Technology Is Culture, Whether We Notice It or Not
Nassim Nicholas Taleb recently argued that the present has changed little from the past, that futurists are consistently wrong, and that we should envision the future by subtracting from the present the things that don’t belong there. That framing misses something important: technology is culture, and we are too immersed in our own to see how radically it differs from what came before.
Consider the simple economics of food. Before industrialization in the late 1700s, the vast majority of humans grew or procured their own food. Today, only about a third of the world’s workforce does so, and in the US the number has plummeted from 75% to around 3%. Agricultural output has nearly tripled in the past sixty years, thanks to petrochemical-based efficiency gains that would have been inconceivable just a few generations ago. That shift freed three-quarters of a population for other kinds of work—work that would be baffling to our ancestors.
My own job is a case in point. As an upper-middle-income earner in the US, I compose arguments in a language never spoken aloud, directing invisible logical machines built on physical scales unknown a century ago. I collaborate in real time with people I’ve never met, via undersea cables and orbiting microwaves, sometimes using automatic translation that sifts through billions of documents, all on a glowing slab of glass in my pocket. The intellectual foundations of my field—logic as formalized by Church, Turing, and Rosser—are barely two generations old.
The Written Word Is a Moving Target
Taleb’s critique that technologists lack literary culture is strange given that literary culture itself is a recent engineering artifact. He dreams of writing everything longhand as writers did before modernity—yet the very tools he uses are historically contingent. Spaces between words date to the 700s, lowercase scripts to later centuries, typefaces to the 1600s, silent reading to around the year 1000. Publishing online began in the 1980s, and reading on devices like the iPad only became manufacturable in the last decade. Clay tablets were expensive, dense, took weeks to produce, and could be written only once. Paper changed economics alone. To call a tablet computer the modern equivalent of clay is to miss not just the scale of change, but its nature.
Writing itself has never been a universal skill for long. Twenty generations ago, it belonged to clergy and scribes. Two generations ago, the idea that formal education might not drill penmanship was unthinkable. Yet in the past forty years, worldwide illiteracy fell from 38% to 12%. In 1820, 80% of African Americans could not read or write, and later literacy and “intelligence” tests were used to suppress their political voice. Only in the last thirty years has that basic gap closed. The election of a Black president in 2008 was driven in part by youth engagement through textual media invented just decades earlier. Civil rights advances for women, people of color, and LGBT individuals have been carried by evolving information technologies—from broadsheets to offset printing, the typewriter, television, packet-switched networks, and hypertext.
Oddity Is the New Normal
By historical standards, the present is genuinely bizarre. The structure of my childhood and adolescence—mandatory schooling, child labor laws, the expectation of literacy—would be unrecognizable to pre-industrial children. The industries that would once have employed me have evaporated. My education was free, world-class, bureaucratically delivered, and still humbled by the Swedish system.
Yes, we will always eat, work, rest, play, and gather socially. Human biology guarantees a stable core of activity. But as robotics and automation reduce the time spent on manufacturing and agriculture, new fields of engineering, research, and creativity take their place—and with them, new cultural forms. We already text to keep in touch, argue physics in blog comments rather than quarterly papers, and judge sources the way previous generations judged editors.
Media itself is fragmenting and resurrecting at unprecedented speed. Text was stable for a millennium before Gutenberg; mass printing took another three hundred years to develop; magazines and television dominated for decades, and the web has upended them in a generation. Wikipedia, Khan Academy, and a universe of professor-authored HTML resources on topics from model trains to quantum mechanics are transformative in ways we haven’t fully absorbed. Huge advertising and subscription flows mean old media will resist; but they will also shape the new.
Virtual Culture Is Already Here
Meaningful cultural interaction is increasingly virtual. Friends have maintained continent-spanning relationships through World of Warcraft and married years later. MUDs, BBSs, zines, enthusiast forums, YouTube channels—all have emerged in the last two decades. Deaf language and culture are shifting in response to text messaging and web video. The likely trend is more time in interest-specific virtual social spaces, often at the expense of local physical engagement. That brings both isolation and lifelines: a message board can save an isolated gay teenager; a diet of only one political echo chamber can polarize a citizenry.
Taleb is right that the future will retain familiar aspects. But he underestimates how thoroughly the present already defies the past—and how much of our culture, including techno-skepticism itself, is a product of engineering we take for granted. Whether through evolution of text, media, or virtual community, what comes next will not be recognizable to us now.
