Technology Recapitulates Biology
Zoom Sunday, Noon PT / 3PM ET. Details below.
Humans are using technology to reverse engineer biology—not to serve other people but to control them.
Several million years ago, primate evolution took a divergent, novel path that ended up in modern humans. We developed a brain that enabled far more than just survival. We became creative beings in a way that, to our knowledge, no other species has.
By developing symbols and language to communicate, we both increased the chance of the species surviving and gave ourselves tools to build new things which (sometimes) gave us new advantages. In the process, our brains evolved a layered stack of functionality starting with autonomic-unconscious functions at the base ascending up to abstract-metaphysical at the top.
The sequence looks roughly like this:
Neurology → Reason → Identity → Perception → Emotion → Memory → Ideas → Belief
But several thousand years ago, something important happened, we began reversing back down through this sequence by developing technologies that could impact each of those cognitive layers in turn.
Since the Stone Age, this has been the rough technological sequence:
Spoken word → Writing → Printing press → Radio/TV → Internet → Social media → AI → Brain chips
When you put these together, the trend becomes very clear: Evolution builds up. Technology reaches back down. Technology recapitulates biology, in reverse.
Perhaps the best-known narrative archetype of the top step—the transition from biology to technology—is Jesus Christ. Mythologically speaking, Jesus used the now-primitive technology of spoken word to share his beliefs, his metaphysics, with the world. Since belief was purely a dictate of the Roman Empire, the simple act of proselytizing threatened the state because it represented what Caesar saw as a seizure of power.
In many ways, human history has been defined by such transitions—where technology breached a deeper layer of human cognition. The printing press enabled mass sharing of ideas and philosophy—a shatteringly disruptive revolution in the ability of people to influence each other at a distance. This led to the Enlightenment and countless other major schools of thought that influenced billions.
But we did not stop with the printed word—although importantly the U.S. Constitution did. Humanity kept building more and more sophisticated technologies to reach deeper and deeper into the way we think—and feel. Radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now chatbots all reach farther down into the human mind than the technologies before them.
The last step down in this sequence is to affect the physical capabilities of the brain, by enhancing it with brain chips or replacing it entirely through “uploading.”
This is the vision of the techno-fascist accelerationist movement that has done so much damage to our collective stability and sanity. The desire to control humanity at the hardware layer is why Musk invested so much in his brain chip company Neuralink—and why both Musk and Peter Thiel are extreme transhumanists.
For me, there are two important insights to glean from this. First, this is a meta-trend in humans. We are not going to be able to stop technology from finding new ways of interfacing with people. Fighting it is the wrong solution. We must adapt. Second, we have to collectively realize that our entire constitutional and justice system was built on a long-obsolete model of human interaction and influence.
The U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment were written over a century before the first radio transmission. The founders had no idea that as the decades rolled on, we would find more and more powerful ways to impact each other’s beliefs—in the same way they didn’t know we would have AR15s when they wrote the Second Amendment.
Americans are experiencing the failure of a constitutional democracy built for an 18th century population. It is the gap between what our system was designed for, and what technocratic elites and the government can access, that has been exploited to cause the population to make horrible decisions—like trusting Elon Musk and electing Donald Trump, twice.
It is in this new hyper-connected world, which enables deep psychological, neurological, and physical influence, that we must collectively construct a new Enlightenment, a new set of rules, that prioritizes human freewill in the face of grave new threats to the sovereignty of the individual.
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