From Wednesday's class

Understanding Kevin Kelly’s The Seventh Kingdom

Issue: Kelly asks the question: just how is the development of technology related to the development of organisms?

Conclusion: Just like organisms evolve through a series of steps from simple to complex that build on one another, technologies parallel the human development of ideas and intellect to ultimately build the technium which is just the continuation of the development of information in organisms that started with the first replicating molecule.

What is necessary to prove this analogy works?

1. Show the development of organisms and provide parallel development of technology in humans
2. Define technology in such a way that it is limited to the intellectual aspects (tractors don’t evolve to change our feet)
3. Show that technologies build on one another and go from simple to complex and that this is also how our minds have developed into a vast ordering of information that will go on as long as we live
4. While technology does not necessarily have ancestors that can pass on genes like organisms do, instead technology passes along traits laterally across time without any necessary ancestral connection. For example, a clock has no relationship to a car but cars could not run without the invention of clocks.  

In order to build on technology, each technology has to interconnect with others.

Kelly takes a very complex idea and attempts to slowly unpack it in “The 7th Kingdom” to demonstrate his thesis that the technium is just the 7th in the six categories of organisms. Just like organisms evolve through a series of steps from simple to complex that build on one another, technologies parallel the human development of ideas and intellect to ultimately build the never ending technium, which is just the continuation of the development of information in organisms that started with the first replicating molecule. Kelly is patient with his reader and provides a step by step process to explain his idea, executing his reasoning with expert support and logic. He even takes time to address counter arguments.  But, despite these good intentions, I still finished the essay wondering if this analogy really holds up. In some ways, he left little room to doubt, but that in itself inspired doubt.

Reason 1 Kelly uses a patient, didactic approach to explaining his concept that takes the reader through his reasoning, step by step. But just because the evolution steps can be mapped on the “technium” steps does not make it so. As Alfred Korzybski stated, “the map is not the territory.” It almost feels as if Kelly creates an imaginary world, defines the limits of it and then tells us that it’s real, a circular way of reasoning.  I define the technium in this way and so when I argue that this is the technium, I get to use my own definition as proof.