What Technology Wants

September 13, 2010
Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, provocatively argues in this ingenious book that technology can have a positive impact on human life and culture. Kelly traces the origins of what he calls the "technium," or the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us. The technium includes culture, art, social institutions, and intellectual creations of all types, and it is a self-reinforcing system of creation. Kelly carefully avoids anthropomorphizing the technium, but acknowledges that various technologies, much like various systems or organisms in the natural world, express needs or tendencies toward other things; Kelly urges that we benefit the most from our relationship to the technium by learning to work with this force rather than against it. The technium, he argues, provides each person with chances to excel at the unique mixture of talents with which he or she was born or a chance to encounter new ideas and new minds. Thus, the technology of vibrating strings opened up (created) the potential for a virtuoso violin player. Kelly's wise attempts to explain our organic relationship with technology will surely provoke conversations with critics whose discussions of the evils of technology are limited to the negative impact of the computer and the Internet on culture.