Birds, Bugs, Changelings and Trolls
What Nature and Folklore Teach Us About Technology
From the Beast to the Beasties
What do cuckoos, butterfly larvae, coronaviruses—and smartphones—have in common? And why has a new race of “trolls” emerged from the wilds of cyberspace? The answers to these questions—like the subjects they refer to—may catch us off guard. The time has come to consider everyday technology with an utterly fresh perspective—akin perhaps to the freshness Thoreau experienced when he observed Nature. For that’s exactly the paradoxical situation we find ourselves in: if we look more closely, we’ll discover that technology everywhere is recapitulating biology. There is nothing that newfangled under the sun. Paradoxically, the more we try to escape Nature using machinery that insulates us from nitty gritty participation in the real world, the more delicious Her raptorial revenge. With due discernment, our brave new biosphere starts to look less like Walden Pond than the Primeval Jungle.
Be on guard. Jungle critters are sly, and the unwary get no breaks. The beasties are on a feeding frenzy right now precisely because we fancy they are on our side. But even the most inert physical object stubbornly hews to its nature whatever our wishes. Consider some signs that the artifacts of progress may harbor an agenda distinct from our own:
1. After 250 years of breakneck “advance,” humankind works longer hours than ever and feels worse.
2. As of this writing, life expectancy in America is declining.
3. The younger generation, the canary in the coalmine of the human future, suffers from unprecedented levels of stress, obesity, loneliness, depression, distraction, cynicism and suicide.
No one can doubt that certain aspects of scientific advance have improved the human lot. For example, chlorination of the drinking water in early 20th century America reduced infant mortality by 74%. Sanitation in urban areas has brought similar results. Antibiotics and vaccines (yes vaccines, which is why we don’t get polio or smallpox anymore) have taken such gains even further.
But not all byproducts of human ingenuity are equal. Consider automation. To be sure, a self-moving device is a marvelous thing. Lewis Mumford once called the automatic machine a “minor organism.” It possesses many of the characteristics of life: nutrition, motility, even sense perception in a limited way. And now thinking in a limited way—limited, of course, by lack of consciousness. But even this limitation may eventually be overcome. At the very least, some of our automated devices have relieved us of work too strenuous or monotonous that no human or animal ought to have to perform it.
For all these reasons, our ever more life-like gadgets and gizmos understandably arouse wonder. But they should also provoke unease. For the very reason they are “minor organisms,” they may readily cross an important line: today’s benign helpmate is tomorrow’s biological competitor. Their very helpfulness might be viewed as a sly “strategy” for human obsolescence (this “strategy,” admittedly, lies only in the heads of their human purveyors for the time being). To the extent they succeed, in short, we fail:
The automobile that saves us from walking displaces our own legs.
The search engine that saves us the need to retain information displaces our memory muscles.
The GPS system that saves us from studying maps displaces our capacity for spatial relationships (a capacity that is closely linked to memory).
And most unsettling of all, the electronic device that entertains or links us remotely displaces human interaction face-to-face.
These quasi-natural competitors also come with seemingly bottomless appetites for fuel, time, resources, and attention. There’s only so much to go around, and so, as the machine population explodes, another unsettling sign of human decline comes to the fore: human depopulation.
Mechanical beneficence is killing us off with kindness.
Why aren’t the sirens sounding? Well, they are: the beeps, jingles, purrs, and buzzing sounds of our devices only lull us in the more.
If we took the trouble to rouse ourselves from our reveries, we might discover something indeed startling: our devices now outnumber, out-eat, and out-think, and out-produce us. They’ve all but taken over the roost.
If you made a visit to your friends on the farm, you might be alarmed to find a live pig rooting in the pantry, a hen squawking on the kitchen counter, a blood-engorged tick clamped to the ear lobe of the master of the house, and a spider’s web wrapping all the family members in gauze.
But when we walk into our own households we think it nothing to see a fuel-hog in the garage (consuming approximately a fifth of our livelihood, measured in time and money); a television squawking and over-talking us in the kitchen; a smartphone clamped to our own ear, or a worldwide spider’s web enveloping the entire family. It all seems so ordinary and everyday.
But could this everyday scene have something to do with the fact that, after 250 years of breakneck technological progress, things are getting worse instead of better?
A dose of biological detachment might come in handy at this point. Nature has been here before, and if we adopted the eye of a zoologist, this might help us better descry just how. If we don’t get some perspective, on the other hand, we may wake up some morning to find that—uh—we haven’t woken up. And never will.
Forensic “cyberpsychologist” Mary Aiken is a pioneer in the sort of naturalist’s distance we need. In her book, The Cyber Effect, she wrote:
In the behavioral sciences, a phenomenon called signaling theory may help us to understand the irresistibility of mobile phones. . . .
There are several types of signal cues that communicate and attract—visual, acoustic, chemical, and tactile. . . . A predatory female firefly lures in males with her flashing body light, and then preys upon them, just like the blinking and flashing of your mobile phone. Vervet monkeys have a language of distinct calls representing different types of threats, not unlike the ringtones of your early morning alarm. The waggle dance of the honeybee is a tactile cue to secure social bonds. Next time your phone vibrates in your pocket, you’ll feel its need to bond with you. The scent of a queen bee motivates and attracts her worker drones—and no doubt manufacturers are developing chemical signals for their mobile phones. Just wait until your device starts emitting those irresistible pheromones.[1]
For Aiken it is particularly unsettling to find modern mothers everywhere scrolling their smartphones while nursing their babies. The eye-contact and emotional warmth once lavished on human beings during their most important developmental window is lavished on a chortling imposter. This is not good news for the future happiness of baby, and Aiken is deeply worried about what this portends. If the younger generation is anxiety-ridden now. . .
We embrace technology because we believe it elevates us far above our jungle-dwelling ancestors. But a new and perhaps more lethal jungle is encroaching into our most intimate human havens.
We once relied on scientifically grounded naturalists to explore and tame our jungles. But Science is on the wrong side of this battle.
Let me suggest a more promising guide: the fairy tale.
Fairy tales and fables spring from the collective human imagination and thus bring an advantage Science lacks: precisely by not being constrained by the need for precise measurements and well-defined research aims, they offer the human mind wider scope to take in the human condition. Memory, imagination, and experience all come in to play, but in that more jumbled and cryptic form we call a tale, legend, myth, or fable. But if we look with fresh eyes, that tale will show us the jungle, not just the trees.
Think of some big-picture examples: Adam and Eve and the Apple; Prometheus and the theft of fire; various other cautionary accounts of human hubris and divine retribution. But there perhaps is a fable less known, which can advise us as to the specific tactics of our new nemeses better than the rest: That of the changeling.
A changeling is a fairy child that is secretly swapped for a human child. With the help of a fairy accomplice, the switch happens when no one is looking or everyone is asleep. The next day, the parents go about their business, continuing to feed, clothe, shelter, and nurture the new family member as if nothing were different. Meanwhile, the abducted, natural-born child wastes away in some hidden fairy lair, wholly deprived of parental love—but also probably distracted and delighted into perpetuity by fairy toys.
Science—witlessly—knows all about changelings but hasn’t connected any dots. It has now discovered that real changelings exist in the wild. Science applies a technical term to them: “brood parasites.” These are otherwise known as cuckoo birds, butterfly larvae, and coronaviruses. But just like fairies of yore, they trick crows, ants, and human host cells, respectively, into neglecting their own in favor of guess who:
Cuckoos drop their eggs into the nests of unwitting mother birds, who raise the chicks as their own. The adoptive parent gives more attention to the Cuckoo egg because it is larger and more luminous. (The word “cuckold” creatively applies the principle to the duping of a human husband).
Caterpillars of the Lepidoptera family lay their eggs in ant colonies, and the emerging larva give off pheromones that fool the ants into catering to their needs rather over and above their own young.
Coronaviruses are able to enter host cells by mimicking the biology of the host cell membrane, and once inside pass themselves off as cellular components even as they divert available resources to their own reproduction.
Sound familiar?
Something else may ring a bell. Folklore may not be our only guide through the woods. Another age-old cultural compendium is our language. On closer inspection, it turns out that the very words we use to describe invention also expose its trickery. To give one pertinent example, “technology” comes from a Greek root tekne, meaning “craft,” which is barely distinguishable from the word tekna, meaning “children.” What humans create, our language suggests, may craftily pass for what we procreate. What we produce bedazzles and distracts us from what we reproduce. As with cuckoos, so with ever more sophisticated cuckoo clocks: we readily bestow our love, attention, and resources onto the wrong recipient.
But since the act of legerdemain most often passes under the level of consciousness, we often make another mistake: unloading our frustration at the human fallout on the wrong parties. Whether through uncivil online discourse, uncivil politics, or uncivil everyday behavior, another fairy tale character has stepped off the page, and we’ve accepted its borrowed name by general acclaim: the “troll.”
Technology is not merely replacing us. It is also remaking us in its own gruff image.
To find our way out of the jungle, we could use a more detailed field guide.
Stay tuned.
[1] Ibid., pp.55-6.