What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly Page B

trend. One is the long-term rise in longevity, education, health, and wealth of an average person. This we can measure. In general, the more recently in history people lived, the longer they lived, the greater access they had to accumulated knowledge, and the more tools and choices they owned. That’s on average. Since war and strife can depress well-being locally and temporarily, indexes of health and wealth fluctuate within decades and by regions of the world. However, the long-term trajectory (and by “long-term” I mean over hundreds or even thousands of years) is a steady, measurable rise.
    The second indicator of long-term progress is the obvious wave of positive technological development we have witnessed in our own lifetimes. Perhaps more than any other signal, this constant surge daily persuades us that things improve. Devices not only get better, they also get cheaper while they get better. We turn around to peer through our window into the past and realize there wasn’t window glass back then. The past also lacked machine-woven cloth, refrigerators, steel, photographs, and the entire warehouse of goods spilling into the aisles of our local superstore. We can trace this cornucopia back along a diminishing curve to the Neolithic era. Craft from ancient times can surprise us in its sophistication, but in sheer quantity, variety, and complexity, it pales against modern inventions. The proof of this is clear: We buy the new over the old. Given the choice between an old-fashioned tool and a new one, most people—in the past as well as now—would grab the newer one. A very few will collect old tools, but as big as eBay is, and flea markets anywhere in the world, they are dwarfed by the market of the new. But if the new is not really better, and we keep reaching for it, then we are consistently duped or consistently dumb. The more likely reason we seek the new is that new things do get better. And of course there are more new things to choose from.
    The typical American supermarket carries 30,000 varieties of items. Each year in the United States alone, 20,000 brand-new packaged-good items, such as food, soaps, and beverages, are launched, hoping to survive on those crowded shelves. Most of these contemporary products carry a bar code. The agency that issues the prefixes used in bar codes estimates that there are at least 30 million of them in use worldwide. The variety of manufactured products available on the planet is certainly in the tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions.
    When Henry VIII, king of all England, died in 1547, his bursars took an exhaustive inventory of his belongings. They were especially careful in their count because his wealth doubled as the wealth of England. The accountants added up his furniture, spoons, silks, armor, weapons, silver plates, and all the usual possessions of a king at that time. In their final tally King Henry’s household (the national treasure of England) contained 18,000 objects.
    I live in a large American house that I share with my wife, my three children, a sister-in-law, and two nieces. One summer my young daughter Ting and I counted all the objects in our home. Equipped with a hand tally clicker and a clipboard, we went from room to room pawing through kitchen cupboards, bedroom closets, and desk drawers unopened for years.
    I was primarily interested in measuring the variety of objects in our house rather than the total number, so I tried to count the number of technological “genres.” We’d count only one representative of each type. The particular coloration (say, yellow or blue) or superficial ornamentation or decoration would not alter the type. I’d count only the archetypes of books: for instance, one paperback, one hardcover, and one oversized coffee-table tome, etc. All CDs were counted as one genre, all VHS tapes as one, etc. Essentially, the content didn’t count. Things made of different materials counted as