Unabomber's Anti-Tech Revolution: A Critical Analysis (2/2)

This is second part of our "Anti-Tech Revolution" review. To read the first one please go here.

The second chapter of the book, according to the author's own admission, is more speculative and, in some sense, even contradicts the first chapter. Here, the author attempts to construct a social model to support their main thesis—the inevitability of the collapse of technological society.

Why the Technological System Will Destroy Itself

The model is based on the idea that social systems are in constant competition with each other and are subject to natural selection. These systems have the property of self-propagation:

By a self-propagating system (self-prop system for short), we mean a system that tends to promote its own survival and propagation. A system may propagate itself in either or both of two ways: It may indefinitely increase its own size and/or power, or it may give rise to new systems that possess some of its own attributes.

Examples of such systems include any organisms, as well as their groups, packs, prides, etc. In the case of humans, these systems could be states, trade unions, churches, subcultures, schools of thought, and so on.

The author then formulates a number of unproven but seemingly reasonable propositions about the behavior of these systems.

Proposition 1. In any environment that is sufficiently rich, self-propagating systems will arise, and natural selection will lead to the evolution of self-propagating systems with increasingly complex, subtle, and sophisticated means of surviving and propagating themselves.

It's clear that over a horizon of, say, 10 years, those systems most adapted to survive specifically over that time span are likely to prevail. However, if we consider a shorter period, say 5 years, selection will favor systems best adapted to survive over 5 years. These systems are only concerned with their success over a specific timeframe, which means they might not be the same systems that were optimal for a 10-year planning horizon. This leads to the second proposition:

Proposition 2. In the short term, natural selection favors self-propagating systems that pursue their own short-term advantage with little or no regard for long-term consequences.

This behavior aligns with the apocryphal quote attributed to Lenin: "The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them."

Now, let's introduce the concepts of subsystems and supersystems. A subsystem is a system that is part of a larger system, while a supersystem is a system that contains other systems within it. For example, a human is a subsystem of society, while society is a supersystem relative to the individual.

If a supersystem sets certain "rules of the game" or simply environment, then the subsystems evolving within it, considering Proposition 2, will rely on the maintenance of existing conditions:

Proposition 3. Self-propagating subsystems of a given supersystem tend to become dependent on the supersystem and on the specific conditions that prevail within the supersystem.

It's evident that any system (remember, this could be any social group) relies on the ability to communicate among its parts, which leads to:

Proposition 4. Problems of transportation and communication impose a limit on the size of the geographical region over which a self-propagating system can extend its operations.

Proposition 5. The most important and only consistent limit on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating human groups extend their operations is the limit imposed by the available means of transportation and communication. In other words, while not all self-propagating human groups tend to extend their operations over a region of maximum size, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups that operate over regions approaching the maximum size allowed by the available means of transportation and communication.

Proposition 6. In modern times, natural selection tends to produce some self-propagating human groups whose operations span the entire globe. Moreover, even if human beings are someday replaced by machines or other entities, natural selection will still tend to produce some self-propagating systems whose operations span the entire globe.

Proposition 7. Where (as today) problems of transportation and communication do not constitute effective limitations on the size of the geographical regions over which self-propagating systems operate, natural selection tends to create a world in which power is mostly concentrated in the possession of a relatively small number of global self-propagating systems.

In summary, it can be argued that the modern world has reached a state where several competing global self-propagating systems exist, and their struggle is for survival and success over the short term. Given the immense power of modern technology, this struggle could easily lead to their total destruction, and subsequently, the destruction of their subsystems, which are adapted to current conditions.

A key factor in this situation, which differs from anything previously seen in history, is the presence of fast transportation and communication. It is known that systems that are both complex and tightly coupled (meaning a failure in one part of the system quickly spreads to the entire system) are most prone to catastrophic breakdowns. The world has long been a complex system, but it only recently became tightly coupled due to rapid transportation and communication. As complexity grows and coupling tightens, the world inevitably approaches catastrophic collapse.

Or Will It Not?

While this line of reasoning appears logical, it should not be accepted on faith alone. As Carl Sagan famously said, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." Predicting the end of the world as we know it certainly qualifies as an extraordinary claim. The chain of propositions from the previous section is intuitive but by no means proven.

Questions and comments arise regarding both the formulations and the conclusions. For example:

• What exactly are self-propagating systems competing for? What resources do they consume? If these resources differ, is there competition among systems that use them? Newspapers compete for readers, states for people, territory, and resources, corporations for consumers. There are also infinite resources, for which competition is either impossible or turns into efforts towards cooperation.
• How is the duration of the event horizon measured? It’s clear that such a horizon is somehow related to the size of the system. If, for a human, a short horizon might be a month, for a state, it could easily be 5–10 years or more. Is it possible that for global self-propagating systems, this horizon becomes extraordinarily long compared to a human lifespan?
• Could the creation of independent settlements on other planets effectively expand the world and reduce the relative size of global self-propagating systems, thus "cancelling" the apocalypse?
• The fact that any system likely possesses a survival instinct and some self-healing mechanisms is ignored.
• We might agree that a decrease in the diversity of systems in which humanity is organized could be dangerous from a survival standpoint. But do we really believe that 400 principalities of the Holy Roman Empire are a better form of organization than a unified Germany? What number of systems would be optimal, providing both high survivability and effective organization?
• One type of self-propagating system could be languages. Although the total number of languages is rapidly declining, it is unlikely that their number will fall below several hundred in the foreseeable future. Languages with several million speakers are extremely stable systems that do not merge into any global self-propagating systems.
• We can consider populations of small islands that are cut off from the larger world. In the appendix, the author himself mentions the island of Tikopia in the Pacific Ocean, where people lived more or less isolated from the outside world for at least 2–3 thousand years. Since the island covers only 5 km², people immediately had relatively fast means of communication and transport, so this island can serve as a model of a world with global self-propagating systems where, nonetheless, no large-scale catastrophe occurred. The author argues this is because the island society was not complex enough and not tightly coupled. This might be true, but why should we believe that Earth is large enough to reach critical complexity and coupling?

Conclusion

In our world, dominated by technophiles both materially and ideologically, this book, though not entirely original, offers a fresh perspective and stimulates reasonable discussions. While we disagree with both the critique of a rational approach to studying human society and the conclusions of the chapter discussed today, the book is simply an enjoyable read, as it is well-structured and logically sound. The model of self-propagating systems can and should be developed further.