Revisiting What Technology Wants

Rethinking the Future (again)

It’s a strange thing when time catches up with a book and renders even the most brilliant one obsolete, or nearly so.

If I read Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants when it first came out a decade ago, I would have agreed with every word. It is a brilliant work of scholarship that makes connections you might not think about, but which seem obvious when Kelly presents. He has a mind like a spider’s web that catches everything that approaches it. He thinks about technology like nobody else. But, in the last few months, after reading The Good Ancestor by Roman Krznaric and Humankind by Rutger Bergman, I’ve seen how trusted scientific research can be revisited, and even revised. When I read about the Kitty Genovese murder in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, I thought I was reading a tragic story about a woman whose cries for help went unheard by her neighbors and who was left to die alone. When revisited, it turns out this was not the case at all. Genovese died in the arms of a friend. In his book, Gladwell cited the study that popularized the “broken windows” theory of policing. If we can punish people for small crimes, the reasoning went in the “broken windows” theory, it will set an example and people won’t commit more serious crime. This isn’t true.

Bergman, in Humankind, digs deeper into the Genovese case than Gladwell did, and shows that the murdered woman was part of a community. When she was attacked, it did not go unremarked by her neighbors…