What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

of matter and energy; but rather, life and mind emerged out of the constraints to transcend them. Physicist Paul Davies summarizes it well: “The secret of life does not lie in its chemical basis. . . . Life succeeds precisely because it evades chemical imperatives.”
    Our present economic migration from a material-based industry to a knowledge economy of intangible goods (such as software, design, and media products) is just the latest in a steady move toward the immaterial. (Not that material processing has let up, just that intangible processing is now more economically valuable.) Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, says, “Data from nearly all parts of the world show us that consumers tend to spend relatively less on goods and more on services as their incomes rise. . . . Once people have met their basic needs, they tend to want medical care, transportation and communication, information, recreation, entertainment, financial and legal advice, and the like.” The disembodiment of value (more value, less mass) is a steady trend in the technium. In six years the average weight per dollar of U.S. exports (the most valuable things the U.S. produces) dropped by half. Today, 40 percent of U.S. exports are services (intangibles) rather than manufactured goods (atoms). We are steadily substituting intangible design, flexibility, innovation, and smartness for rigid, heavy atoms. In a very real sense our entry into a service- and idea-based economy is a continuation of a trend that began at the big bang.

    The Dematerialization of U.S. Exports. In billions of dollars, the total annual amount of both goods and services exported from the United States between 1960 and 2004.
    Dematerialization is not the only way in which exotropy advances. The technium’s ability to compress information into highly refined structures is also a triumph of the immaterial. For instance, science (starting with Newton) has been able to abstract a massive amount of evidence about the movement of any kind of object into a very simple law, such as F = ma. Likewise, Einstein reduced enormous numbers of empirical observations into the very condensed container of E = mc 2 . Every scientific theory and formula—whether about climate, aerodynamics, ant behavior, cell division, mountain uplift, or mathematics—is in the end a compression of information. In this way, our libraries packed with peer-reviewed, cross-indexed, annotated, equation-riddled journal articles are great mines of concentrated dematerialization. But just as an academic book about the technology of carbon fiber is a compression of the intangible, so are carbon fibers themselves. They contain far more than carbon. The philosopher Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an “unhiding”—a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of anything manufactured.
    Despite the technium’s reputation for dumping hardware and material gizmos into our laps, the technium is the most intangible and immaterial process yet unleashed. Indeed, it is the most powerful force in the world. We tend to think of the human brain as the most powerful-force in the world (although we should remember what is telling us that). But the technium has overtaken its brainy parents. The powers of our minds can be only slightly increased by mindful self-reflection; thinking about thoughts will only make us marginally smarter. The power of the technium, however, can be increased indefinitely by reflecting its transforming nature upon itself. New technologies constantly make it easier to invent better technologies; we can’t say the same about human brains. In this unbounded technological amplification, the immaterial organization of the technium has now become the most dominant force in this part of the universe.
    Technology’s dominance ultimately stems not from its birth in human minds but from its origin in