What Technological Age?
AS AN ELECTRICAL ENGINEER I HAVE always enjoyed Invention & Technology and I share Walter Vincenti’s interest in history (“What Engineers Know: An Interview With Walter Vincenti,” by Robert C. Post, Winter 1997). But I differ with him on the relationship between technology and culture. While he sees our culture as the age of technology—as opposed to the Middle Ages, the age of religion—I see all cultures as driven by technology.
Archeologists label different stages of human cultural evolution by the driving technology—Stone Age, Bronze Age, and so forth. In each era the prevailing technology had a profound effect on human interrelations. Once urban culture evolved, advances in transportation—shipbuilding, wagon building, and road construction—made political empires possible and led the way to the modern state. The Phoenicians’ far-flung mercantile successes were founded on their shipbuilding and navigational technology. The Roman Empire stood on a foundation of civil engineering. But while technology made possible the concentration of a centralized political power, further technological evolution was putting power back in the hands of individuals.
Governments have always tried to monopolize power, which means monopolizing technology and education. In ancient times priests kept their technical knowledge secret so they could impress the public with their powers. During the Middle Ages, when church and state had a vise grip on power, high tech took the form of the construction of magnificent cathedrals. Fortunately, while the monopolists were preoccupied, some guy named Gutenberg, tinkering in his garage, put together one of the world’s most important technological advances—movable type—changing human culture forever.
We can view cultural evolution since urbanization as a technology-moderated battle between the individual and the state. First technology made the state possible; now it is making it obsolete, at least in the forms we know from the past. The story of the printing press, of which the Internet is the latest evolutionary incarnation, is the story of the fight. With each advance governments have attempted to control the means of communication, but the individual is winning, because evolution favors flexibility, a quality notably lacking in government.
To call our present age, as opposed to some other age, technological is hard for me to do. I think that perception is best explained by a cartoon I remember seeing in which one caveman says to another, “We never had weather like this before the invention of the bow and arrow.”
Robert A. de Forest
McMinnville, Ore.
