The Narrowing of Possibility: Technology, Conformity and Civilisational Fragility

How Our Systems of Symbolic Wealth and Success Are Making Planetary Civilisation Catastrophically Fragile

What follows is a little more complicated than it first appears. I am interested in the relationships through which the world acquires its familiar structures, and how those relationships constrain what can happen next. We are making planetary civilisation increasingly fragile through arrangements we believe are making it stronger. Never have we possessed such extraordinary capacities to generate images, language, technologies and apparently limitless forms of expression. Yet beneath this proliferation, the processes through which things are generated, selected and reproduced are becoming increasingly alike. Immense expressive complexity exists within a narrowing range of relationships. This is not simply a complaint about conformity or commercial influence. It concerns the deeper processes through which differences acquire persistence, meaning and consequence. We are becoming extraordinarily proficient at producing what our existing arrangements can accommodate, while diminishing the conditions through which something different can emerge and endure.

Consider the fireworks of contemporary machine learning. Images, videos, music and language proliferate through systems capable of generating almost endless variation. I use the same technology to compose my writing, and its usefulness is not in question. Yet these distinct productions arise through shared computational arrangements, accumulated histories and probabilistic selection. Their processes are stochastic, shaped by entropic tendencies through which some patterns become more probable and persistent than others. Each output returns to the communicative environment, altering the conditions of further production. The machinery does not merely repeat what exists. It reorganises what becomes possible next. Immense combinatorial multiplicity is not equivalent to an expanding diversity of relationships. Apparently unique expressions can share remarkably similar structures of production and recognition. This is true of technology, but also points towards something more general about the world we inhabit.

Our individual experiences are no exception. We inhabit extraordinary differences of circumstance, memory and expectation, yet the processes through which these acquire continuity are remarkably similar. Differences recur and interfere; histories accumulate; familiar patterns become easier to reproduce; and what persists influences what becomes possible next. These relationships extend through material processes, biological life, language, institutions and the abstractions through which we understand them. Rhythms and delays matter, as do absences and unrealised possibilities against which events acquire significance. Repetition is never simply repetition, because each recurrence changes the conditions of subsequent activity. What appears stable is also an ongoing achievement of relationships. Our descriptions participate in these processes rather than standing outside them. The world is not obliged to organise itself according to the distinctions we find convenient for describing it.

Institutions nevertheless reproduce those distinctions with extraordinary determination. Universities, corporations, governments and research establishments inhabit a larger organisation of markets, political expectations, professional conventions and recognised measures of success. None controls the whole, yet each reproduces relationships upon which its continuation depends. Even unconventional thinking must become recognisable, fundable and administratively manageable. Fresh thinking is repeatedly declared essential, provided it arrives in familiar vocabulary, satisfies existing criteria and leaves the machinery of recognition undisturbed. The problem extends beyond commercial margins and political leverage, although both help sustain these arrangements. Institutions express deeper patterns of recurrence and selection. They reward differences they can accommodate and struggle to recognise those that would change the terms of recognition. We become remarkably proficient at awarding gold stars for departures from convention that leave the conventions intact. It is an impressive system for discovering what we already know.

These relationships also explain the turbulence of collective life. Communication is not simply information exchanged between independent individuals. Expressions enter an accumulating environment of expectations, associations, antagonisms and recurring responses. Their timing, frequency and interference influence which patterns acquire authority and which disappear. Populism does not require a populist. Apparent leaders ride waves of collective activity whose organisation precedes them. Opposing positions sustain one another through antagonism, while anxiety, resentment and insecurity become recurring features of the cultural environment. Commercial technologies identify these regularities and return selected expressions to circulation, amplifying patterns whose persistence becomes confused with importance. Political leverage and commercial profit are instruments and consequences of this organisation, not its ultimate explanation. These tendencies can operate without deliberate manipulation, extending beyond anyone’s intentions. No villain is required, although that hardly excuses those who exploit them.

The technological turn makes these relationships particularly consequential. What benefits individuals can produce destructive collective outcomes. Technological insecurity generates demand for solutions introducing further dependencies and vulnerabilities. Conflict reproduces conditions for further conflict, while autonomous warfare makes destruction easier to administer without making peace more achievable. Apparently separate institutions, economies and technologies increasingly depend upon similar infrastructures and expectations. Their vulnerabilities become correlated as their capacity to respond independently diminishes. War ruptures dependencies across continents, while climate change propagates through ecological, economic and political relationships without regard for administrative boundaries. We respond by intensifying many of the technologies and dependencies through which our vulnerability developed. Standardisation and efficiency enable extraordinary achievements while eliminating differences through which larger systems accommodate unfamiliar conditions. Delays, ambiguities, independent responses and unrealised possibilities are not merely imperfections awaiting correction. They help coherent arrangements remain capable of changing. Nature has no particular interest in our definitions of success.

I have spent more than four decades studying these relationships through complex systems, science, philosophy and communication, including disruptions to language and communication following my serious illness. My experiences of higher education and exclusion have made the narrowing of legitimacy particularly apparent, although these processes are hardly peculiar to me. We all participate in patterns shaping what we can recognise, express and sustain. I am frustrated by institutions celebrating intellectual independence while discouraging unfamiliar thought, especially when so much is plainly failing. But the point is not another gold star for an unconventional argument. My relational account is a description, not the world itself, and its value lies in what it enables us to recognise, investigate and test. Understanding distributed processes does not absolve individuals of responsibility. We reproduce conditions diminishing our capacity to recognise and respond to danger while celebrating the abundance of expression they permit. The question is whether we can sustain differences through which something genuinely unfamiliar becomes possible, including a world organised a little better than this one.