This is from Connections, James Burke’s documentary television series produced by the BBC in 1978, on how technology and change happens. It’s a personal account of how we got to now, how ideas spread and technology evolves; overall I think what Burke does well is showing how everything is connected. Throughout Connections knowledge is analysed foremost as a distributed system within a community, rather than from the individual perspective. In Burke’s view then change is almost inevitable and it happens when all the bits necessary for its discovery become widely available to a group of people, to one civilisation.
His point is also that — as we add layers of technology to our society — it becomes impossible for each and one of us to have a solid understanding of how everything works. Knowledge has to be distributed, by necessity. The first episode (from which the clip is from) is focused on our relationship with technology, specifically on how granted we take that everything will just keep working as expected.
We’re mostly clueless: we move between abstractions, failing to notice the model, unaware of the complexity of the network we built. What Burke also seems to say is that although our strength — our ability to survive and adapt — derives from technology, the complexity that technology has introduced over time has reduced (if not removed) our individual ability to survive: we’re totally dependant on it. Partly, it’s because any mature technology (think electric power) eventually recedes to the state of nature: we don’t have to think about it to use it (that is, until it fails. That’s when we realise that we built a trap from which we can’t escape).
I sympathise with this argument — it’s why I was never charmed by the escape to the pond kind of literature. It’s naive at best to believe that at this stage any single one of us is not totally dependant on the layers of technology (water supply, electricity, healthcare, and so on) that we put in place and on the outsourcing of the knowledge required to keep them running.
Which is another way of saying that reality has an infinite amount of details, most of which we’re unaware of. As soon as we look closely into something, we realise the stark vastness of our ignorance. It might be a useful thing to remind ourselves of, before entertaining any dream of self-sufficiency outside of society.
