This episode is sponsored by Skillshare
We often say that technology offers humanity a bright new future, but not everyone sees
it that way. So today we’re back to the Rogue Civilizations
series to look at techno-primitivism, both the general concept and how it might evolve
into societies on other worlds. This is a pretty common trope in science fiction, cultures
losing their technology or intentionally limiting it, and we’ll see today that its one that
might turn out to be fairly common too. Probably the most common fictional way of
losing technologies unintentionally is after some sort of cataclysm, but we’ve covered
that topic in the Cyclic Apocalypses episode so it won’t be our main focus today. Rather
we’ll focus more on examples like Frank Herbert’s classic Dune series where the
loss was intentional, as well as on some real world examples and motivations for it.
Dune illustrates one of the most common reasons in science fiction for abandoning a technology,
concerns about artificial intelligence. There we have the Butlerian Jihad, which has some
rather contradictory portrayals from the original series and the Expanded Universe novels written
after Frank Herbert’s death, and each version is examined a lot in science fiction. Either
artificial intelligence represents a direct physical threat to humans, becoming sentient
and attempting to wipe us out or enslave us, as we see with examples like Skynet in the
Terminator franchise, or a more existential one where the machines are either used to
oppress most humans or to entice and debase us into a life of idle luxury.
The concern about technology taking our jobs and replacing us has been with us for a long
while. The various labor-saving devices we’ve invented down the years are not likely to
attack or conquer us but have often represented a perceived threat to either our prosperity
or spiritual health. We have a somewhat bad habit these days of both waving these concerns
aside as short-sighted and exaggerating the irrationality of those objecting to it. For
instance, the Luddites remembered for objecting to textile technologies of the 19th century
have become a byword for violent technophobia but were neither particularly violent nor
technophobic, and mostly concerned about labor practices and wages associated to rising industry,
and objectively speaking these concerns were neither new nor baseless.
On this channel we obviously tilt toward techno-optimism but at the same time we hardly try to paint
new technology as always bringing nothing but good times. New technology often brings
a whole new array of challenges and hardships, but generally brings more good than bad, thus
far anyway, and our society has gotten quite used to technological disruption and does
a better, if hardly ideal, job at smoothing the integration of new technologies into culture
and preventing those displaced by it from being too adversely affected. It’s worth
keeping in mind that when a piece of tech displaced workers in the past, it often did
so very literally, a landowner with a superior bit of farming technology that required less
labor might kick off surplus laborers from his estates who might actually starve to death
as a result. Similarly crafts and skills take many years
to learn, representing a very large investment of time and resources by both the teacher
and student. A skill made redundant by a new technology can leave a person not only unable
to practice that skill to support themselves, but feeling reduced as a person as well, a
central pillar of their life and confidence has been removed while at the same time their
comfort and survival have been endangered. It is not too surprising then that folks often
think along the lines that when you create a machine to do the work of a man, you take
something away from the man, and indeed that’s a rather memorable quote from the film Star
Trek Insurrection. In that film we get an example of a post-technological civilization,
the Ba’ku, who having been once technologically advanced, had reverted to a low technology
existence over concerns of the various physical and existential dangers technology posed.
Now, that film shows the Ba’ku from the outset as living in rural simplicity, and
they are portrayed to us as so smugly happy and downright superior in their low-tech bliss
that a lot of fans, myself included, actively disliked them even though they’re meant
to be the good guys and victims of the tale. As my favorite TV and film reviewer, Chuck
Sonnenburg of SF Debris, noted in his review of the film, “Paradise protests too much”,
that “It tries so hard to make everything perfect you can see just how impossible this
perfection is.” We’re shown a simple village that’s is
incredibly clean and prosperous, which matches no farm ever seen outside a story presumably
written by someone who has never worked on a farm or lived in a place without a strong
technological infrastructure. Unsurprisingly many Trek fans, who tend to view technology
as producing utopias, found this a bit grating. Romantic portrayals of shepherds in idyllic
pastures or blissful simplicity of hunter-gatherer life are very far from the truth and ignore
all the filth, hardship, misery, oppression, and brutality that typically made up the often
rather short lives of those people. And while it should be noted one can go too
far the other way too, in simply assuming technology solves all problems, automatically
creating a peaceful and enlightened culture, one is merely indulging in fantasy to think
going back to nature makes life happier and better.
Part of the problem though is that term ‘going back to nature’. Any line drawn between
natural and artificial is going to be a bit arbitrary and blurry, humans are hardly unnatural,
but for the word artificial to mean anything we essentially have to treat it as meaning
manmade, or more generally, made by intelligence. We’ve remarked before when discussing cyborgs
how humans are already pretty artificial, things like clothes and language and tooth
fillings are integral to us and entirely artificial. However, it overlooks a more fundamental flaw
of this line of reasoning. As mentioned a bit ago, when someone’s skills and craft
are made redundant by some machine, it represents the loss of a major investment of time and
resources and a blow to their self-esteem and sense of self.
That is important to note because if artificial means something humanmade, there is nothing
we invest more time and resources into making than new people. Even ignoring all the development
and prototyping and background culture that forged the specific tools and patterns used
to make the machine that made us, our parents and grandparents and community, the sheer
amount of effort put into creating you or I, individually, is enormous.
The fact of the matter is that if you have a tooth filling, that is one of the least
artificial things about you. After all, it only took a brief while for the dentist to
craft it and put it in and it merely poorly mimics something that evolved long ago.
So a total return to nature is not really on the table, I’d say that ship sailed long
ago, but it did so before we invented sailing ships. I should probably also note that our
ancestors, whose primitive lives are being put on a pedestal in such trains of thought
probably, without exception, considered anything natural to actually be the product of very
skilled artifice. That’s handy to remember, two different people saying natural is better
can mean two very different concepts, since one might mean something evolved by natural
selection while the other is assuming it’s superiority as natural is because it was designed
by a supremely talented creator. Either one though, working from that premise, is expressing
a concern that we are not skilled enough to be tinkering casually with something that’s
the byproduct of billions of years of trial and error focused on functionality and survival,
or the work of a vastly better craftsmen. And that is a very legitimate concern. It’s
easy for us to dismiss any objection to technology as irrational technophobia. When you dig into
most examples of it though, modern or historical, that irrationality is either exaggerated or
absent. Which is not to say it’s right or a model of solid logic, but in general non-fictional
examples of technophobia that are fairly recorded or reported usually rest on fairly legitimate
concerns. Technology is dangerous, we do have an abundance of actual examples of specific
technologies that did more harm than good, and while it does make life easier as we get
more of it, the level of danger, physical and existential, rises too. We don’t want
to simply extrapolate from past examples that the benefits will always outweigh the downsides
and risks, amusingly a very unscientific line of thought itself but one expounded by technophiles
who claim to analyse everything scientifically. It is not too hard to imagine that as technology
makes life easier and more prosperous a lot of folks will say that things are good enough
and we should stop, or at least that they are getting off at this stop. Indeed we’ve
even speculated in some episodes that a post-scarcity society might grind to a halt on advancement
simply because life has gotten so easy nobody feels a personal compulsion to further advance
technology or lacks any inspiration for how to do so.
That’s not exactly without precedent either, while debatable, many historians explain the
general slowing or halt of scientific progress in various previous golden ages on the thinkers
of that time preferring pure logic over empirical evidence, and disdaining crafts and skills
considered illiberal, which is to say hands-on manual work. If nothing else, it’s hard
to think up a handy new technology that is labor saving if you yourself never actually
do any labor. So the general notion that people are in some
way diminished by having things too easy is not exactly without basis, nor are other common
concerns about the impact things like video games or social media have on kids or even
adults less skilled or motivated at more classic human interactions. Regardless of whether
or not that is actually true or a bad thing, many folks consider it so, and for our purposes
perception is what matters since it motivates what folks will actually do. It does not actually
matter if technology is good or bad objectively if folks think it is bad and decide to start
a low-tech splinter civilization. We mention all the various reasoning involved in drawing
that conclusion simply because the closer perception is to reality, or the more solid
the logic behind the reasoning, the more likely it presumably is that folks will opt for this
path. Tied up to that is that observation that the
more technology and prosperity you have, the easier it is to survive comfortably if you
decide more technology, or a specific technology, is a bad thing. And I’ll note that a lot
of us have individual technologies and conveniences we personally disdain already or avoid using.
For instance, I’m unable to ignore the irony that while I keep a lot of my show notes for
this channel on science & futurism on my computer, when I do write them down, I do so in vintage
leather notebooks with old-school handmade paper. Certainly many of us, for all that
we rationally know the old, the classic, the traditional, and the handcrafted is often
of inferior make, still fervently surround ourselves with such things. Why do we value
old stuff, or facsimiles thereof? I don’t know, but the antique mystique is certainly
very real and not something I expect to diminish. As an example, our loose notion of a future
transhuman would be someone pumped to the gills with nanotech augmenting mind and body,
possessing the physique of an Olympic athlete, the body of supermodel, and the mind of a
supergenius. Such a person could be living in a crude hut in genuine comfort, since they
can’t get sick, could easily feed themselves with no more than a sharpened stick to hunt
and plow with, and hardly needs tons of books or devices lying around their home since they
probably never forget anything they see and likely have a vast archive of knowledge and
entertainment wired directly into their brain. This particular version of primitivism, which
isn’t really primitive, is often called post-technological. Examples of it in science
fiction can range from various ascended beings made of pure energy to ones who basically
look primitive even though they are not, like the Nox from Stargate SG-1, shown to us initially
as simple forest people but with a reveal at the end of the episodes of having an invisible
giant floating city. This does break one objection made about the
Ba’ku in Star Trek Insurrection, shown to be able to fix Commander Data, the pinnacle
of cybernetic technology, even though they live pre-industrial lifestyles. It’s felt
that technological knowledge would be use-it-or-lose-it, so they had it in the past and shouldn’t
now, but they themselves do not age in the film, and some post-technological transhuman
living in a hut might be a thousand years old with perfect recall. Again if you have
a lot of knowledge, skills, and technology you do gain the benefits of being very selective
of what bits you feel like using. This also interferes with one of the more
common objections to planets being colonized by those who reject a lot technology, with
the assumption being that folks that hate technology could not bring themselves to get
on board a spaceship or terraform or otherwise construct a new world. Even ignoring that
such groups are likely to be selective about which technologies they don’t use and when
it’s okay to use them, we have to factor in that lesser of evils consideration.
If you are part of some group that believes technology is bad, and wants to isolate yourselves
from those who feel otherwise, you are probably going to recognize that staying on Earth isn’t
likely to be the best approach, particularly considering that even if you are willing to
force others to follow your ways, you will generally lose a conflict with someone who
has more advanced technology. Unless their leader subscribes to the Zap Brannigan School
of Strategy, they are likely to realize that trying to overwhelm your enemy by sheer weight
of numbers and hoping they’ll run out of bullets is probably not a good plan.
Of course some might but obviously they’re not founding new off-world colonies. We can
therefore assume techno-primitive colonies out among the stars either put their prohibitions
on technologies more sophisticated than those needed for going to new worlds, exempt those
needed for such efforts, or exempt their use as a necessary evil, either by them or hiring
someone else to handle it. There’s certainly precedent there, the Amish
and Mennonites are not a homogenous group in their application of the Ordnung about
what technologies are okay to use and when, but for those living in my own area of rural
Ohio, usage is often seen as different then ownership, the latter thought to encourage
bad behaviors, and even then it’s not unusual for cell phones or power tools to be employed,
as their concern is more about what regular use of them will have on work ethics and family
relationships. They’re not anti-technology because they think its evil, merely they believe
routine use of it makes people lazy or immoral. As best as I can tell, since I’ve not had
occasion to explain terraforming or O’Neill Cylinders to a practicing member of that community
and ask for their opinion, there would not actually be a clear prohibition on living
on such a world or being transported there. And of course, they would not be representative
of some group that decided that 21st century technology was enough.
Another noteworthy caveat on this, following the transhuman vein, you could easily have
folks born nowadays still living in the 25th century who were just fine with spaceships
and terraforming or space habitats but were simply uncomfortable with the cultures emerging
with more advanced tech. Given that compound interest and prior ownership works wonders
on wealth when one is immortal, not only could such folks likely afford to buy planets or
space habitats and the ships to reach them, but a low-tech Earth might result simply from
them telling all the young folks to conform or get off their proverbial lawn. High-tech
will tend to curbstomp low-tech in most conflicts, military or otherwise, but the dynamic shifts
a bit when low-tech also means old and respected. It’s probably not going to be a good idea
to try to annex and renovate the primitive village that is essentially a retirement home
full of everyone’s ultra-wealthy great-great-great-grandparents. Of course speaking of annexation, people reluctant
to even board spaceships might be doing so at gunpoint, or forced exile, though given
the implied morality of those on the other end of the gun and them being high-tech, odds
are they’d opt for an option like brainwashing those folks or tricking them into some virtual
mockup of their homes. A post-biological civilization dealing with technophobes they regard as criminally
inefficient in their use of land and resources might just wait till they all went asleep,
scan their brains into a simulated copy of their community, dump their bodies into a
recycler and clap themselves on their virtual backs for doing the primitives a favor. So
I wouldn’t think we’d see a lot of forced exile.
On the other hand I could imagine a lot of compromise cases, voluntary exile is a fairly
common way to engage in colonization historically. A government with a group who doesn’t mix
well with their main culture and who has a place they’d like settled can offer to subsidize
that group going there, effectively ridding themselves of problematic dissident groups
and getting a colony out of it, very similar to the prison colony approach we discussed
last time in the series. We noted there that while it seems like a
bad idea to settle a place with criminals or dissidents, in practice that generally
did not breed a dysfunctional or hostile daughter colony. And a group that just doesn’t like
the influence of technology, or certain technologies, on their civilization is hardly automatically
militantly hostile to their culture. Folks going and living off the grid or in a cabin
in the woods often have issues with their main culture but rarely homicidally so. Heck,
I openly loathe metropolises and even suburbs, preferring my rural area, I don’t dislike
the folks living there or want to burn them to the ground, I just don’t want to live
there or visit much. Realistically a future Earth, and any swarms of habitats it may have
orbiting nearby, probably would have tons of lower tech spots, ranging from the genuine
to the tourist trap equivalent of Renaissance Fairs to those with lots of technology hiding
under a facade of vintage and period decoration. The other thing we noted about prison colonies
is that they’d probably be a transition phase, settled as penal colonies by folks
offered it as an alternative to prison, while the place is not too hospitable yet, and through
their work and kids and immigrants turned into just another regular world.
We also need to keep in mind, with colonization, that we potentially have billions of solar
systems to fill up and once the initial prestige of space travel wears off, it might be rather
hard to find folks willing to pack up and leave the comforts of home. In a galaxy without
faster than light travel you are making a big and pretty permanent sacrifice to leave
behind those comforts and your friends and family to go settle a barren wasteland after
decades of travel. There has to be a motivation to do that, and while there are many that
might serve, most will tend to arise from a dislike of home. If home is a technological
utopia where robots do most of the work and you can explore any number of virtual paradises
in your tons of free time, a lot of the traditional historic motivations for going off to a new
colony are not as strong. On the other hand, a general belief that too much technology
and easy-living is unhealthy for you, and not something you want your kids exposed to
either, is a very good motivation to pack up for the frontiers where you’ll live on
your wits and skills and hard work. In that regard, it’s actually very easy
for me to imagine that an awful lot of future colonies will be founded by folks who have
some negative views on technology, or certain technologies, and one would expect them to
tend to group together by which technologies they dislike and what philosophy motivates
that dislike with the intent of founding a world that will be governed by that attitude.
Now, that said, I don’t think the future of a galactic humanity is a billion primitive
worlds, even for a given value of primitive since the hypothetical technophobes might
regard our modern world as too primitive. It’s popular in scifi to show colony worlds
abandoning or losing their technology, sometimes both, like in Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders
of Pern series where they meant to be modestly lower-tech but got forced by disaster to be
even lower tech, I don’t see that happening much. We worried about generation ships losing
technology en route but that was mostly due to them being far too small in population
and resources to rediscover anything they lost or even really have the numbers to maintain
a vast host of specialty skills. A planet is a bit different, that’s part of why we
suggested them as intergalactic colony ships in Planet Ships last week, they do have the
space and resources to support a civilization able to relearn things from scratch.
Indeed any world that goes too primitive isn’t even going to be able to retain a prohibition
on technology, as we mentioned in Cyclic Apocalypses, a culture has to work very hard to erase all
signs of technology, and while that’s lessened on a new world without technological artifacts
left all over the place, you still have to be able to keep records of why you banned
technology and maintain a global civilization unified enough to allow an orthodoxy enforcing
those prohibitions, particularly considering any breakaway culture that re-embraces technology
is going to start gaining benefits that make them economically and militarily hard to coerce
from outside, and of course folks will rationalize why this particular new and useful tech should
be an exception to the rules. The other point about primitivism is if you
are living on a space habitat or even a terraformed planet there is probably some form of technology
in place that maintains the environment. While that technology is probably largely self-maintaining,
we currently have no examples of completely autonomous self-repairing technology that
can exist for millennia. This might necessitate a base-level of technology required for existence.
So, folks opting for primitivism might donate their third child to the Temple of Maintainers,
much as people did in years gone by and even practiced today in some places of donating
children to the higher calling of the church. The Temple of Maintainers would be tasked
with training technicians and conducting the rituals of “Keeping the Lights On” in
service to the Machine God. Unlike with other religious orders of the past, though, if the
temple was abandoned the vengeance of the Machine God will play out in the form of failing
life support systems and Everyone Dies™ becomes a very real existential problem.
So you probably can’t maintain such a tech ban for very long beneath a certain level
of technology, and even then it’s likely to erode over time, and even centuries mean
nothing in the grand scheme of galactic colonization. Particularly since you’re likely to eventually
get neighbors who show up, and might view your primitivism as oppressive and unethical,
or just don’t feel obliged to get your permission to show up and trade knowledge or devices.
They might even do as Admiral Perry did with Japan, and just show up with a fleet one day,
and in such cases, assuming they didn’t conquer you overtly, you’re likely to have
internal pressures to modernize to defend yourselves, a lesser of evils situation again.
Fundamentally, while I can see plenty of colonies setting up as techno-primitives, at least
relative to their motherland, I can’t see them staying that way in the long term unless
it turns out too much technology really is a bad thing, and even then it would be hard
to do. Of course, to be fair, the major motivation for such places tends to be a belief that
hard work and challenge is fundamental to being a good human, so they might embrace
that aspect of it. And while neither I, nor I assume most of my audience is technophobic,
I doubt I’m alone in agreeing with that basic principle, that those struggles and
challenges and the push to overcome them are a significant part of what define us and lets
us grow. For my part though, I remain confident that
at least for the foreseeable future, we’ve got plenty of character-building hard work
to do, and I don’t think more technology will change that any time soon, just change
what specific tasks and skills and challenges we have.
We were talking about skills a lot today and an important takeaway is realizing that we’ve
always been a skills-based culture, those skills have just changed a lot over the centuries.
Of course these days they aren’t even changing with each generation, they change almost every
year. I don’t need to tell anyone here that having lots of skills and keeping them up
to date is both good for the career and personal happiness, and we have so many more to choose
from these days. It’s also far easier, with communities like Skillshare, to learn them
from the comfort of your own home. Skillshare is an online learning community
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offer, and start learning today. So we have some fun episodes coming up for
the next couple of weeks. We spend a lot of time discussing humanity’s future, but next
Thursday is International Pet Day, and I thought we’d celebrate that by asking what the future
might have in store for our furry friends. The week after that, by popular demand, we
are going to look at Giant War Robots and Power Armor.
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Until next time, thanks for watching, and have a Great Week!
I made an original soundtrack inspired by SFIA, I hope you like it! (Free to use, CC0)
Isaac, if you're reading this, feel free to use this in your videos. I'd be honored :)
And yes, I'm also trying to get a little visibility for my Songs For Humanity project. I hope it's all good. Have a fantastic day, everyone!
My dad has been a big fan of the idea of Space Amish for a long while.
From what I studied in school, agriculture is very important to them, so you'd need either dome farms or Terraforming. Regardless, the isolation of space might be perceived as a good way to perserve community/family.
An SFDebris reference to the Baku? Huzzah!
Techno-primitivism might be the main motivation to terraform a planet, basically because a terraformed planet is for biological humans, an unloaded human has no need for a terraformed planet, they can live in uploaded form in a data center on an unterraformed Titan. A techno primitive would want to terraform a planet that is as close to Earth in basic physical properties as possible, that way a terraformed planet will stay terraformed without constant continuous technological maintenance. A terraformed Venus that is not moved to an Earthlike distance from its Sun and given a spein and axial tilt similar to Earth would not qualify. A Venus that requires a solar shield, and a fake Sun to mimic Earth's days and seasonal cycle would require that whoever inhabits it stay technological in order to maintain the equipment that keeps the planet terraformed. the ideal place for techno primitives to terraform would probably be an Earth sized planet orbiting a Sunlike Star in the habitable zone and just be in need of one time only terraforming, and once done, it stays that way without further technological innovation for about a billion years.
Alternatively there could be a technoprimitive colony on a virtual world with built in technological restrictions within the simulation. I mentioned in another post about terraforming Titan virtually, that is within the data centers on Titan, we create another Titan with software, this Titan has the same landscape as Titan, the same mountain ranges, lakes and rivers for instance, only these mountain ranges in the simulation are made of rock, the lakes and rivers are made of water, the atmosphere is breathable to virtual humans, and the gravity is made identical to Earth, even if the scale of the World is not One interesting note is that many of the features on Titan are named after places on Tolkein's Middle Earth, for example Titan has a Mount Doom. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_Mons
The scale of Titan's Mountains made of Ice is not greater than Earth's, for example the highest mountain found so far is only 10,948 feet high, we could make digital mountains modeled after those ones made of rock, grow digital forests, and make a virtual Titan with an Earthlike Sun and an image of Saturn in the sky, that is basically a fantasy setting. Make life as rough and brutal as one desires, and if one "dies" in this setting, one gets downloaded back into a physical body. the point of this setting would be to challenge you rather than present ease and comfort. So when you die in this setting, you die, you don't come back, but you can visit another virtual world perhaps.
Why not just ask one of the bishops? (16:55 in video)
I feel like this anit-vaxx movement is a form of techno-primitivism.
I wonder if purposful techno primitavism is a a viable reason why cultures revert back to more advanced old ways. Like a samurai steampunk culture. Or a city scape where rapier duels are common.
The Amish are the fastest growing population in the world today, doubling every 18 years. If they can maintain that growth rate there could be a hundred billion of them by the 25th century. So the main customers for the living space provided by O'Neil cylinders might be Amish people.
Seriously, how do humans earn a living in the future without some sort of techno-primitivism? Without techno primitivism there are no jobs for humans. One way to approach it is to segregate machines, let them terraform worlds and then move off of them to let humans settle.