Cancerous Growths : Technological Darwinisms

For over a century, the question of tomorrow has largely been a question of evolution. Under the influence more, perhaps, of Herbert Spencer than Charles Darwin, the future path of the human race is conceived now as one of a directed evolution through technology, and in this respect the theorems of futurologists have themselves evolved somewhat less over the course of the capitalist period than has the peppered moth.

The term Techno-Darwinism has entered a certain vogue over the past few years thanks to the work of entrepreneur and 'angel' investor, Benjamin Joffe. For Joffe the term refers to what he calls a "survival of the fittest" amongst tech start-ups in the rapidly expanding Chinese market. Nevermind, that the term "survival of the fittest" is Spencer's and not Darwin's, Joffe is hardly the first capitalist to stretch a scientistic metaphor in order to justify and naturalise his own profiteering.

Nor - though he may be credited with the hyphenation - is he the first to import purportedly Darwinist models and notions into the sphere of human technological 'progress' - in order, principally, to legitimise the use of the very word 'progress' and frame it as a kind of naturally occurring and practically inevitable process.

For Ray Kurzweil, evolution through technology represents an exponential growth in human advancement towards what he refers to as the Singularity, a point in the near future (2045) when the combination of advance in genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence will allow an expansion in machine-human intelligence and technological development beyond our wildest imaginations.

Similarly, as Marina Banjamin has pointed out, the Space Age was full of evolutionary metaphors, with everyone from Werner von Braun to Arthur C. Clarke to Buckminster Fuller referring to Apollo 11 as the natural sequel, equal in importance, to the moment primitive life first left the oceans for the land.

All of which amounts to little more than a stretched metaphor put in the service of valorising some favoured project. Consensus amongst developmental biologists and palaeontologists seems to be that human evolution has remained fairly static for a good hundred thousand years or so. That's not to say that we are not witnessing evolution - and rapid evolution at that- in the present day. Only it's an evolution to which we are but the hosts. To talk of the evolution through natural selection of metastasising cancer cells is not just a metaphor. Puts a somewhat less positive spin on Joffe's notion of capital as techno-Darwinism though....

The Future: Not Worth Paying For, Apparently

There's an interesting feature in the latest issue of The Journalist, in-house organ of the NUJ, about the decline in fortunes of newspaper and magazine horoscope columnists. In 1988, Russel Grant popularised the astrological phoneline, accepting only a modest fee from his publisher in exchange for the free advertising the column generated for his highly lucrative pay-per-minute chatlines. Before long, this became standard practice. All astrologers had to set up their own phone line. Unfortunately, without Grant's celebrity status, few made much actual money out of them.

By the late nineties, the bottom had rather dropped out of the chat line business, but by that time the low fees for astro-copy had become standard practice. Nowadays companies on the internet will generate horoscope columns for syndication for no more than £3, where once a star gazer could expect a hundred times that for their talents.

While we may snort and think good riddance to bad rubbish, it's worth remembering that horoscope columns remain as popular as ever with readers - it's just that the people who write them are no longer getting paid properly. Aside from the rather obvious parallels with the music industry, there's something broader at issue here, concerned with the question of who is authorised to write the future.

Once upon a time (not that long ago) the future was written by artists, and by speculative thinkers like Buckminster Fuller. At a certain point, artists seem to become embarrassed by the question of the future, epitomised perhaps by Gyorgy Ligeti's notorious (1961) unlecture entitled The Future of Music, in which he stood silent, impassively before the class, only responding to the calls and jeers from the audience by writing musical terms on the white board as 'directions' to the noise-makers.

Mostly, the people talking and writing about the future today work in marketing, or in computer software. That is, if they have anything positive to say about it. Of course, there are plenty of different artists and theorists prophesying some form of catastrophe or other on practically a daily basis. But the astrologists task of looking forward with hope, and with the kind of optimism that actually makes doing stuff a bit easier, is steadily proving itself to be as easy to generate automatically and artificially - with the right software - as a Chopin etude.