> About 10,000 years ago, humans passed a tipping point where our ability to modify the biosphere exceeded the planet’s ability to modify us. That threshold was the beginning of the technium. We are at a second tipping point where the technium’s ability to modify us exceeds our ability to alter the technium. Some people call this the Singularity, but I don’t think we have a good name for it yet.

> Langdon Winner claims that “technical artifice as an aggregate phenomenon [or what I call the technium] dwarfs human consciousness and makes unintelligible the systems that people supposedly manipulate and control; by this tendency to exceed human grasp and yet to operate successfully according to its own internal makeup, technology is a total phenomenon which constitutes a ‘second nature’ far exceeding any desires or expectations for the particular components.”

He says that a bacterium or a sea cucumber doesn’t really think or have consciousness, but they exhibit tendencies that can be seen as behavioral desires. Similarly, the technium is a superorganism of ideas and artifacts which has entrenched itself into the global culture and economy, and that we have to understand it as separate from us so that we can discern its desires from our own. We cannot dial it back because that’s not what it wants, so we have to make sure we find a way to live in symbiosis with it.