But how did that happen? Why had technology become so central and embedded in our life? How did it come to be “the campfire around which we gather” (33)? Kelly’s answer is that technology “has become more like us. It’s become organic in structure” (33). This argument resonates with the themes raised in Chapter 6: by being more organic and natural, technology is able to resonate with humans more fully. The arguments then ultimately circle back to nature: our culture is technological, our technology biological, our biology informational. Technology can no longer be thought of in social terms as something that humans construct and that therefore follows a social logic. Network technology “behaves more like an organism than like a machine” and is much better understood as part of nature (33).
T<sub>E</sub>CHNO<sub>L</sub>OGY AND TH<sub>E</sub> IN<sub>E</sub>VITABI<sub>L</sub>ITY OF NAT<sub>U</sub>R<sub>E</sub>
As David Nye shows in his study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century technological narratives in America, the naturalization of technology meant that technological—and the ensuing social—transformations were seen as inevitable: “The narratives naturalized the technological transformation of the United States so that it seemed an inevitable and harmonious process leading to a second creation that was implicit in the structure of the world” (2003, 6). In a similar fashion, the naturalization of network technology and the informationalization of nature are reiterated in the digital discourse.
In “The Big Picture” (Hillis 1998), natural history becomes a teleological story that culminates with the advent of information technology. In this long and evolutionary process, “cells evolved an information processing mechanism . . . the genetic code of DNA” (Hillis 1998). Since the biological is understood to be, in essence, informational, information (or knowledge) is portrayed as the protagonist of this natural history: “With DNA came an evolutionary advantage: knowledge, as genetic recipes, could accumulate from generation to generation” (Hillis 1998). Then there was the great transformation from single cells to cells cooperating and creating a community, not unlike a communication and information network. The article goes on to unfold this history until it reaches the time of human civilization with its most sophisticated means of communication—language. Here the ontologies of informational nature and information technology converge and reach their zenith. All sorts of information and communication technologies, the article argues, “are all specialized mechanisms we’ve built to bind us together” (Hillis 1998). The evolution of living organisms, as well as that of technological machines, has an ontology and teleology—a communication, cooperation, and cohesion of disparate parts. In this framework, network technology is seen as the pinnacle of that evolutionary development and as essentially bent on fortifying natural tendencies. It is thus also essentially benevolent.
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Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age