The day I created my Second Life, I was, I’ll admit, a little lonely. My roommates had gone out. Tired from work, I didn’t want to read, and we didn’t have cable, so I dragged a laptop onto the couch with me and opened up an internet browser.

Second Life’s online registration page greeted me with a banner: Your life. Your imagination. Indulging a sixth-grade obsession, I named myself after the Egyptian goddess of something I couldn’t remember. There were forty last names to pick from, all of which sounded like they’d be read in roll call by a German schoolmarm, or a wizard in a fantasy novel: Scmergel, Weizenberg, Liebster, Eizenstark. The next page started with salutations.

Welcome, Isis Aszkenaze! I had a choice of several default avatars that could represent me in the 3-D web realm. You’ll have plenty of opportunities to be almost anyone you want should you change your mind later, the instructions promised me. Avatars can dye their hair. They can change clothes and body types—or species—and one of my roommates had told me that “some of them even have rocket launchers coming out of their butts.” I briefly considered the figure of a long, tall cybergoth and, even less briefly, a giant raccoon with boobs and high heels, before becoming “Girl Next Door.” In just a moment, I joined the 47,758 other users logged on at 8:31 on a Thursday night.

I spent my first night in Second Life on Orientation Island, where I arrow-keyed my way down a grassy path lined with tutorial stations teaching me how to walk and talk (read: type messages), as well as find things and change my appearance. My surroundings looked like—and, granted, were—a painstakingly rendered computer animation. On my screen, I watched my avatar from behind, her brown-haired head bobbing up and down as she wandered. Realistic-looking palm trees rustled in the breeze, which I could hear, and ocean waves lapped the shore in the distance while I tried to get my bearings. It was kind of like a video-game version of a Corona commercial.

ECONOMIST EDWARD CASTRONOVA, author of Exodus to the Virtual World, estimated that as of December 2004, the population of people in subscription-based synthetic worlds likely exceeded 10 million. By 2007, it was double that. Every month, a million unique users log in to Second Life, where they buy clothes and property and houses for their avatars with Linden dollars—named after the company where Second Life was created, which is named after the San Francisco street on which it sat—which cost real dollars to buy. Since its launch in 2003, SL, as users call it, has been the topic of countless articles and has appeared in books, novels, and TV shows; its users spend 50 million actual dollars monthly on virtual goods. What is going on in this virtual world that so many people are spending so much of the time and resources of their RL, as many users call real life, there? 

Frankly, throughout all the early hype, I’d never cared to know—I was one of those people still using a landline in late 2005. I didn’t believe Linden’s founder, Philip Rosedale, when he said that when meetings in actual buildings and meetings in Second Life eventually “come into serious competition, there’s only going to be one in the long term.” But I didn’t believe Stacy Morabito’s dad in high school, either, when he said everyone was going to have e-mail someday. Then, zero percent of my communicating happened over the internet. Now, probably 90 percent does. And the maintenance of my current professional and personal life is utterly dependent on my cell phone, given the amount of accessibility and text messaging necessary for keeping in contact with other people who are constantly accessible and text messaging.

In April 2008, Congress held a hearing, “Online Virtual Worlds: Applications and Avatars.” Avatars could watch the proceedings via live video feed to screens in a Second Life incarnation of the Rayburn House Office Building, while TVs in the actual House aired the goings-on in the virtual room. The agenda was to “explore safety issues and the use of real currency in virtual online worlds, as well as the growing presence of educational institutions, nonprofits and other real-world organizations in online virtual worlds.” Congress is hardly a fast-acting, ahead-of-the-trends game-setter, and even its eye was on the SL ball. Maybe I was eventually going to be forced to move some of my RL interactions to SL, too. I found the idea decidedly unappealing, and I suspected it wasn’t just because I was an uppity liberal arts major who sucked at video games and read alarmist articles about modern isolationism in The New Yorker. Even given all the supposed possibilities of virtual worlds—or perhaps because of them—it seemed like there had to be a trade-off.

ON MY SECOND VISIT to Second Life, I logged in on a lazy Sunday morning and started looking for where the action was. When I pulled up the search box of the current ten most popular places “in-world,” PandaMart appeared at the top of the list. I had two ways to get to my destination. I could, with a press of the arrow keys, take to the sky and fly there. Instead, I clicked “Teleport.”

I materialized on a gray tile floor a few seconds later, next to row after row of wooden benches packed with seated avatars, surrounded by kiosks where I could buy hairstyles, art, a virtual party business. Many of the avatars were incredibly muscular bipedal horses. All of them were too cool to talk to me, or, more likely, not actively manned by humans, who had probably parked them there and taken their attentions elsewhere. In a scheme to rack up traffic and make their “land” more attractive to advertisers or renters, the owners of the benches paid these loiterers thirty-one cents a minute for a limited period of time.

Boring. I teleported to FREE SEX EMPIRE, another most-popular destination. I’d read that sex was popular in SL, though I’d had difficulty imagining the details. From the sound of this hot spot, I didn’t even have to pay the four to twelve dollars for a prostitute in order to figure things out. Sure enough, within moments after I took shape on an ornate dark carpet with gold inlays, a naked man with a caricatured erection approached me.

“Do you want to have sex?” appeared on the screen, where anyone within the frame could see it. I couldn’t get VD, and nothing brings total strangers together like theoretically mutual masturbation. My avatar’s arms started the typing pantomime they did when I used my actual keyboard; I spelled out “yes please.” The man turned around, and I followed him over to two floating balls, one blue and one pink. He grabbed the blue one, which immediately threw his avatar into a thrusting animation next to, but not facing, me. I’d learned to manipulate objects in an exercise on Orientation Island, and though I picked up my arm and reached out and made little magic stars shoot from my fingers, I couldn’t touch the pink ball. I clucked my tongue in real life, frustrated, and my roommate looked over my shoulder at the computer.

“What are you doing?” she asked, seeing the man’s driving pelvis. “Your avatar is retarded. You’re avatarded.” Even the non-avatarded couples on the floor around us, though they were jerking about very near each other, didn’t seem to be connecting in any sensible way. Maybe the real show was going down in their private chats. But I didn’t know how to do that, and however I tried, I couldn’t figure out how to get on the receiving side of my partner, standing helplessly by as he plowed mechanically and fruitlessly at the wall.

In a month of Second Life, no matter what time I went in-world, the most popular spots were sex clubs, dance clubs, and earning benches. But entrepreneur Anshe Chung made a million dollars in RL with her SL businesses. Ben Folds Five gave a concert and Sweden opened an embassy and Kurt Vonnegut conducted a lecture and Arianna Huffington and Nancy Pelosi had avatars. In August 2009, Second Life users logged more than 40 million hours. Clearly, I was going to the wrong places. 

I called Mario Gerosa, the owner of Synthtravels, a virtual travel agency that gave tours of online worlds. Given what I’d seen so far, I’d figured he was a sleaze whose “red light” tours of SL were his most popular. He was, instead, the Milanese editor of Architectural Digest Italy who has written three books on virtual worlds and organized and curated an RL Florence exhibition of art generated in SL. The bulk of his clients, surprisingly, were companies considering opening a Second Life presence. Nearly every business now tries to connect with consumers and enhance brand awareness on websites and Facebook. Why not reach out on SL, where marketers can take advantage of the ultimate interactive technology?

“Second Life is going to be the big thing,” Gerosa said. “It is going to be more and more professional, more serious. Art, education, business”—already, hundreds of RL schools, bands, nonprofits, politicians, corporations, television shows, magazines, car companies, and governments have an SL presence—“we will have more and more of these things. Maybe the newspapers will talk less about them, but they will be more concentrated in Second Life. Until last year, we were just talking about how Second Life is for sex, things the newspapers and magazines like to talk about.”

Guilty. But Forbes had suggested in 2007, just six months after an article about Second Life’s extraordinary growth, that the virtual world wasn’t a viable place to do business after all, and American Apparel, the first RL retailer with an in-world presence, ultimately closed its SL doors. Still, Gerosa suggested that SL offered the potential for businesses to move from RL to SL entirely—once the world was ready for the transition. 

“We’re on the threshold of the next technological revolution,” Merrill Johnson, associate dean of the liberal arts college at the University of New Orleans, assured me. In mid-2008, he orchestrated the building of SL campuses for UNO—my graduate alma mater—as well as Tulane, Southeastern Louisiana University, and Southern University at New Orleans with a grant he’d gotten from the Louisiana Board of Regents. “Right now we’re at about the same place with 3-D web as we were with the internet in about 1994. Back then [the internet] was still a little bit of an iffy proposition for most people, who were a little bit unsure about what this new medium offered, and a little bit unsure about whether it was worth spending your time on, and whether it was safe.” He was the first—though hardly the last—to point out to me Gartner Research’s report that by 2011, 80 percent of regular internet users will have a second life (though not necessarily in Second Life—there are dozens of virtual worlds). 

“Seriously?” I asked Johnson. “Are you saying that some people are dragging their feet, but eventually everyone will have to be on it?”

“Yes,” he said emphatically. “Yes. We will get to this equilibrium, this middle ground, whereby 3-D web will become a normal part of our existence. We’ll all have our avatars running around out there.” Which could preclude our bodies running around out here. Johnson laid out a scenario in which my avatar could have my exact measurements and go to a store to try on a sweater with the manufacturer’s exact measurements. He was right that if that technology existed, the SL shopping experience would be far superior to the current 2-D web one; I could see exactly how the sweater would fit me in RL. In that future, I probably would stop going to stores entirely. I would have already were online clothes shopping as reliable as online book shopping, which I do all the time. SL would be faster! Easier! Involving less chitchat with salespeople!

“Second Life is just going to further the already extreme trend toward isolationism,” my friend Dan complained when I described the possible new order to him over the phone. He lives twenty-five hundred miles away, and we communicate far more often than would have been possible at any other time in history, by a long shot. “Physical isolation,” he clarified. No one ever argues that we’re not more in touch than ever. The concern among people like him, people like me, people who neither enjoy nor excel at utilizing the latest technological advances, people who have always had a strong need for tactile interaction, is that we’re doing less actual touching—of our conversation partners, of the sand on the shore that real waves lap against.

Since fall 2008, Dentyne has been running a “Make Face Time” campaign—selling gum by advertising physical interaction with other people. Even ten years ago, when I was in college, the evolution of instant messaging kept us in front of our dorm-room computers and out of the commons. Ditto, often, for Google’s chat application and my office conference room today. Or, as Castronova has put it, somewhat more terrifyingly, “My guess is that the impact on the real world really is going to involve folks disappearing from reality in a lot of places where we see them.” Though it sounds extreme, it’s already, to some extent, what’s happening. Advertising face time sounds absurd, but most of us would be liars if we didn’t admit that Dentyne’s message was aimed, at least a little—and justifiably—at us.

I ASKED LISA REIN to meet me in a coffee shop with her laptop to better show me where we were all going to disappear to. “People just don’t get it yet,” she said. She’s a tech consultant, teacher, and believer. As I watched, she teleported to her SL land, for which she pays twenty-eight real-life dollars a month: a green, waterfront knoll with some chairs and video screens on it. (When I cooed, “You have waterfront property,” she responded, “It’s all waterfront property. Everybody wants waterfront property. Because it’s a virtual world, everybody can get waterfront property!”) She’d decided not to build a house. (Her neighbor, whose property we could see when she turned her avatar’s head with the arrow key, lived in a giant pirate ship.)

Rein loaded a video she’d taken of a concert. An artist had set up a stage show involving his avatar in front of elaborate lights and big speakers while he streamed in the real-time sound of his playing. I tried to grasp why I’d want to have been virtually present at this when I could just watch a video of a live concert later.

“So the difference is that I could be listening to him while he’s playing and see this avatar at the same time?” I asked.

“Yeah, and your friends, and you’re all—it’s a social setting at that point, with everybody hearing it at once.”

She talked about the importance of a sense of presence, something avatars could provide that online chats couldn’t. Though that presence was often something like a big raccoon with boobs, it seemed to be a major selling point; UNO’s Johnson had mentioned it to me four times.

“For a university, Second Life offers a sense of presence in the classroom that you can’t get with regular internet courses,” he’d said. Indeed, when my UNO graduate program had been interrupted by Hurricane Katrina, I’d had to take all my courses online, like most students there, and they had been cold, impersonal affairs. “In a chat room, you sort of know where the other people are who are talking to you, but in a classroom with avatars you just turn your head and there he or she is. That gives it a greater sense of community.”

Rein showed me another video, a lecturer giving a talk. People had gathered on her lawn to watch him speak live. They sat next to each other, like at a movie in the park, watching the event stream live on a big screen. They could type messages to each other to discuss what was going on, and could also type messages to the lecturer, who would answer them in real life in real time, in front of both his virtual and physical audiences, the latter of which was also watching video of the attending avatars. Thus a lecture for a few dozen in Palo Alto had the potential to become a massive international salon. In 3-D web, as opposed to 2-D, as Johnson explained it, “The friction of distance is largely collapsed. It’s the ability to bring people—at least representations of people—together in space that makes this technology so appealing.” That is, 3-D web will supplant 2-D web because it restores a representation of what is usually missing when people interact online: a shared space. And the possibility of easy representation of presence is what could lead to 3-D web also supplanting some arenas of 3-D RL. 

That presence can be powerful. Though novice Isis Aszkenaze can barely walk, avatars can, for example, smile, converse, blush, exercise, and make eye contact. You can make your representation reflect your true emotions, or take on faker, more manipulative or more socially appropriate ones—just like in RL. “In an online world like Second Life,” writes Wagner James Au in his book The Making of Second Life, “the emotional intimacy is . . . enhanced by a visual representation that becomes your mental picture of the person somewhere out there on another computer. . . . The interaction is so realistic, so powerful, it can inspire the full gamut of human emotions, including desire, rage, and jealousy.” Who among us hasn’t experienced some, if not all, of these emotions over e-mail? Whether we realize it or not, aren’t we looking for a human connection every time we check our inboxes? Researchers at Stanford have shown that by using visual and behavioral mimicry, avatars can more easily persuade the humans behind other avatars. Many a real-life couple has demonstrated that virtual interactions can lead to (or undo) love. In fall 2008, a British woman sued her husband for divorce after discovering he was having an affair in Second Life.

“It’s not even a question anymore of replacing something in [real] life with something that’s just as good,” Rein said. “It’s gonna be doing things in virtual worlds that you can’t do in real life anyway.” Like meet a fellow vegan while sitting in your rural-Alaska basement.

Harvard Law School has held classes in Second Life. You can conduct transcontinental—or transatlantic—interviews there. People are staging protests and celebrating Earth Day and going to yoga classes, working together from more than one hundred countries. You can open a bank account, take your students on a field trip, conduct virtual visitation sessions in long-distance custody cases.

“The people who use virtual worlds connect with way more people every day than I do, I’m sure,” Dan had told me on the phone. “But I still don’t like it.” I didn’t, either, and not just because my inaugural SL excursions had been so solitary and bumbling. Even if, once you got the hang of it, virtual worlds did it better—especially if they did it better—they did indeed further the trend of bringing people together while keeping them apart. Every moment spent cultivating the “sense of community” in your online world, of course, requires spending less time in your actual one.

Ah, there was the trade-off. Like e-mail, this new source of interaction could never be the only source of interaction, whatever SL creator Rosedale said, not for a species whose entire social and genetic structure is rooted in tribes. My long-distance ex-girlfriend exchanged about eight hundred text messages a month, including many with me, but she still called me almost every night, and still flew a thousand miles to see me as often as she could manage. Second Life is to real life as talking on the phone to your girlfriend is to having her in your arms. Nothing mimics the powerful subtleties and complete and encompassing sensory experience of physical interaction with another person, or of a palm-rustling breeze, obviously. But like e-mail and texting, 3-D web is another virtual presence that makes demands on our actual presence. We already spend so little time with our girlfriends in our arms that Dentyne knows it’s reasonable to remind us to put it on our schedule.

I’d forgotten, before my conversation with Rein about “presence,” that in college, my best friend and I had gotten into a wicked fight when my frustration about her answering her cell phone when we were together culminated in my raising my voice at her in the middle of a mall. Since the instant-interaction-technology boom, we’ve all sat down for dinner or drinks across a table from someone who, despite available instant-interaction technology, just wanted to talk to us in person—and then pulled out his BlackBerry to check his e-mail eight times during the conversation. Or we’ve shaken our heads at an iPhone-wielding hiker. The more sophisticated our online presence becomes, the more compromised our real-life presence; the more present we are there, the less present we can be here, as we sacrifice being truly in touch for being constantly, relentlessly, everywhere all over the place in touch. If 3-D web was going to be such a draw, it could also further the trend of our being isolated from even the people right in front of us.

“This is very much like the Wild West of the internet,” Rein said. She teleported to Wishfest, a music and arts festival she was helping to coordinate. Her friend Somatika Xiao, one of its programmers, met us there—a buff, blue-haired avatar. We fell down a rabbit hole into an art installation. “Nobody understands it, they’re scared by it, but it turns out there’s certainly nothing to be afraid of. Just like the internet, people didn’t do it until they had to, and then something changed.” The two avatars stood in the middle of a vortex of slowly circling glass shards. When Rein’s avatar touched one, the floor turned into a swirling display of fractal art.

That was neat and all, but I couldn’t accept that she was right, that I was overreacting—that it was useless, or beside the point, to hate on how distracting virtual communication is from real-life communication. Because that would mean I needed to stop trying to fight off 3-D life. Because, logically, if everyone’s going to be doing it, and it makes actually present people less present, one sure way to not be distracted by virtual communication is to stake your presence there, completely embrace it, become part of it, live and interact right inside of it. And the idea of accepting that unsettled me right there in my real-life chair.

“Oh look!” Rein said suddenly, her eye caught by her computer screen.

A giant “HELLO” had appeared between the blue-haired avatar and Rein’s. “Aw, he’s saying hello to you.” She laughed.

I watched the screen, where the HELLO started flashing different colors. “Anyway, it has a lot of implications,” she went on. The HELLO replicated, then started spinning, the culmination of a series of complex original computer codes. From somewhere in California, Somatika Xiao had channeled a lot of energy into making an animation—this total stranger, for me. His buff, blue-haired avatar stood squarely in the center of the floor, waiting patiently amid his colorful greeting, looking at me dead-on through the screen. As Rein continued talking, I looked back at the avatar and intuitively, automatically, before I could hesitate, smiled warmly.

There is, of course, a caution for our species in Pig #6707. When an organism grows beyond its design, nature will determine it to fail—a fact of life, in the strictest sense. Nowhere in evolutionary theory is hypertrophic growth posited as the key to success. What is key is optimum size, what we’d more accurately call right size. All living things have a right size, and historically evolved to that size because it was optimal for survival. So, for example, elephants and giraffes and rhinoceroses, though comparatively huge, are in fact just the right size—their bigness operating as a defense against predators, allowing for greater reach in forage, and much else. The same goes for polar bears and walruses and whales, which require extra tissue volume to retain heat against cold water and long winters. Dinosaurs, as we all know, were likely the biggest creatures to walk the Earth, but bigness didn’t help them meet the challenge of changing conditions. The largest of the dinosaurs disappeared altogether, the smaller ones got even smaller and eventually evolved into birds, while the animals of more moderate size, the marsupials and primitive mammals, found that being small in the first place was a blessing.

On the cellular level, biologists have long understood that large cells, the kind found in cancer, are always unstable and heading for collapse. In physics, too, the principle of right size holds fast. “Atoms of middle weight are stable and inert,” writes Sir George Thomson, the nuclear physicist and Nobel laureate, “but the light as well as the heavy atoms have stores of energy. If one thinks of the heaviest atoms as overgrown empires which are ripe for dissolution and only held together by special efforts . . . one may think, on the other hand, of the lightest of the atoms as individuals which run together naturally for mutual help and readily coalesce to form stable tribes and communities.” As with atoms and empires, so also the stars, which when grown too big will collapse under their own weight in the spectacle of the supernova. So also for animal communities, which rarely aim for bigness. Birds fledge their nests; they don’t keep crowding in. Bees and ants split their colonies when they grow too large, decentralization as instinct. Trees self-prune when laden with too much ice or snow or assailed by wind, dropping limbs to sustain the trunk. Naturalized goldfish in the carp family, kept in an outdoor garden, will only grow to a size proportionate to their pond—unless they are fed (and if fed too much, they grow terribly obese and soon lose the knack for swimming, procreating, and everything else that makes a fish a fish).

Nothing in nature just keeps growing, except where the usual evolutionary constraints are removed from the picture. Isolation from predators, in the example of island gigantism, allowed a host of species to grow to outsize proportions. The elephant bird of Madagascar, the giant gecko of New Zealand, the giant ducks of Hawaii, the giant rabbits of Mediterranean islands, the famed dodo—all were extinguished at astonishing speed after meeting the wily Homo sapiens and his diminutive camp followers (dogs, cats, rats). Without effective competition to keep them fit, the island gigantics were in fact terribly vulnerable when conditions changed.

The United States, it would seem, is suffering its own kind of island gigantism. Bigness is the prejudice of American life, our cultural albatross, the axiom being that when something is big it is automatically better. Why we’ve been saddled with love of bigness as a people perhaps comes down to the matter of geography, the vastness and richness that the landscape offered for the taking from the moment of European settlement. Size was our birthright, our conditioning, the justification for our exceptionalism, bigness our manifest destiny, and for a long time, whole centuries, it worked. The free land and timber and animals to be hunted down and coal and oil and ore to be dug out of the ground made us very wealthy very fast, taught us that growthmania was the norm, the shape of progress, the American way.

Thus, we prefer our Big Macs and our Whoppers, our food portions supersized, our big cars and sprawling cities, our enormous football players (growing bigger every year, the average offensive lineman now topping three hundred pounds), our big breasts and big penises and big houses (up from an average of 1,200 square feet in 1950 to 2,216 square feet today), our big armies with big reach, and, though we complain about it incessantly, big government that spends big money running up big debt (more now than at any other period in our history). That we allow corporations to grow to outrageous size is just another symptom of the disease. Bigness worship permeates every layer of the culture; it is racked into our brains with every turn of the advertising screw; it is a totalizing force.

WHEN LOUIS BRANDEIS WROTE The Curse of Bigness in 1934, he had been a lawyer for many years and, famously, a Supreme Court justice, and much of his work in the courts was busting up bigness. He was particularly concerned about the corporate monopolies that afflicted American life at the turn of the twentieth century. The Curse of Bigness was not a big book, because the arguments were pretty obvious. The great robber baron trusts—in oil, rubber, steel, tobacco, sugar, and railroads (and let’s not forget the Writing Paper Trust, the Woolen Trust, the Upper Leather Trust, the Paper Bag Trust)—had rigged bids, defrauded patentees, crushed labor movements, and could sway prices in any direction regardless of supply or demand. The ur-trust that by 1904 controlled 91 percent of U.S. oil production, Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, was found by the Justice Department to have secured its position via “discriminatory practices in favor of the combination by railroad companies; restraint and monopolization by control of pipe lines . . . ; contracts with competitors in restraint of trade; . . . espionage of the business of competitors, the operation of bogus independent companies”—the stratagems as expectable as they were ugly.

The threat that behemoths like Standard Oil posed to the republic, wrote Brandeis, was their concentration of economic power and decision making to the extent that they were effectively a state within the state, operating under their own laws. Many of the trusts were shattered, in a long struggle that Brandeis pioneered. It was his advocacy that helped push into effective action the antitrust mechanisms in government (the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914, the Federal Trade Commission), which led to the breakup of Standard Oil and many of its sister monopolies by 1911. “American development can come on the lines on which we seek it, and the ideals which we have can be attained, only if side by side with political democracy comes industrial democracy,” Brandeis wrote. “It is the relatively small man who pre-eminently needs the aid and solicitous care of industry and government. We have, gentlemen, to bear all the time that democratic view in mind.”

But we have not. Today we find ourselves in an unprecedented age of corporate gigantism. This situation is characterized not by the outright monopolies that worried Brandeis, but by the rise of oligopolies, a few very obese firms, the Big Three or Big Six, dominating their sectors while being insulated from failure by the hand of government. Republican and Democratic administrations alike for the last thirty years, spellbound by so-called laissez-faire ideology, abandoned their antitrust duties and watched as the total value of mergers and acquisitions rose to an unprecedented $20 trillion—abetting, in other words, the growth of stupendous privileges in the corporatocracy. At the same time, federal and state governments have done most everything they can to ignore, discourage, and imperil the small man in the world of business.

It’s an old story, and it bears repeating: Government subsidies favor large-scale standardized activity (in farming, manufacturing, retail—the list is long) at the expense of the local, the small, the diverse, the upstart. By 2005, four firms controlled 60 percent of the nation’s grain business. The four largest meatpackers controlled 70 percent of beef supply. In some states, the four largest grocery chains controlled as much as 88 percent of all retail sales. Today, a handful of merged energy companies, the Big Five, dominate the petroleum business, with ExxonMobil, Chevron-Texaco, Conoco-Phillips, BP, and Royal Dutch / Shell proving, in the words of Lord Browne, former chief executive of British Petroleum, that “many of the components of the old Standard Oil [trust have] been brought together.” The pattern of oligopoly holds in banking (Citigroup, Chase, and Bank of America now issuing one out of every two mortgages, two out of every three credit cards), accounting, tobacco, automobiles (the triopoly of GM, Ford, and Chrysler), defense, steel, telecommunications (Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint-Nextel), pharmaceuticals, airlines (Delta, American, United), in every major stage of the food business (even including grain elevator storage), and in the generation, transmission, and local distribution of electricity.

What we’re told is that all this consolidation, this predilection for bigness, always and every time—per the usual knee-jerk size-valuation—brings “synergies,” “economies of scale,” efficiency, innovation. But the opposite is too often the case. To take perhaps the obvious example: The Big Three automakers, which for the last half-century have trumpeted “efficiency” and “innovation” as the bywords to justify their great size, in fact failed over the years to produce automobiles at prices and quality comparable to smaller Japanese automakers like Honda and Nissan, the U.S. oligopoly by the 1980s requiring nearly twice as many engineering hours per new car project, and today taking up to two weeks to change plants for new model assembly while little Honda does it in one night. And all this for products that are more expensive and less advanced than those of the competitors. GM, among all automakers, was routinely the least efficient, the least visionary, its mastodonic bureaucracy trained to crush new ideas in the cradle. “At GM, if you see a snake, the first thing you do is to hire a consultant on snakes,” said Ross Perot during his tenure on GM’s board of directors. “Then you get a committee on snakes, and then you can discuss it for a couple of years. The most likely course of action is—nothing.” One might go so far as to charge that the neglect and recalcitrance of the Big Three in the field of invention, their strangling of innovation, has been a danger to the public and disastrous for the environment. They ignored and sometimes actively suppressed safety innovations (seatbelts, padded dashboards, shatterproof glass), a decision that arguably cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of motorists who otherwise might have survived crashes. They have consistently resisted fuel economy and emissions technologies. They colluded to destroy public transit in cities throughout the nation, with the planned effect of getting more people into cars (which rendered cities, by default, more destructively auto-dependent). They killed the electric car—invented out of their own labs, years before anyone had heard of a Prius (and now, as it happens, they are seeking tax dollars to reinvent it). If the nation is to be efficient in its use of fast-dwindling fossil fuels, innovative in curbing pollution and greenhouse gases—effective at imagining even the possibility of a sustainable future—the Big Three are, and will continue to be, a monstrous hindrance.

But why confine ourselves to automakers? Look at U.S. Steel, the “big sprawling inert giant,” in the words of the company’s own assessment, which survives only by government subsidy and protectionist measures from friends in Congress. The smaller steel companies, the so-called mini-mills operating throughout the U.S., produce at lower cost and with fewer man-hours and better pay for workers. Or look at IBM, where a senior vice-president once described the managerial hierarchy as “a giant pool of peanut butter we have to swim through.” The company was out-invented at every turn of the 1980s, in the dawn of personal computing, by upstart Microsoft, which preyed on the inventions of Apple. (Microsoft today is an oligopolist like no other, with the Windows operating system installed on 95 percent of personal computers worldwide.)

Or consider how giant pharmaceutical firms license scores of products from tiny innovative biotech labs every year, perfect and mass-market the inventions of the little companies, but invent few, if any, new drugs inside their own labs. It has always been thus: the big private research laboratories of the modern age are marked by their creative barrenness, a pattern identified by no less a luminary than the former vice-president of the General Electric Company back in 1953: “Not a single distinctively new electric home appliance has ever been created by one of the giant concerns—not the first washing machine, electric range, dryer . . . razor, lawn mower, freezer, air conditioner, vacuum cleaner, dishwasher, or grill. The record of the giants is one of moving in, buying out, and absorbing after the fact.”

Kodachrome film? Not invented by Eastman Kodak, but by two musicians in a bathroom. The earliest turbojet engines? Blew in from none of the major aircraft firms. The Google search platform now fast becoming—in one of those tasteless ironies we have learned to expect—an internet monopoly? Conceived by two geeks in a dorm room. You don’t paint the Sistine ceiling by committee, though perhaps one day a corporation will try. Creativity, in any case—the radical’s creativity, which is the only kind—is not what the corporation looks for. Rather, it pursues what William Whyte called “the fight against genius.” It looks for Whyte’s “Organization Man,” who seeks protection, safety, succor in bigness, who can be relied on to conform and submit. What it lacks in creativity, of course, the big corporation makes up for in coercion.

THE STANDARD OIL PLAYBOOK, it turns out, is very much alive, because with corporate obesity always comes the institutionalization of unfairness. Economists Walter Adams and James Brock have done more than any contemporary scholars to chronicle the effects on the ground. They find, for example, that the oligopolists in the grain and meat industries drive down prices for family farmers and ranchers, starving the small men out of business. The defense industry, they report, consolidates in the 1990s, and what follows is an explosion in contract fixing and price fraud, with procurement costs skyrocketing at the Pentagon. The oil oligopoly intentionally withholds gasoline supplies from the market in 2001—a “profit-maximizing strategy,” in the words of the Federal Trade Commission—costing Americans billions of dollars in overcharges. The giant airlines tacitly collude to fix prices, always higher and higher, and so do the automakers, while service and quality continue to decline. In the ninety-seven top radio markets, where two broadcasters now control some 80 percent of the spectrum, we hear allegations of censorship, and we stop hearing the music and opinions considered unpalatable by corporate ownership. The power of bigness everywhere corrodes the regulatory instruments of government through the usual means (lobbyists, campaign money, revolving doors, conflicts of interest). And all this is tolerated, which is to say it is not questioned (so much for regulating with a “democratic view in mind”). It can’t be otherwise, when money and influence grows with every aggrandizement of industry, and corruption of the state is only a matter of the size of the checks one can write, the stature of the executives one can place to gorge in the henhouse. American government, write Adams and Brock, “is in constant danger of being transformed into a welfare state for powerful private interests.” The danger has swallowed us whole; we are now living inside its belly.

I think particularly of Goldman Sachs, one of the most powerful players in the banking oligopoly, which for two decades has been a berserker in the marketplace, sowing discord, leading people into shoddy investments and out of their homes, making huge money in the process, all while dictating terms to government and looting the public treasury. Matt Taibbi, in an article in Rolling Stone, recently deconstructed how effective Goldman has been in exploiting its bigness. The achievements in regulatory capture alone are momentous: Bush’s treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, architect of the 2008 bailouts, was a former CEO of Goldman; Robert Rubin, the treasury secretary under Clinton, spent twenty-six years at Goldman; former Goldman director Ed Liddy was placed in charge of the bailout of crumbling insurance goliath AIG (which owed Goldman billions of dollars); the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York were Goldmanites; and on and on.

Taibbi reports that Goldman was among the chief promoters of the tech stock bubble of the 1990s (and profited from the collapse), the real estate bubble of the 2000s (and profited from the collapse), and throughout these debacles it was variously accused of securities fraud, tacit bribery, insider trading. Goldman’s commodities bubble predations in 2008 are perhaps most illustrative of how a bigness complex with tentacular reach touches all Americans. With friends placed on the Commodities Futures Trade Commission, Goldman quietly secured an exemption from a Depression-era federal law, specifically the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936, which limits the number of speculators in the commodities market, stating that if speculation gets too big in those basics of existence—corn, wheat, coal, oil—it’s a risk to society as a whole. Armed with the exemption, Goldman was free to set its traders loose in the commodities markets to balloon oil prices even though oil production was up and consumption was down. Due in part to Goldman’s manipulations, Taibbi writes, the average barrel of oil in the summer of 2008 was traded twenty-seven times before it reached the consumer, and with the parasitic middleman taking his cut through aggressive—often lawless—interference in the laws of the marketplace, we had four-dollar-a-gallon prices that crimped the livelihoods of tens of millions of drivers.

For this good work, the company demanded a bailout, stretching its many arms to twist the necks of these same taxpayers. Goldman executives were brought in to help plan the bailout arrangements, for themselves and other banks, and the $700 billion was dispersed mostly in secret, with little or no oversight. They helped to oversee the AIG bailout, because Goldman’s investments were bound up in AIG, and, as anticipated, when AIG received $85 billion at the direction of ex-Goldmanite Paulson at the Treasury, $13 billion was promptly routed from AIG to Goldman. Goldman then machinated for its own bailout, while Paulson opted to let Goldman’s chief competitor, Lehman Brothers, collapse for the pickings. This had the benefit of allowing Goldman to sop up Lehman’s share of the market, so that Goldman, among the prime perpetrators of excess that led to the crash, now grows even bigger, presumably to go on to further excesses.

What must be understood is that this bailing out of bigness is nothing new. It happened, for example, with Chrysler in 1979—$4 billion was allocated by Congress so the company could continue making stupid decisions and crappy cars—and with Long Term Capital Management in 1998, after the hedge fund invested too much money in too much risk, which is just the model of profligacy required for a company to achieve the coveted status of “too big to fail.” The difference in the recent bailout is only its size, stretching into the hundreds of billions of dollars, saddling generations of Americans with government debt larger than any single generation past had to contend with.

There is no learning curve, only the upward sweep of profits and size and government intervention. Bailing out bigness masterfully incentivizes bigness, because to be big is apparently the ultimate indemnity against the rigors of the marketplace, i.e., against the real world in which you and I are supposed to muck around for a living. And the bigger the losses among the giants, the better—how else can one threaten the “system” and demand a bailout and grow still bigger? The small community and state banks in boring places like North Dakota are holding course just fine in the throes of the “crisis”—they were humble and frugal—as are many smaller banks that operate nationally. But the necessary consequence of bailing out losers like AIG and Goldman Sachs and the other giants is that the small guys, who were modestly surviving, lose business to the subsidized goliaths. The bailouts in their scale have one other big incentivizing consequence: they reframe the mistakes of the private sector as social catastrophes, which makes us all vulnerable by encouraging the socialization of foolishness and greed that would better remain the burden of boardroom executives. The private enterprise economy is revolutionized in the most cynical and ironic fashion, so that unfairness bears down like a jackboot on the small man, while it’s socialism for the rich, the big, the abusive, the powerful, the ones doing the stomping. “Marx, in his innocent, and now obsolete, way thought it would be the workers who would force the pace of socialism,” wrote John Kenneth Galbraith way back in the comparative innocence of 1985. “He must be looking with surprise at the way, in our time, it is the bankers and the big industrialists who lead the march, carry the flag.” And lo, swollen with government money, while the world economy immolated throughout the summer and fall of 2009, Goldman Sachs posted its largest profits ever.

In 1834, Roger B. Taney, who would become chief justice of the Supreme Court, warned about the supersized hostage-taking capacity of big concentrations in business. Listening to the bailout justifications throughout 2009, one could appreciate the fatefulness in Taney’s message. The big interests, he observed, “may now demand the possession of the public money . . . and if these objects are yielded to them from apprehensions of their power, or from the suffering which rapid curtailments on their part are inflicting on the community, what may they next not require? Will submission render such a corporation more forbearing in its course?” Ask Goldman Sachs.

The Founding Fathers were concerned about the problem from day one, though they described the influence and power of bigness in terms of “factions,” those groups of citizens—and now, more problematically, in a way the founders did not foresee, those groups of fake citizens known as corporations—“who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” Madison’s solution in the Federalist Papers was to allow a multiplicity of interests that, ideally, would balance each other out, so that no one interest could hold sway. In other words, competition for power among factions—that itself could only function in a decentralized system—was key to keeping all factions free.

The principles of representative democracy and the principles of free-market economics were able to coexist in the small-scale schematic of eighteenth-century America. But the bigness complexes of today require that we sacrifice one or the other. We can refuse to bail out the big companies while letting the economy falter—dragging into penury no small number of Americans—and fail in our oath to caretake the interests of the people. Or we can sacrifice free-market principles and fund the bailouts and let corporate obesity run riot till it crashes power-drunk into another wall—and it will, it always does. “The irony,” says James Brock, “is that we have established a reverse economic Darwinism, where we ensure the survival of the fattest, not the fittest, the biggest, not the best.”

THE 9/11 ATTACKS presented one of those classic moments when bigness failed spectacularly. The $75-billion-and-counting “central intelligence” apparatus, this lumbering giantist peanut-butter bureaucracy, was outsmarted by a dispersed, small-scale, “small-cell” operation of nineteen men armed with box cutters and bad English and funded by a Saudi exile languishing in the mountains of Afghanistan. I got on the phone recently with a sociologist at Yale University named Charles Perrow, who a few years ago wrote a book called The Next Catastrophe, in which he singles out Islamist terrorist networks for their adaptive dexterity, their adroitness in adversity, and for the schooling they offer in the vulnerability of being too big, which is to say too centralized. Terrorist networks “are very reliable,” says Perrow. “They can live largely off the land, can remain dormant for years with no maintenance costs and few costs from unused invested capital, and individual cells are expendable. There are multiple ties between cells, providing redundancy, and taking out any one cell does not endanger the network.”

Islamist terrorists operate, to their credit, Perrow says, by virtue of the same “resiliencies” and “decentralizations” that characterize small-firm networks, those systems of disparate though interrelated companies that most economists would associate with low economic development—because of their smallness—but that in fact do very well while spreading the wealth. Looking at small-firm networks, where each firm had twenty or fewer employees, Perrow found “efficiency, resiliency, reliability, innovativeness and positive social outcomes” in Japan, Taiwan, Italy, across Northern Europe, and, not least, in the Silicon Valley of the United States. Dependency, the chief factor in Perrow’s understanding of how catastrophes past and future can envelop whole societies, was what small-firm networks cut out of the equation. “Dependencies are low because there are multiple sources of suppliers, producers, customers, and distributors,” he writes. “Wealth is decentralized, since it is spread over many units, and thus the economic power of individuals or single units is kept in check while the power of the network is enhanced.”

It echoes what the founders were thinking, though presently such thoughts are considered wholly un-American. The American way in business and government and infrastructure is to systematically increase dependencies and call it “efficiency.” Perrow singles out three areas of dangerous concentration: in energy, in populations, and in economic/political power. In energy, there is not simply the fact that U.S. refining capacity agglomerates just where hurricanes like to hit, but that industrial storage and toxic processing facilities sit one atop the other, some of them prone to explosion, such as the ruptured oil storage tanks in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It’s not just cities too big for the floodplains in which they sprawl, but the fact that they are supplied by electricity grids too centralized and increasingly prone to blackouts like the one that surprised much of the American Northeast in 2003, resultant from a single broken link in the grid. It’s not just that the grids are centralized and so tightly coupled, but that they became this way because energy companies, growing into oligopoloid monoliths, captured and undermined the centralized regulatory agencies of government. In Perrow’s analysis, it all interlinks, cross-pollinates, conduces to perpetuate ever-increasing bigness. The bigger and more complex and more total our systems and institutions become, Perrow is saying, the weaker and more vulnerable they really are.

Anybody who’s been on a camping trip with too many friends can understand Perrow’s thinking. Small groups of people prove to be more cohesive, effective, creative in getting things done. In the 1970s, the English management expert and business scholar Charles Handy put the ideal group size in work environments at “between five and seven” for “best participation, for highest all-round involvement.” Alexander Paul Hare, author of the classic Creativity in Small Groups, showed that groups sized between four and seven were most successful at problem solving, largely because small groups, as Hare observed, are more democratic: egalitarian, mutualist, co-operative, inclusive. Hundreds of studies in factories and workplaces confirm that workers divided into small groups enjoy lower absenteeism, less sickness, higher productivity, greater social interaction, higher morale—most likely because the conditions allow them to engage what is best in being human, to share the meaning and fruits of their labor.

This might have something to do with the evolution of the human brain over the hundred thousand years that man survived by hunting and gathering in small tribes. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that the regions of the brain controlling emotion are hard-wired for a small-group dynamic, that the frontal cortex itself is severely limited in the amount of information it can synthesize on a large scale. Indeed, these same researchers of group dynamics show that a disturbing thing happens as groups expand. Large groups develop quickly into a committee structure, with an executive or leadership that directs and often dominates the decision-making process. Power, in other words, is centralized, hierarchies are built, authority is increasingly top-down, consent is gently coerced or it arrives by default, as members of the group simply stop participating—not speaking, or initiating, or deciding, or acting, their invisibility growing in proportion as the group grows in size. In short, the experience of most members of the big group could accurately be described as one of alienation, powerlessness, meaninglessness.

Needless to say, in our very modern world of enormous institutions, we are daily confronted with this alienating experience, not merely in corporations, banks, automakers—to whom we say, “Yes, too big to fail, and nothing to be done about it!”—but in our most prestigious universities, our proudest labor unions, our staunchest advocates for environmental action and civil rights, our best hospitals, our gigantic corporate organic farms, not to mention the multi-trillion-dollar machine of a welfare government—the social safety nets, the regulatory functions, the housing and healthcare authorities, and all its octopus arms that reach into the lives of citizens. In such environments, people, as Paul Goodman once put it, are reduced to personnel, certainly if they don’t secure a place at the top of the heap or near it, which most do not; they become functionaries, bureaucrats, organizers for the organization, jugglers of abstractions. Goodman, a self-described anarchist, observed in 1963 that “no matter how benevolent the goals, the style of execution is dehumanizing. So long as people are transformed into personnel—management-personnel, labor-personnel, professional-personnel,” and to this Goodman goes on to add sales-personnel, consumer-personnel, client-personnel, voting-personnel, to which we might as well add military-personnel, security-personnel, police-personnel, killing-personnel—“we cannot expect the organization to be internally humanized by their persons, for there are no persons.”

IT WAS E. F. SCHUMACHER WHO, in the 1950s, as the chief economist at the British National Coal Board, came to the quite reasonable—at the time unthinkable—conclusion that energy supply, the coal that England so ravenously was burning up, could not satisfy an ideology of unlimited growth. It was, Schumacher concluded, a suicide pact with Planet Earth. What Schumacher offered instead in the book that made him famous, Small Is Beautiful, is the common-sensical idea that man is small, therefore should think small—that is, think along the lines of human scale.

When in 1955 Schumacher was invited by the government of Burma as an advisor on economic development, he understood at once that the rote econometrics of the West had little to offer the Burmese. Schumacher fell in love with the country, the people, the culture, and it was Buddhism that most impressed him, Buddhism in practice in the little villages, the Buddhism of the Middle Path. The experience was transformative, inspiring him to gestate the notion of a “Buddhist economics,” an “economics as if people mattered.” Instead of demanding that his hosts modernize, he urged the Burmese to hold fast to the middle path, employing energy-light, human-scale technology—what he called “democratic or people’s technology”—to develop the economy on the organic scale of the village. Instead of industrial irrigation super-projects, there would be drip-irrigation and foot-operated treadle pumps (which have worked in Burma to this day). Instead of breakneck urbanization and huge capital investments and centralized planning, the Burmese would do better to decentralize as much as possible, he said, to keep decision-making local for the local production of food and handicrafts to be locally consumed.

Mahatma Gandhi’s development plans for India were much along the same lines. “If we feel the need of machines,” said Gandhi, “we certainly will have them. Every machine that helps every individual has a place, but there should be no place for machines [that] turn the masses into mere machine minders.” What in the intervening years has been the alternative? In China, great leaps forward have poisoned the rivers and the lakes and the fields and the coastal beds, displacing huge populations, concentrating them in the filth of cities as machine minders, impoverishing every rank of traditional society while enriching a very few, for whom tradition is nothing more than an attachment to the nonmaterial.

Of course, among the economists for whom growth was the unquestioned ideology—growth for its own sake, the ideology of the cancer cell—Schumacher was considered a crazy old man, a godforsaken crank. And to that he was said to have replied that a crank is small, safe, cheap, comprehensible, nonviolent, and efficient, a perfect tool of intermediate technology.

Let us be cranks then, though the consensus conspires against us—against the very notion that the small-scale and low-tech may hold the means to a workable future. We can start by downsizing the monster corporations. The antitrust law is there, waiting, a fist in our pockets. Let’s have a third party in politics that might dare to confront bigness—hell, let’s have a second party, given that Republicans and Democrats are at odds only in the perfumes they wear. Let’s have ten or twenty parties. Let’s encourage local production with local labor within easy commuting distances; pay a living wage; restructure land-use patterns to provide easy access to work; grow most of our food close to where it will be consumed. Let’s dream small.

Of course, bigness may still be needed to provide certain goods and services, but the most realistic future for humankind lies in a determined return to the human scale. The transformation will no doubt be costly in the short term, that is, less profitable for Big Ag and Big Oil and Big Coal and all the other bigness complexes, but it will produce vast benefits to social health in the long run. And how shall we quantify that kind of quality? Not in the usual gibberish of national product—the original definition of gross meaning “repellently fat”—or exports and imports, or capital-output ratios, or capitalization, not with the metrics of the idiot savants in the finance industry, who produce nothing one can hold in the hand, nothing of real value in a human-scale economy. Instead of depending on slave labor abroad, we can have jobs at home for the things we need, not the things we are told to want. Instead of processed food, we can have fresh food. Instead of faraway hierarchies, we can have local networks. Instead of militarism, cooperation. Instead of repression, innovation. Instead of homogenous, homegrown.

It goes against every urging in our recent history and our covetous training, and therefore it may only happen when some external force comes into play. Most likely that force will be the limits of Planet Earth, and our fitness will be determined, as it was with the dinosaurs, by our ability to adapt to the new conditions. Or not. We might do well to remember that the laws of nature are bigger than Goldman Sachs or the Big Three or the United States of America. Until then, we will continue to think of our systems as too big to fail, during which time we may end up presiding with a blithe mind over their failure—which, ultimately, will mean our failure.

Meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today. They were my kin.

There are understandable personal reasons for wanting to believe in the invincibility of an oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, there’s no reason to undertake the often arduous, sometimes dangerous, always necessary work of organizing, preparing to dismantle, and then actually dismantling this (or any) oppressive system. If you can convince yourself the system is invincible, you can, with fully salved conscience, make yourself and your own as comfortable as you can within the confines of the oppressive system while allowing this oppressive system to continue. There are certainly reasons that those in power want us to see them as invincible. Abusive systems, from the simplest to the most sophisticated, from the familial to the social and political and religious, work best when victims and bystanders police themselves. And one of the best ways to get victims and bystanders to police themselves is for them to internalize the notion that the abusers are invincible and then, even better, to get them to attempt to police anyone who threatens to break up the stable abuser/victim/bystander triad.

And meanwhile, another 120 species went extinct today.

But those who believe in the invincibility of perpetrators and their systems are wrong. Systems of power are created by humans and can be stopped by humans. Those in power are never supernatural or immortal, and they can be brought down. People with a lot fewer resources collectively than any single reader of Orion have fought back against systems of domination, and won. There’s no reason the rest of us can’t do the same. But resistance starts by believing in it, not by talking yourself out if it. And certainly not by trying to talk others out of it.

History provides many examples of successful resistance, as do current events. The Irish nationalists, the abolitionists, the suffragettes—I could fill the rest of this column with examples. Recently, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has, through attacks on oil pipelines and the kidnapping of oil workers, disabled as much as 40 percent of the oil industry’s output from Nigeria, and some oil companies have even considered pulling out of the region. If those of us who are the primary beneficiaries of this global system of exploitation had 1 percent of their courage and commitment to the land and community, we could be equally effective if not more so. We have vastly more resources at our disposal and the best we can come up with is, what, compost piles? The world is being killed and many environmentalists still think that riding bikes is some sort of answer?

Some people maintain that resistance cannot accomplish anything unless we first change the underlying culture; changing culture, then, is where the real work must lie. Setting aside the fact that sometimes people, organizations, and institutions are just wrong and need to be stopped—the Nazis come to mind, as does the KKK at its peak of power, the robber barons, and so on—the more important point is that resistance and working for cultural change are in no way mutually exclusive, but rather are deeply complementary, which makes the complaints of the lifestylists all the more nonsensical. I’m not trying to stop them from saving seeds or handmaking scythes; I’m merely saying that those activities are insufficient to stop this culture from killing the planet.

Yes, there absolutely needs to be the creation of a new culture with new values (or, really, tens of thousands of cultures, each emerging from its own landbase, including the re-emergence of extant indigenous cultures). But the people involved in that cultural creation must see themselves as part of a resistance movement that supports and encourages action against the forces that are dismembering our planet, or, at least, that doesn’t actively discourage organized resistance whenever the subject is raised. Otherwise that nice, new culture is simply a fantasy, unhooked from anything in the real, physical world, incapable of ever being effective, and, ultimately, a position of privilege. Maud Gonne, for instance, was intimately involved with the Gaelic Revival, promoting literature and language preservation. She also did prisoner support, worked with the Land League, and got arrested herself. She almost died on a hunger strike and won some basic rights for Irish prisoners in the process (and her son Seán MacBride eventually became chief of staff of the IRA, helped found Amnesty International, and in 1974 won the Nobel Peace Prize). It is insulting to her memory and to the memory of so many other brave people to state categorically that resistance doesn’t work. Of course it works. But people have to actually do it, and keep doing it for the long haul.

Why are even those who call themselves environmentalists not talking about what really needs to happen to save this planet? Burning fossil fuel, for example, has to stop. This isn’t negotiable. You cannot negotiate with physical reality. It doesn’t matter how or why this burning stops. It needs to stop. We need to stop it—need to stop doing it ourselves, and need to stop others, especially giant corporate others, from doing it too.

We need organized political resistance. Power needs to be named and then dismantled systematically. This requires joint action of whatever sort is deemed necessary. While the frontline actionists are taking apart systems of power and fighting to defend wild nature, the culture of resistance is providing loyalty and cooperation and material support, as well as building up alternate institutions—from means of bringing justice to economic systems to food supply chains to schools to new literary forms—that can take over as the system comes down. The template is not hard to understand. It will take its own culturally appropriate forms. The same actions have been undertaken by resistance movements everywhere—the Spanish anarchists, the American patriots. It’s not conceptually difficult.

But instead of supporting the necessity for action (and we’re not yet even talking about what forms that action should or could take), or at the very least not attempting to discourage action at every turn, so much of the environmental movement keeps insisting that only personal lifestyle change is possible. No other oppressed group in history has ever taken such a stand. Right now, a small group of half-starved, poverty-stricken people in Nigeria have brought the oil industry in that country to its knees. They remember what it is to love their land and their communities—perhaps because they are not drowning in privilege, but in the toxic sludge of oil extraction. Is that what it will take to get environmentalists in the U.S. to fight back?

MEND has said to the oil industry: “It must be clear that the Nigerian government cannot protect your workers or assets. Leave our land while you can or die in it.” There is more courage, integrity, intelligence, and pragmatism in that statement from MEND than in any statement I have ever read by any American environmentalist, including myself. We need to accept the fact that making this type of statement (and being prepared to act on it) might be necessary to preserve a living planet.

Some people may be willing to give up on life on this planet without resisting. I’m not one of them.

When the Soviet government officially incorporated the region into its empire in 1917, it began transforming the rivers into a web of irrigation canals that brought cotton production to the area on a massive scale. Such large quantities of water were diverted that the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest inland sea, began to disappear, leaving salt and dust storms in its place. When Moscow’s rule ended in 1991, five new Central Asian nations appeared: Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and the Kyrgyz Republic. They are burdened with plunging economies, artificial borders, and a growing environmental crisis.

Despite the divisions that have emerged since the Soviet Union collapsed, the two rivers that run through the countries still bind them inextricably. Two thousand five hundred kilometers long, the Amu Darya is formed from the thousands of glacial mountain streams that feed the Panj and Vakhsh rivers in Tajikistan. It begins a longer, slower, flatter course between deserts downstream, where Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan come together. Stopped up at man-made dams and reservoirs along the way, it fractures into a maze of irrigation canals so that the river itself now vanishes well before reaching the Aral Sea.

The Syr Darya, which carries only half the water of its counterpart, is created from the Naryn and Kara Darya rivers in the mountains of the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan. Also dammed and diverted, it runs flat across central Uzbekistan and southern Kazakhstan, eventually draining into the tiny North Aral Sea, which is now separated from the dried South Aral by the Kokaral dike.

This is a place where the connection between the Earth and human life is at once plainly visible and complex, where the forward flow of time and progress are not a given. I have seen cotton harvested on pesticide-laden land be later burned in a ritual celebrating rebirth and spring. I have traveled along the Qaraqum Canal, which, running fourteen hundred kilometers through Turkmenistan, is the world’s longest; it has turned barren desert into a lush landscape of fishing and farming and beekeeping. 

As these rivers have splintered on natural and unnatural paths, so have empires and cultures. Tombs, caravansaries, consulates, coins, teapots, palaces, cell phones, tractors, Mercedes, prayer books, fortresses, factories, bones, gas rigs, and armor of the past all remain in varying states of decay and revival. Soviet missile heads become garden boxes in western Turkmenistan. In a local history museum in the former Aral port town of Moynaq, half the formaldehyde solution embalming Aral Sea fish has evaporated like the vanished sea itself. Here the cracks of history exist together with the present, and the present carries no more weight than the past.

In America’s mass consciousness, Central Asia has transformed from being part of a powerful communist Cold War enemy into a place where the threat of Islamic extremism is imminent—all within the short span of my adult lifetime. Amid the clutter of preformed judgments that surface during the course of this work, it is always a comfort to return to the rivers. No matter how many different names they have been given, or empires have ruled them, or canals have been made from them, I can still see the rivers. Traveling along them offers the closest thing to truth that I can find.

Pebbles from Canada, pebbles from Cleveland, pebbles from carriageways in Caledonia. Maybe the echoes of miners reverberate in my genes; maybe I share a That’s-Pretty-and-I-Want-It covetousness with thieves and princesses and bowerbirds. Maybe I hope someday I’ll finally overcome the fundamental truth of pebbles and find one that looks prettier dry than wet. Or maybe I’m just an introvert, a down-gazer, a bad conversationalist.

But every night as I wash another dish or fill another mug with water, my little hoard stares up at me with its thousand imperturbable faces.

Oh, him, the stones seem to whisper. He’ll be gone soon enough.

Take this nugget of quartz: milky, egg-shaped, the size of a breath mint. Quartz is hard, harder than all the common minerals, and on its journey from mountain to dust this pebble has reached the way station of my kitchen counter by passing through an almost unfathomable series of gauntlets. This little thing is a master of endurance: survivor, abider, traveler; inside it is folded a story of creation and time so large it threatens the imagination. 

Born as a crystalline vein inside some huge extrusion of granite, it probably rode a thrust fault into the light a few hundred million years ago, helped bulldoze up a mountain range, got pulverized by a glacier. Over a few millennia ice, weight, and lichen weathered the vein into boulders, the boulders into stones. Maybe this pebble was driven by a cloudburst into a great fan of other pebbles; maybe it was—after another ten thousand rainstorms—sucked back underground where it was compressed into conglomerate by heat and pressure, until it rose again, smaller and rounder, to be polished for a few more centuries in a creek bed before the creek disappeared and the sand swallowed it, incubated it, and hatched it years later into the gulch below my house.

Until last Tuesday, when it traveled into the whimsy of my frail attention. Into my pocket, onto the pile behind the sink. It sits there now and dares me to outlast it.

The lesson of rocks, of course, is not a lesson in permanence but rather the opposite. Change, that’s the only music a pebble (or person) can count on, and in the lifetimes of stones change comes in relentless concatenation on scales so large our brains aren’t quite evolved to understand them.

Over time the landscapes beyond our kitchen windows rise and fall as surely as ocean waves. The green and blue maps tacked to the walls of our children’s classrooms are merely snapshots, out-of-date the moment they were printed. Tomorrow Australia will have an observably different shape, North America will be farther from Europe, and the Pacific Ocean will be deeper. Mount Everest is getting taller, Polynesia is sinking, and any day now California might calve off from the rest of the United States and slide smoking into the ocean.

What’s California to a nugget of quartz? What’s a Tuesday, what are a few hours in a damp pocket, what are a couple of decades on a kitchen counter? Pompeii, Krakatoa, Paricutín; the vast basaltic plates on which our continents drift and our lives play out move at roughly the same speed as our fingernails grow, and that may not seem like much until one remembers 2004, Boxing Day, the event scientists now call the Great Sumatra-Andaman earthquake, ten minutes in which the whole planet vibrated like a thumped watermelon and 230,000 people died. Civilization is a blink in the eye of a pebble, and pebbles are but heartbeats in the trillion-day lifetime of the Earth.

At three in the morning I creep to the kitchen sink. With trembling hands I fill my mug. The eyeless faces of my stones stare up at me. They say: Enjoy your drink, little man. They say: We stared up through rushing streams at the stars a thousand years before you were born.

Sometimes I wonder: If four and a half billion years ago an Archaean god suspended a time-lapse movie camera over the latitude and longitude at which I now stand, and could run the reel back to me at high speed, what would I see? Floods of molten basalt would cross the screen, cooling and hardening. Spasms of airborne ash would blot the view now and then. Oceans would seethe and evaporate. Galaxies of clams might appear, flapping their shells at the sun, then vanishing beneath successive sheets of mud. A cubic mile of ice would show up several times. Puddles would fill and drain away in a breath. Soils would build and be scraped away; stands of prehistoric trees would surge up toward the viewer and fall and rise again in succession. And all the while swarms of pebbles would dart to and fro like bees.

In this movie everything around me right now, water in my mouth, crickets shrieking in the yard—stones, refrigerator, house, heartache—would not stay put long enough to register in a single frame.

If these kitchen-counter pebbles had memories, if they could unpack their lithic histories and unroll them across the floor like scrolls, they’d show us flashes of heat in the crucible of the Earth, epochs of darkness, the heavens spitting snow, then rain, then light. On those scrolls would be wildernesses of silence so vast that to dwell within them for a fraction of their length would make us insane with terror and loneliness.

After I’m dead, someone will have to decide what to do with all the stones I’ve stockpiled. Pitch them over the backyard fence or dump them into a box or wall my carcass in with them. Eventually everything I know—my children, my friends, this language, these hills—will be something else.

Not much longer now, the pebbles whisper. Just a few more years. While electricity twinkles between the dendrites of my mind, insufficient against whatever erosions lie ahead.

Win bounds out, searching for her unconventional quarry, ready to herd. She spots a flock of about a dozen geese feeding on the well-manicured grass of Clove Lake Park in Staten Island. She crouches until her belly is almost on the ground, tucks her tail between her legs, and slinks toward the geese, fixing them with an intense glare.

The geese honk in alarm, first trotting across the lawn and then reluctantly spreading their wings and taking off. Win, her body still quaking, keeps up her fierce stare until the geese have disappeared.

Scaring off the ubiquitous Canada geese that see New York’s parks, cemeteries, and golf courses as a year-round salad bar is exactly the point. Joe Kohl is Win’s human co-worker at Geese Police, but he is the first to say that, when it comes to interacting with geese, his main function is driving Win from site to site. When he interviews potential employees, Kohl tells them, only half joking, “If the dogs had thumbs, we wouldn’t need you.”

The number of geese on the East Coast has nearly tripled in the past twenty years. Attempts to keep the birds and their copious feces off of lawns and away from airports have spawned an entire industry of companies with names such as Bird-B-Gone and Goose Busters. Indulging their inner frat boys, goose hazers have tried everything from lasers to fireworks. Geese Police claims to have pioneered the idea of using border collies, bred to herd sheep along the English-Scottish border, to scare off geese (a federally protected species) without ever touching them. Now the practice is so common that Geese Police lost New York’s Central Park as a client in a bidding war, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture employs a staff of goose-tormenting dogs.

But Win and I are both a little disappointed by the geese’s quick departure this afternoon. Win’s instinct is to gather them up and bring them to a human. I, on the other hand, was hoping the geese would land in the park’s lake so I could witness another border collie trick: kayaking.

Because geese often head to the middles of lakes to escape their predators, border collies have taken to the water in pursuit. They do their silent glowering from a kayak, leaving uneasy geese to wonder how the hell a wolf got so far out on the water. 

The geese in the park aren’t a problem today, but Kohl has arranged for me to see a kayaking dog, even if the outing is recreational. Win isn’t much of a kayaker, so another Geese Police duo joins us. As her crate is opened, Gail whines and shuffles before running toward the kayak. Joe Compton is the thumbs of the operation, and when he is situated in the boat, Gail effortlessly hops between his legs, facing the bow.

Compton paddles around the serene lake, green from the reflections of the lush trees that surround it. The scene is comically pastoral: a man and his dog, out enjoying the day. But though Gail looks relaxed, she is also alert. If a goose dared come close, she would drop her head, hunch her shoulders, and start the stare-down.

Project developers now figure it might be 120 gallons a year (winter temperatures in the Brooks Range village can drop to fifty degrees below zero), but that’s still a small fraction of the thousand gallons or more that existing homes typically burn.

An oil-revenue-fed housing boom in the 1970s and ‘80s brought modern housing to rural residents across Alaska. But the homes were built with little attention paid to lifestyle or energy use, and people in many communities now face a harsh predicament: existing homes are too expensive to heat and maintain, and new ones are too expensive to build.

Enter Jack Hébert and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center (CCHRC). Over the last year and a half, staff at the Fairbanks-based nonprofit have worked with village residents to design a home that meets local needs, takes advantage of local resources, and is relatively cheap to build and operate. Residents signed on because of the village’s acute housing needs; CCHRC staff saw building in the remote village, nestled in a windy valley one hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, as a good challenge.

The final design blends traditional building techniques with modern materials. Like the traditional sod homes that inland Eskimos used for generations, the prototype home is built partially underground for protection from wind and cold and uses a chimneylike ventilation system. A staggered entryway helps keep cold air out. But the home also uses metal studs, soy-based spray insulation, and a spray-on plastic coating normally used for truck bed liners. “The old systems worked well,” Hébert says. “The old systems with good technology work extremely well.”

Thanks to a donation from the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, another nonprofit group, the home will be powered by the wind and sun. Refrigeration will come from the cold ground itself. The house is designed to fit on a single DC-6 cargo plane, and the goal is a three-week installation period. Ilisagvik College in Barrow is already training workers from surrounding villages to build the homes.

The house is expected to consume a small fraction of the heating fuel and electricity used in other homes, and it cost only $150,000 to build, shipping included. (Recent cost estimates for new construction in Anaktuvuk topped $750,000, according to CCHRC.)

With the first house barely finished, developers already have plans for more. The Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority, which is sponsoring the Anaktuvuk project, is seeking funding to build forty more homes in Anaktuvuk and other villages using the same methods. And CHRC is already working to design another home for the coastal village of Point Lay.

Hébert hopes the new designs—and more generally the new approach—will change how people think about building in rural and urban Alaska alike. “All of us live just a few generations away from living in a sustainable way,” he said.

Meanwhile, Anaktuvuk Pass residents are anxious to see just how efficient the new home is. “For now,” Paneak said, “people are pretty excited.” When workers installed the sod roof, village elders came out to make sure they did it right.

The fingertips are a border checkpoint of the human body, and through them the self reaches out to touch the world. Fingertips are diviners, lovers, poets of the perhaps, emissaries of empathy. They are feelingful, exquisitely sensitive to metal, dough, moss, or splinter. They are also one of the body’s places of greatest idiosyncrasy: a fingerprint is the body’s signature. Fingertips are at once highly selved and highly sensitive: they articulate difference and they distinguish difference.

Forced to erase the sign of themselves, people scar, burn, stitch, and staple their fingertips at U.S. borders too, and indeed wherever people fear that their identification will be used against them, not because they are criminals but because they are refugees and victims of war, poverty, and neo-imperialism.

Border checkpoints bristle with state control, and this control now encroaches within nations. In Britain, already the world leader in surveillance, the state is now pushing for nationwide ID cards. Identification, tagging, and surveillance are used to intimidate those at the margins, the borders of society: refugees, whose individual stories of blood and horror give the lie to the glossy brochures of foreign policy; the insane with their flashes of specific mind-lightning; those who stand out, eccentrically, for their beliefs, who poke and provoke with the demeanor of a pitchfork in the cutlery drawer; young people at the borders of adulthood; protesters, with their multifold cries of “see it otherwise,” demanding political alterity. All are harassed with surveillance.

Truly individualistic societies would cherish all such border crossers, not punish them. But the dominant culture is a society of intolerant homogeneity that bolsters racism, ageism, and conformism. It supports monoism, destroying variety from biodiversity to linguistic diversity. Like the monoculture of Hollywood and the monocrops of agribusiness, the monopolitics of world powers erase the particular, searing away the idiomatic dialect of the self, symbolized so specifically by each person’s fingertips. Burning away the signature of individuality, at the borders of those very countries that most profess individualism, is a metaphor of terrible reproach. And it tells a deep truth, for ours is not an individualistic society. Rather, it is a hyper-privatized one.

The word private originally meant to be “deprived of public life,” and most people today are so deprived. A vote every few years does not constitute a political voice. Terms for public political life, like solidarity, trade unions, co-operatives, or collectives, are unwelcome in a world of hyper-privatization. Employees engaged in public protest find their jobs threatened. Citizens are also deprived of public life in nature, fobbed off with parks and that hyper-privatized patch of green, the fenced-in private garden. Entertainment, traditionally a very communal affair, is now hyper-privatized, the individual watching TV in a room alone, where the sequestered self is more vulnerable to advertising.

Similarly, the etymology of the word idiot, from ancient Greek, refers to a “purely private person”—one who takes no part in public life. In this hyper-privatized world, it is as if governments would prefer their subjects to remain idiots, disengaged from the state’s process but suffering its intrusions.

Humans need community and public life: we also need the secluded intimacy of privacy, and the latter is threatened by surveillance. Those in favor of surveillance argue that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear,” but this denies the very significance of privacy—a cache to shelter our tenderness and our name. Telling one’s name is a gift. Withholding it is a right.

Through the twin prongs of ID cards and surveillance, the borders of the private self are invaded. I am declaring, here, that I am a sovereign state. I do not want alien states to use biometrics to crawl into my eyes like flies. I do not want my identity captured by strangers. But I, who am deprived of the human right to freely roam in my own free land, find that the state can roam freely through the territories of my self, violating the integrity of my borders.

When the state crosses the borders into my private self, it is an ugly act. But border crossing the other way—the self reaching outward—is an act of beauty and transcendence. Art, spirituality, environmentalism, and movements for political justice agree, seeking transcendence from the confines of the single self, and it is no surprise that people from backgrounds of faith, activism, and art are those who most vehemently oppose ID cards.

The perennial philosophy of a universal oneness suggests a reaching out beyond the ego. So does the traditional posture of fingertips touched together in prayer to set free the spirit, winged for infinity. Movements for political reform take wide, unprivate ideals, the wisest art goes beyond the individual, and at the heart of environmentalism is the extension of the borders of responsibility to encompass lands, times, selves, and species beyond the individual.

The human psyche, then, seems to find benevolence in the self transcending its boundaries. By contrast, the psyche finds malevolence in those who invade those boundaries: in the myths and mores of many cultures, people are wary about giving names to strangers. Belief in the Evil Eye is virtually a human universal, embodying the malignity of surveillance. Staring is inherently predatory, and we, as other animals, hate being watched because it is a prelude to attack. Mass surveillance—modernity’s Evil Eye—is peculiarly nasty because of its cowardice; the watcher is hidden, unknowable and faceless.

Anyone can recognize a sense of guilt merely walking (innocently) through airport customs. Being trailed by a police car provokes a similar guilt, even when unfounded. Surveillance provokes a pervasive sense of guilt and entrapment and this fusion has a practical history in the invention in 1785 of the Panopticon, the surveillance device designed to watch prisoners without their knowledge. If plans for compulsory ID cards succeed in the UK, we will be carrying our own Panopticons with us, and the protest against these plans is muted. In the U.S., thankfully, there is tougher resistance to ID cards, but a modern Panopticon, the microchip tag within the body, is in use already by an Ohio company (CityWatcher.com) whose business is in providing governments with surveillance tools, and which has inserted microchips under the skin of some of its employees.

Surveillance creates conformity. Anyone queuing at border control attempts to look as “normal” as possible: like any animal under a predatory stare, humans try to fit in with the herd, not to stand out. The glare of surveillance is the opposite of the gaze of love, for under that gaze a person wants to be known, seen especially for themselves, flirting the peacock feathers of otherness, the distinguishing features of the soul. The law of evolution encourages individuation, and diversity is a signature of the vitality of nature. These laws of life agree with the law of love in nurturing true individuality, for the human heart cherishes “thisness,” the essential specificity of the beloved person.

“If you ask me why I loved him,” said the Renaissance French humanist Michel de Montaigne of his friend Étienne de La Boétie, “I can only say: because he was he, and I was I.” Delineating an exquisite uniqueness, it is as if their fingertips still touch, after all these centuries, and the fingertips of Montaigne’s mind, like all great artists, transcend the borders of self and time to touch minds today with the inalienable signature of love.

LAWLER: There are few people today who talk about science and spirituality in the same breath without criticizing one or the other. You are an exception.

KELLY: My larger agenda is to bridge the technological and the holy. These are not two words that most people normally associate with each other. It is going to be a long conversation to bring
them together.

LAWLER: Is this what you mean when you describe yourself as a “techno transcendentalist”?

KELLY: Right.

LAWLER: But can you really imagine Thoreau multitasking on a BlackBerry? How do you relate transcendentalism to technology?

KELLY: I don’t mean transcendentalist in a monkish or hermitlike way. I mean transcending in the sense of connecting to a state of awareness, of living, of being, that transcends our day-to-day life. It’s not a withdrawal, it’s an emergence. And tools can be used.

LAWLER: Or misused.

KELLY: There’s been a lot of chatter about information overload recently. It is true there’s something different about this [modern] environment in our day-to-day and minute-to-minute awareness. What it means and what we should do about it is really not so clear.

I acknowledge the fact that multitasking and BlackBerrys and iPods and Twitter can be distracting. But we don’t really have the option of ignoring it. The proliferation of devices is necessary to learn new things. And the cost of learning new things is an avalanche of fragmented information. We just have to learn how to live with it.

LAWLER: But don’t we get to choose?

KELLY: It’s not that we don’t have the option to remove ourselves. This phase of cultural evolution, in which we are growing and discovering, requires this tide of twenty-four-hour information. I think it’s necessary and good that there will always be an opt-out option. We want to encourage that diversity, but it will always be a niche. Barring some disaster, society is not going to become a world where everybody stays at home writing poems and reading one long book after another without interruption.

LAWLER: Where is the transcendentalism in this view?

KELLY: The roots of technology go deeper than just human culture. They weave and string all the way back to the Big Bang. Technology is an example—like life and intelligence—of an extropic system, a system that feeds off entropy to build order. And not just order, but self-amplifying order of exploding complexity and depth. Extropic systems create even more entropy in the process—that is, energy runs through the system at a faster and denser pace. This is the definition of self-sustaining systems like a living organism. There’s continuity from the beginning of the universe, which is expanding out and creating space to allow diversity to flourish.

What we have is a long-term trend of increasing diversity, complexity, and specialization—all characteristics of self-sustaining systems. That could be a galaxy or a sun or intelligence. The resulting density of power is technology. I use the term “the Technium.” A galaxy is a system composed of individual technologies, complex enough to have its own self-sustaining qualities including self-preservation. It is self-perpetuating and self-increasing. You could say that humans are the sexual organs of technology—that we are necessary for its survival. But it has its own inertia, urgency, tendencies, and bias.

LAWLER: Other than to reproduce, what is the purpose of these systems?

KELLY: These systems are evolving evolution. They are increasing degrees of freedom. And this is the theological part—we have the infinite game. The game is to extend the game, so that the game will keep going. The game is to keep changing the nature of change. And that infinite game is my view of holiness. You play the game not to win, but to continue to play to make room for all expressions of truth, good, and the beautiful. You are opening up the world to possibility. Every child born on Earth today has some particular mixture of genes and environment, of capability and intelligence to unleash. The game is about trying to educate that individual into a position where they can maximize their potential and possibility. And technology is the instrument.

LAWLER: You have spoken about what would have become of Beethoven if he’d been born before the invention of the piano . . .

KELLY: That helps me think about the people born today who may be missing some technology that would allow them to be their best. That’s what technology is in the larger sense—the discovery of potential and possibility.

LAWLER: But tools are not creativity.

KELLY: At a deep level, the act of discovery and the act of creation are identical. The steps that you would take to find something are exactly the same steps you’d take to make something. So you can say that Edison discovered the light bulb and Newton invented gravity.

LAWLER: Wendell Berry might say that is all well and good, but technology doesn’t change the essential nature of humanity. It doesn’t make us better people.

KELLY: I disagree with Wendell. We have created our humanity. And I think our humanity has been created by technology. Our humanity is defined by things we have invented. Like the alphabet. Our culture is one thing we’ve created. But I also think there has been an evolution of morality. Culture and cultural inventions are part of the Technium—they are technologies.

LAWLER: But the Ten Commandments were likely tribal rules passed on orally long before they were written down. It was just the medium that changed.

KELLY: Language is part of the Technium too. And language allowed us to structure laws and rules, our ideas of inherent fairness and sense of right and wrong. These are associated with society and culture and all that Wendell is concerned about. And they were developed over thousands of years. Our humanity is actually a result of the invention and the distribution and the enhancement and growth of the Technium.

LAWLER: Man the Toolmaker—it’s an old concept. Surely we are more than toolmakers.

KELLY: But I don’t think the Technium is only about humans. It’s a type of learning. It’s a type of expression. It’s a type of possibility.

The Technium works as an ecology. Just as evolution has a longterm direction as we look 4 billion years into the past, so technology increases complexity and diversity, with increasing power.

LAWLER: So technology is part of evolution or God—that which drives the universe?

KELLY: Exactly. Some people call this the Great Story. Roving preacher Michael Dowd talks at churches about this alternative creation story. It is about evolution through God, that which started from nothing, grew into particles that gained mass and complexity, and then clumped into molecules and then became dust and planets and so forth. And technology is the latest variety.

LAWLER: So the Technium is one of the ways in which the universe is getting to know itself? And by increasing complexity, the universe becomes more self-aware?

KELLY: Exactly. I think of God as the intelligence of mind that is increasing the complexity of the universe.

LAWLER: That makes me think about the way new ideas appear to spread almost simultaneously. Five thousand years ago humans suddenly began living in cities from Egypt to India. There was something in the air. Is this the Technium at work?

KELLY: Simultaneous invention is actually the norm for science. That’s why we have patents. I’m not talking about the supernatural. Inventions never happen in a vacuum. Every idea requires the support of four or five other ideas. There’s a necessary subset of other surrounding inventions that are required. As they appear, the new idea becomes more obvious. It’s an ecological growth. There are two kinds of changes that we see in nature. One is developmental and one is evolutionary. And the developmental changes are fairly predictable in a certain sense. We know what the pattern is and I can map your developmental trajectory very clearly. You go from fetus to child to adolescent. I may not know what kind of teenager you’re going to be, but I can say you’re going to be a teenager. A lot of what we see in culture right now is developmental, not evolutionary.

LAWLER: But we can’t say that about human culture—we don’t know where it is going.

KELLY: We don’t, but only because we’re ignorant. I’ve looked at the sequence of discoveries and inventions around the world to see whether they follow generally the same sequence, and it seems that they do. Certain things you discover first. The moment a planet decides to wire itself up, to connect everything to everything, is an inevitable developmental stage in civilization. It is a stage like puberty or metamorphosis—pick your biological analogy.

LAWLER: I’m struck by an analogy you make between nature and the Technium—that technology also needs pruning. You pull the weeds in your garden or you won’t get vegetables.

KELLY: This is husbandry. You are not your garden’s puppet master, pulling each leaf off the tree. You train it in a general direction. The work is still being done by the tree. We are tending the garden of technology, moving things around, noticing a plant coming up here that would do much better in the sun over there. Or it needs a little more fertilizer. You don’t control it.

The banning of genetically modified organisms in Europe is a typical response these days. GMO critics instead would like us to use fruit produced through genetic gambling, which is what natural breeding is. If genetic gambling came along now, it would never be permitted. It’s all mutation, all random. The point is we’ve never had control. We get the best results by doing a little bit of training and pruning and letting things unroll.

LAWLER: So where does evolution come in?

KELLY: It’s very hard to unravel what is evolutionary and what is developmental. My suggestion is that evolutionary change is unpredictable, while developmental change is not.

LAWLER: There is a lot of fear around the pace and impact of technology. It is all happening so quickly. Isn’t fear of weapons of mass destruction, genetic modification, and advances in nanotechnology prudent and reasonable?

KELLY: That’s a good question and I may not have a very good answer for it. There’s no single source of this fear—it can be as simple as discomfort with change. And for all our talk about the need for change, people resist it—particularly if we are comfortable in the moment. Change brings discomfort.

LAWLER: So how can we cope with the increasing pressure to change?

KELLY: We’re now in a new regime of information. For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, the manner of change on an individual’s soul and life was very minimal. That fostered appreciation for continuity and enduring values, and that persisted even though new inventions came along. Those inventions diffused slowly and generally didn’t happen within a single life span. That changed with the coming of science, and with that came increasing prosperity and a dramatic rise in population in the last two hundred years. The pace of change within an individual lifetime accelerated. One consequence was the invention of science fiction, part of a large-scale investigation of the future. It became a survival tactic.

LAWLER: You have said that the next century marks the great identity crisis of our species.

KELLY: Wendell is probably right that we aren’t really wired very well to cope with this. But I have no problem thinking that human nature will change, that we will change human nature, that we will engineer human nature amid this rapid change. The nature of humanity has been changing all along, but until now very slowly. And as I was suggesting earlier, part of the nature of humanity is wrapped up in our own inventions—it is, in fact, our own invention. Each time we make an advance in artificial intelligence, we redefine who humans are. Each time there’s a discovery in science related to intelligence or even the animal world, we redefine who humans are. At one time we defined ourselves as the toolmakers. Now we find out that termites and birds use tools, so we’ve redefined what it is to be human.

LAWLER: Are we moving toward something that shuts out the past, or is there a place in which low-tech tradition and high-tech science can meet?

KELLY: We generally reinterpret our older selves, rather than discard them. Right now we’re very biological; we’re very meatbased animals. We have the benefit of a very highly evolved sensual body. So whatever improvements we make, I think very few people would really want to evolve out of their bodies, though they may want to better the body. We contain 4 billion years of evolution, and it’s not a matter of casting that off completely. It’s a matter of reinterpreting it and enhancing it.

LAWLER: Already people are talking about designing babies for specific traits. Technology often starts with the best of intentions—to ensure a healthy child—then deteriorates into thorny and even nightmarish scenarios. In India now, you can go to a clinic to ensure you have a boy rather than a girl. The long-term implications—lots of male teenagers and few females—are horrific.

KELLY: My suggestion is not to take the technology away, but to educate those making the choice. What we want is greater choice. And these choices are always bound up in politics. I don’t think technology is neutral. But the proper response to bad technology is not to stop it—to stop thinking—but to have a better idea.

LAWLER: You go so far as to say that it would be immoral for us to put prohibitions on technology. Are there any exceptions to that?

KELLY: I haven’t been able to find any. What we want to do is find the proper home for technology. Technologies are like children. They’re often asked to do things that they’re incapable of doing, don’t really want to do, are ill suited to do. We need to find the right place for technology. DDT is actually a very good insecticide for eliminating malaria—used judiciously around the house, it’s very effective and does not cause much harm. Spraying it on 25 zillion acres of cotton is terrible. So you find the right home for that technology.

LAWLER: You could argue Rachel Carson did that for DDT, but only after a long struggle. How do we create a conversation, a structure, for making such decisions?

KELLY: Conversation is the correct word. Our current default is to not proceed to the next step until you can prove no harm. That doesn’t work. You have to use inventions to evaluate them, to
see them in action. Their consequences in the very complicated world are impossible to simulate. You have to have constant vigilance, to re-evaluate constantly. If they don’t work out, you don’t prohibit them, you move on to something else better.

LAWLER: What if they discover that this Diet Coke I’ve been drinking will increase my chances for cancer? Are you saying it should not be banned?

KELLY: It should not be prohibited for several reasons. One is it may only cause cancer in people who have some subset of genes. It may not have an effect on other people. Before we prohibit it for everybody, we have to find out what’s going on. First we need your DNA, and then we need constant twenty-four-hour self-monitoring. This idea that every five years we go for a checkup, well then of course people are going to get cancer from drinking soda. Most people will be lucky if they have their blood tested once in their life. We need noninvasive, constant information about our bodies so that we can determine right away whether something we drink has an adverse effect. The proper response is not to ban something—the proper response is better technology. If there is something wrong with aspartame, modify it. Find a new home for it.

LAWLER: What if you have a company that has spent millions developing and producing the chemical, and they hire lobbyists to argue for its widest possible use? Look at the tobacco or alcohol industries. And scientists with a financial stake in the system have been used to justify wide use of toxins. You make a logical argument, but one that leaves out the reality of the marketplace. Where’s “the conversation”?

KELLY: We need a more sophisticated system. That is why we are locked in a binary pattern—it is either approved or prohibited. There is the option of education—to take an approach to life that is more scientific.

LAWLER: Does that mean that if enough people have access to the data on chemicals, and could understand it, they could pressure a company to make a different choice?

KELLY: I haven’t thought about this until this moment. Let’s say a study finds the substance causes cancer, that it is really bad. Then the question is, what changed since the time of approval? Maybe you have to drink it every day for five years, so it is an issue of dosage. So what is a better dosage? And you could decide to use a different dosage or use something else instead. And you could use the substance for something else that would not cause harm.

LAWLER: How do you factor in human complexity—the corporate executive who wants a profit, the researcher who is more concerned with creating than monitoring? Such motivations can overwhelm scientific logic. Look at tobacco smoking—you can say it’s a bad idea, but people do it.

KELLY: I’m not talking about just the market solving problems. I’m assuming there is government to regulate. What I am proposing is that you have more choices than approving or prohibiting. When you have more choices you can have a more sophisticated response. I think prohibiting tobacco is the wrong idea, because we’ll get the same result as with Prohibition. But obviously you don’t want people addicted to smoking. We need to find the right home for tobacco.

The market and science and education can provide more creative solutions. Consider marijuana. The medical use of it here in California is interesting, because we are trying to find the right home for it.

LAWLER: So do you support funding bacterial warfare, for example, since it expands our knowledge?

KELLY: No. I would prohibit technology that kills people, for sure.

LAWLER: But you are against prohibiting use of technology.

KELLY: So nuclear weapons are okay, but using nuclear weapons is not. Take the AIDS virus. It’s nasty, bad stuff, but we can use the mechanism of a virus infection for good. You hijack it and use it for gene therapy. The technology of viral infection is okay. There is a way we can redeem a virus to make it into something good—but not if you prohibit the research.

LAWLER: You are walking a fine line—prohibitions for certain areas, but no blanket prohibitions.

KELLY: I think funding new ways to kill people is not a good use of technology. The same discoveries, however, can be used for better purposes. I’m not actually a pacifist. I believe that there should be restraint, but not necessarily killing. Killing is a binary response we fall back on, but there are other options.

LAWLER: How do you reconcile faith with logic and reason?

KELLY: There’s always the question of how the universe began. Then you ask, what was before that? Either you believe that it goes on and on by itself or you believe that there’s some ultimate
being which caused it. Both of those views are logically unsatisfying. Either could be true, but not both. And neither is provable. You come down to faith. Faith for me is simply experiential. My faith is that God unleashed creation as a way to know himself, to express and fully manifest his fullness. Our job as creatures of this creation is to surprise God. We’re co-creators in a certain sense—we have a divine spark in us. We have the same attributes as the creator of the universe, which is that we can create something. We can make something out of nothing in our small world. God has bestowed sparks of his creativity in the right places so they will surprise him. He’s allowing us to make something from our free will that maybe he would not have thought of making.

LAWLER: So we’re instruments of the divine?

KELLY: Right. Going back to the infinite game, the goal is to keep the game going for the purpose of maximizing the potential of this creation. We create other beings and other worlds. In so doing, we eventually discover different views of God, of the universe. Our own minds are incapable of comprehending the universe as a whole; we’re just too small and limited. But we can create other worlds, and technology gives us a sure hand to do so.

LAWLER: That feels so ineffable, so unquantifiable.

KELLY: My experience with God is no different than my own experience of my own consciousness and reality. Descartes’ observation is that in the end, the only certainty we have that we exist is that we think. But if we look at consciousness, it evaporates when we attempt to translate it into bits. The nature of consciousness is still a total riddle.

LAWLER: Why is there such a lack of sophisticated conversation between religion on the one hand and science and technology on the other?

KELLY: The only place we see it is among the theologians of our day, the science fiction authors who tackle the big questions. Religions appeal to tradition, to people who are afraid of change. But at the same time the Catholic Church has proved remarkably adaptable over two thousand years. There is a blockheaded rejection of evolution among Christian evangelicals, which has been tremendously harmful. It has turned a religion that was at one time at the forefront of science into an antiscience stance. I have little glimmers that in another generation or two, this will change. When it comes to climate change, for example, there has been rapid change toward recognizing the problem.

LAWLER: You are leaving out the spate of books by scientists which dismiss and even mock religion.

KELLY: There are fundamentalist atheists, just as there are fundamentalist Christians. The real conversation will happen in the middle and not at the extremes.

LAWLER: But how do you kick-start a more mature debate?

KELLY: My view of technology as holy is a minority view. Right now, technology is either the devil, or, if it’s embraced, it’s called neutral. Nobody is saying that it’s divine. An alternative view is not going to sweep the country overnight. It will require people smarter and deeper than me to work it out. Right now I’m a church of one.