The Bleeding Edge. Bob Hughes
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to accuracy and truth. Hugh Brody – an anthropologist who has worked on land-rights campaigns with hunter-gatherer communities, and made documentaries with them – has reflected on this at some length in his book The Other Side of Eden.13 George Dyson, whose work on computer history will be mentioned later, has also written about the extraordinary technological traditions this kind of knowledge economy can support, in his book about the Aleuts and their kayaks, Baidarka.14 Aleut kayaks are made in some of the most resource-poor places on earth, and are technological miracles that defy long-accepted wisdom by travelling at speeds once considered theoretically impossible for a human-powered craft.
The hunter-gatherer knowledge economy also supports a healthier kind of person. Physically, hunter-gatherers have always been healthier and often taller than their civilized counterparts (see Chapter 3). Explorers and anthropologists constantly remark on their happiness and ‘robust mental health’. Brody attributes this to a complete absence of anxiety about being believed, or listened to, or being completely honest, or whether the other person is telling the truth. This has a utilitarian dimension – such societies simply cannot afford deceit and lives depend on absolutely accurate information – but it runs deep: this is how we evolved. Evolution made us radically honest people, and going against this hurts.
Wherever it is found, the egalitarian ethos is maintained through what another anthropologist, Christopher Boehm, identified as ‘counter-dominance’ strategies.15 We can readily recognize these at work everywhere in modern communities in the extensive repertoire of strategies for ‘taking someone down a peg or two’, ranging from friendly ribbing, to gossip, to ostracism and, in the extreme, to homicide. There is also the array of self-effacement strategies used by those who do not want to seem domineering: ‘honestly, it was nothing’; ‘I’m completely hopeless with computers’, etc. Even within the most hierarchical and unequal modern societies, personal life is lived as much as possible within egalitarian or would-be egalitarian social bubbles (families, peer groups, work-groups, neighbors and, in wartime and warlike situations, nations).
In fact, we seem to need these even more as societies become harsher and more stratified, and it is now gradually becoming recognized that the evils that arise from inequality are largely the effects of group inequality – ‘us’ against ‘them’.16 We gravitate towards groups where we can have this experience of solidarity and, what is more, we do it without being aware that we are doing so. This is why evil is so banal; why ordinary people who see themselves as decent folk (and are, in most situations) are capable of genocide.
Solidarity is a fundamental phenomenon of human nature – and dominant forces have learned down the centuries to exploit it. If technology is ‘a phenomenon captured and put to use’ then all our formal and informal social systems are some kind of technology, and ‘social engineering’ is what they do. We need social systems that maximize our chances of ‘not doing evil’, to borrow Google’s motto – which is precisely what Google’s practice of segregating its creative elite in pretend-Utopias, separate from the society around them, can’t possibly do.17
Theologian-turned-neuroscientist Heidi Ravven has documented the fairly new but already impressively large body of research into this phenomenon, and the vast and terrible historical evidence of its workings and effects, in her book The Self Beyond Itself. She concludes:
On the societal scale, our freedom lies in developing institutions and cultural beliefs and practices and families that shape our brains toward the greatest good rather than toward narrow interests, and toward health rather than addictive habits and other limitations, starting early in life.18
THE MYTH OF CREATIVE COMPETITION
In the Northern world, there has been a dominant idea that human nature is fundamentally competitive and individualistic. Innovation is said to be driven by the lure of wealth; hence, if we want nice things like iPhones, we need an unequal society, where there is a chance to get ahead. But when we actually see innovation in action, that is not how it works.
Some of the clearest refutations of the ‘spur of competition and profit’ argument come from the world of computers, with its egalitarian, collaborative origins and continuing culture. This has even inspired a wave of wishful thinking, to the effect that computers herald a new, egalitarian age. The social-science writer David Berreby has described computer programmers as ‘The hunter-gatherers of the knowledge economy’19 and identifies a long list of similarities between the new knowledge-workers’ behavior and value systems, and those of the hunter-gatherers described by anthropologists such as Christopher Boehm and Marshall Sahlins. ‘Can we win the joys of the hunter-gatherer life for everyone?’ he asks, ‘Or will we replicate the social arrangements of ancient Athens or medieval Europe, where freedom for some was supported by the worst kind of unfreedom for others?’
Technology’s history makes more sense if we recognize it as a constant, global, human activity, unconcerned with corporate or national boundaries, or the status systems within them. But as technologies became more powerful, elites became increasingly aware of them as threats or opportunities, and either suppressed them, or appropriated them and tried to channel their development in directions they found acceptable.
This fits better with innovators’ own experience. One hardly ever hears of an important innovation emerging from a boardroom or a chief executive’s office. Usually, the innovation emerges from an organization’s nether regions, or from outside any recognized organization. The innovator must laboriously build up evidence, gather allies, pay court to financiers and backers, and only then, on a good day with a following wind, perhaps attract the boardroom’s attention. Then, perhaps, the organization will adopt the innovation and perhaps, after modifications and compromises of various kinds, sell it to the world as yet another great product from Apple, Canon, or whoever.
More often than not the innovation is used, but without much appreciation. When the first, small capitalist states arose in 16th-century Europe, major innovations had quietly been emerging from within European towns, or making their way into Europe in informal ways, from China and India, for several centuries. The merchant elite did not acknowledge them officially until 1474, when the state of Venice started granting its first 10-year patents. To those who only look at the official record, this has suggested the start of a period of innovation, but 1474 more likely marked the beginning of the end of Europe’s great period of innovation – mostly achieved by anonymous, federated craftworkers. In a major study of medieval industries published in 1991, Steven Epstein wrote:
More than five centuries of increasingly effective patents and copyrights have obscured the medieval craft world in which such rights did not exist, where, to the contrary, people were obliged to open up their shops to guild inspection and where theft of technology was part of the ordinary practice of business.20
This allowed a capitalist myth to flourish, that there was no progress at all in either technology or in science in Europe from the end of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Lynn Townsend White, who became fascinated by this ‘non-subject’ in the early 1930s, wrote in 1978: ‘As an undergraduate 50 years ago, I learned two firm facts about medieval science: (1) there wasn’t any, and (2) Roger Bacon was persecuted by the church for working at it.’21
But between the 10th and 15th centuries, the stirrup, clockwork, glassmaking, the windmill, the compass, gunpowder, ocean-going ships, papermaking, printing and a myriad other powerful technologies were introduced or invented and developed under the noses of European elites, and were adopted and used by them greedily, ruthlessly and generally without comprehension. Many modern technologists and technology workers would say that little has changed.
Despite the contradictions, modern society is permeated by a belief that capitalism is pre-eminent when it comes to creating new technologies, and that computers and electronics have proved this beyond doubt. Even people on the Left say so. The sometime-socialist economist Nigel Harris has written of ‘the great technical triumphs of capitalism – from the steam engine and electricity to the worldwide web,