Network technology seems to be telling Kelly about nature. To grasp the enormity of the contemporary technological revolution, Kelly situates it on a historical axis that begins a few billion years ago: “It took several billion years on Earth for unicellular life to evolve. And it took another billion years or so for that single-celled life to evolve multicellular arrangements” (Kelly 1998, 6). But these multicellular arrangements, he explains, yielded very limiting forms of life, since cells had to be directly connected to each other in order to work in coordination: “After another billion years, life eventually evolved the first cellular neuron—a thin strand of tissue—which enabled two cells to communicate over distance” (6). This, he says, was a quantum leap in the possibility to create more diverse and sophisticated forms of life. In a language that echoes the biblical scene of creation, Kelly recounts, “Life quickly exploded in million different unexpected ways, into fantastic awesome varieties, until wonderful life was everywhere.” After this short detour into natural history Kelly makes a clean break back to technology and concludes, “Silicon chips,” he says, “linked into high-bandwidth channels are the neurons of our culture” (6).
This is not simply a metaphor, a projection of a natural science discourse over a technological screen. For Kelly, the silicon chip is an extension of living organisms and squarely fits into the history of the natural world. Previous chapters of this book paid close attention to the actual dynamics and forms attributed to the network in the digital discourse— complexity, decentralization, spontaneous order, and so forth. What we need to pay attention to here is the epistemological level of the argument, in which (a) information and communication are defined as the essence and teleology of nature and (b) a direct, unproblematized, and undialectical transference between nature, technology, and society is made.
The transformative power of technology, Kelly says, is true for any technological paradigm, like the steam engine or electricity, and the same goes for network technology. The reason why Kelly is ready to put so much weight on network technology as transformative and why he is ready to surrender completely to technological determinism—to embrace it, in fact—is because he is able to conceive network technology as the end of technological history. Not, of course, that this ends the cycle of innovation; quite the contrary, technology, its improvement, and further application to every sphere of life are central to the digital discourse. Rather, he sees in network technology the final paradigm of technology. That is because technology—a human creation, a product of human culture—has finally took the shape of nature itself. The paradigm of network technology inaugurates a science and technology that follow the rules of nature, replicating the way biological systems work, sustain themselves, and evolve. After taking a long detour from these natural rules (emblematic to the unnatural technological paradigm of the industrial era), human civilization has come full circle, finally joining the bandwagon of nature.
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