorus line of straw men to make the scarecrow proud, but he also mangles both the underlying structure of language and the cultural history of signifying systems.

While fans of Neal Stephenson may appreciate the fantasy of a world where nanobots can create just about any product out of some raw form of matter, the elision between “Designers at Adidas print prototypes of their shoe soles” and “Other companies prototype toys, dinnerware, bottles, golf clubs, jet skis, and so on” in consecutive sentences should give anyone pause. After all, creating a prototype of a shoe sole, out of a pre-engineered material specifically generated for the purpose, from a uniquely designed machine that bears a passing resemblance to a common household printer, and painstakingly hand-crafting and assembling all the components of a complex piece of machinery like a jet ski are not the same process at all. One might as well compare mad libs to the writing of “The Wasteland”. Stephenson’s work at least has the advantage of being filed, and properly so, under the heading “science fiction”.

This erasure of the material difference in the translation of language between specific forms, i.e. the difference between translating spoken speech to written text using a common household computer as opposed to translating a complete genome into a physical lifeform using technology so advanced (and thus inaccessible at any price) that it does not even exist yet, is at the heart of Pacotti’s treatise. We might well have reason to fear the engineering of viruses if any John Doe with a couple of bucks could waltz into his local Walmart and buy a Ronco Genetic Constructor Set, but I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about that when the most well-trained scientists in the world with vast resources at their command cannot even begin to do this.

While the maxim “language is a virus” has some currency in the world of intellectuals and dope-smokers, which all too often are not exclusive categories, the making of the word into flesh not only takes tremendous sophistication (only limited forms of which have been developed so far) but also vast amounts of money. The inscription of the word onto matter is always a violent one, and the more precise the violence, the greater investment of capital is required. It is fairly simple for a child to smear a crayon across a sheet of paper; it is many magnitudes of order more difficult, and thus more costly, to articulate molecular bonds within a precise grammatical structure. Just as it takes a child years of practice to evolve from crude lines to fine penmanship, it has taken thousands of years for technology to move from smearing charcoal on cave walls to layering semiconductors on silicon.

Although I acknowledge that the pace of scientific advancement has accelerated astronomically from the stone age to the digital age, by the time virus sequencing is available as an off-the-shelf technology, neither you nor I will be around to worry about whether it should be an open-source project or government-controlled, and whatever noodling about social policy related to the issue Mr. Pacotti may have published will long since have been forgotten.

The extrapolation of current technological trends into fantastical future worlds is certainly an entertaining diversion, and in some cases (e.g. Wells, Huxley, and Orwell) even produces some fine examples of writing. However, as even these examples demonstrate, such imaginings routinely fail to present a picture of the world that is recognizable as reality, even when their constituent technological changes are achieved, because changes in our ability to understand and thereby manipulate the world inevitably entail fundamental shifts in our cultural organization. We change technology, but technology also changes us.

Human culture is neither as completely fluid nor as static as it is generally held to be. The explosion of printing in the 17th century is not isomorphic with the explosion of digital publishing in the 20th century, nor will our reaction to it take the same, nor even necessarily similar, forms. Culture is, above all else, adaptive; however, there are certain constants that can be identified by careful attention to history and the lessons it offers us.

For example, the signification of identity through visually recognizable codes is not a by-product of late industrial capitalism. Go to any natural history museum, and you will find a rich and diverse tapestry of the ways in which individuals have marked themselves, by tribe, caste, gender, religion, political leaning, geographical origin, etc., etc. Even beyond the commodification of signifying systems, the daily routines of our lives leave their inscriptions on us in ways that the canny can decipher. It doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out that someone with long and clean nails does not work with dirt for a living.

Similarly, the delineation between the public and the private has been a fundamental component of human civilizations from the time when we can properly call them such. Socrates, who taught in the agora, or public space, would not be at all surprised to see, were he alive today, that the authorities actively police the activities of citizens in public spaces by all means available to them, although I’m fairly certain that he (and the Homeric bards who recited thousands of lines of poetry from memory) would dispute the claim that knowledge, and specifically refined rhetorical knowledge, required mastery of chirographic systems as a prerequisite. Lance Henriksen and numerous others would no doubt also dispute the claim that illiteracy condemns one to a life of poverty.

While the power of signifying systems to shape the world, and the world-experience of individuals, is no doubt a significant part of our technological development, and while the development of new technologies always entails risks as well as rewards, the far greater threat to our future than the mutability of language is the use of it by those who are not conscious of its history. A little knowledge, as they say, is a dangerous thing.

Pacotti’s professional work may be all about fun and games, but public policy debates should aspire to sounder rhetorical foundations. A far more cogent argument for the open-source approach to the fruits of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil can be found here.

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