Gregory J. E. Rawlins
Sapere aude! Dare to know!
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
Gregory J. E. Rawlins
Sapere aude! Dare to know!
Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment?”
Prelude
Introduction
1. Covenant [Food]
1.1 Autocatalytic Runaway
1.2 Changing Phase
1.3 A Hungry World
1.4 Seeds of the Future
1.5 The Food Factory
1.6 The Later Middle Ages
2. Rebooting Reality [Labor]
2.1 Sweat of Thy Face
2.2 The Prime Mover
2.3 The Synergetic Machine
2.4 Rebirth
2.5 Critical Mass
2.6 In the Grip of the Metal Hand
3. The Swarm [Materials]
3.1 Insolubles
3.2 The King’s Last Argument
3.3 Amalthea’s Recursive Horn
3.4 Swimming with Barracuda
3.5 Wolf Children
3.6 Living with the Dead
4. Dynamo [Energy]
4.1 Trigger Effect
4.2 We’re All Cheapskates
4.3 Some Assembly Required
4.4 Knowledge Is Power
4.5 Two Islands, Two Futures
5. Sweat of the Sun God [Wealth]
5.1 Wolf in the Fold
5.2 Weaving the Web
5.3 The Non-Elephant in the Living Room
5.4 The Properties of Property
5.5 A Billion Coin Flips
5.6 After the Bunting
5.7 Utopia Dead Ahead
6. Contending with Demons [Health]
6.1 This You Cannot Cure
6.2 Avast, Ye Scurvy Dogs
6.3 The Universe’s Lethal Quiz
6.4 The Knowledge Game
6.5 A Microscope Made of Numbers
6.6 Whirlpool of Conjecture
6.7 A Plague of Ignorance
6.8 This You Can Cure
7. Sentenced To Love [Thought]
7.1 The Long Chain
7.2 End of Days
7.3 The Very Pulse of the Machine
7.4 Organon
7.5 Dying to Have a Baby
7.6 Changing Our Minds
7.7 Wiring the World
7.8 Liquefying Everything
8. The How and the Why [Change]
8.1 Sparks of Life
8.2 Life Is a Verb
8.3 Summing Up
8.4 The Invisible Nest
9. Faster than Life [the Future?]
9.1 Golgotha
9.2 The Colossal Machine
9.3 Into the Wild
9.4 Waking Up...
9.5 ...In a Dark Night with Anxious Love Inflamed
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.
Abraham Lincoln
This book will teach you a new way to think about our past, present, and future.
We all have little models in our heads of how the world works. Those models needn’t be complicated. For example, one might be that if you push on a rock and it moves a little, then if you push harder it’ll move more. We then reason by analogy that if a government is trying to do something, and if a little money does a little good, then a lot of money will do even better. Such models can work, but they also often fail. For example, the United States has spent a lot of money on integration. Today, housing there is about as segregated by skin color as it was in 1968. Britain, too, has spent a lot on integration. Today, segregation by income and education there is about the same as it was in 1970. Australia has also pushed integration. Today, opportunity there is about the same as it was 40 years ago. If we really understood how we work, how come so much effort has made so little difference?
Our usual stories of how we work focus on individuals, not groups. We often imagine, for instance, that if most of us want something to change then that change must happen. That works in reverse too. We imagine that if something changes then most of us must first have wanted it to change. For example, many of us imagine that women’s lives have changed over the past two centuries because a few heroic women got together and made them change. But if that’s all it took why didn’t some heroic women do that thousands of years ago?
A group needn’t behave the same way as its set of individuals—the whole needn’t be the sum of its parts. A group can act differently than any of its parts might wish to act because the group itself can, in a sense, be an actor. That super-actor is the network that the various separate actors form. What it ‘wants’ is often more important than what any of its parts might want. It’s as if there’s one kind of physics for each of us, but a whole different physics for us together. If you run off a cliff, you’ll fall. But if a cartoon runs off a cliff, it can’t fall. It first has to notice that it’s in midair, then it has to look at the camera for that last desperate second, then it falls.
Today, scientists in a new field called ‘complex systems’ are giving concrete meaning to that idea of group physics. Understanding that physics is especially important today because our technology is now changing so fast that we need more accurate models about how we work simply to survive our coming changes. Those potential changes likely won’t be much like the usual calamities or utopias. They have little to do with climate change, nuclear terror, or shinier doodads. They’re deep changes in how we work together. Now, normally when you hear that kind of thing some political talk follows. Often the next sentence starts with ‘Join me’ and ends with some slogan like ‘Moral Rebirth,’ ‘Communist Utopia,’ or perhaps even ’Thousand-Year Reich.’ But this book is an attempt at a work of science. It has little to do with political change, self-sacrifice, or central control. It’s about material things and material life and the network forces that move us without our even being aware of them. It’s about how we swarm.
We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.
Winston Churchill
Folks who study termites know two secrets. For a start, they know that we aren’t the only species that farms, builds cities, and jointly cares for its young. Termites work together to do all that too. They divide labor so much that they divide even the labor of reproduction: most of them are sterile. In terms of Darwin’s natural selection, that’s impossible. They will even die for each other. That’s impossible too. They annoyed Darwin so much that he called them “by far the most serious special difficulty” of his theory. Largely because of them he held off publishing his Origin of Species for almost 20 years. How do they work?
Huge termite mounds pimple the planet—in American badlands, African veldt, Australian bush, Indian jungles. Normally they look dead, but if you visit one in the evening, especially after a rainstorm, you might see it boiling with activity. Thousands of winged termites gush from it, like water from a pricked firehose. Fluttering here and there, they seem desperate to learn how to fly in minutes—which is wise, because they’re defenseless. Toads, lizards, and snakes will soon hop, skip, and slither in for the impromptu banquet. The flyers barrel off as soon as they can, scattering like bomb shrapnel. When a female lands she sheds her wings—wings she took months to grow in the pitch black nest, wings she never used before and will never use again. Then she balances on her forelegs and raises her hindquarters. Frozen in place, her scent calls males to her. Some time later one comes buzzing in and as soon as he touches her she bursts into motion, scuttling about until she finds some place that suits her in the dark, rain-moistened earth. He keeps up with her and they quickly burrow in a short way, hiding from the birds that will come looking for breakfast the next morning. There they make their small nest.
The male then inseminates the female and she lays about five eggs. Those grow up to become the first brood. That brood then digs into the earth, sometimes as much as six feet down. There they hollow out a cavern for their mother, the new queen. With the king to inseminate her, she crawls down to her cell. Once there, she begins to lay eggs in earnest. Fed to bursting point by her children, she swells to monstrous size over the next few years. Her body keeps adding ovaries as it distends. Far too fat to move, she turns into a kind of giant glistening worm with her tiny head still attached. Entombed deep in the earth, termites crawl all over her, feeding her and rushing her eggs to nurseries. She’s now nothing but an egg-making sac, pumping them out like bullets from a machine gun. For the next 20 or so years she might lay up to 30,000 eggs a day in that cave. Her one Cinderella night of flying on gossamer wings is long gone.
Her offspring form castes, and based on age and caste they (very loosely) divide labor. They’ve much to do too: digging, building, farming, nursing, fetching water, pulping wood, attending the queen, repelling invaders. They dig and build and scurry until their nest is a huge, intricate warren, with a stone-hard, honey-combed turret rising above the earth perhaps ten feet high. Then one evening, after it’s dark enough that the birds have nested but before it’s dark enough for the owls and bats to be out, and often only after a rain has softened the earth, the nest will churn with activity. Sighted and sexual fliers with newly minted wings, wings they took months to grow in the dark, will boil out then buzz off into the rain-moistened night.
That’s roughly what termites do, but how do they do it? That’s the second secret that termite watchers know. They’ve realized that besides studying particular insects we can also study how they organize. It turns out that certain organizational strategies don’t vary much regardless of whether we look at termites, ants, bees—or even ourselves. Economists and ecologists have known that for a long time too. So have urban planners. Lately, computer scientists and mathematicians have noticed the same thing. So have physicists, biochemists, embryologists, and lots of other -ists. Together they’re firming up a new field called ‘complex systems.’ It’s about how a lot of separate parts can sometimes organize to make a whole far different from its parts.
Termites make for a good example. They work like one well-oiled machine, but no one plans it and no one’s in charge of it, not even the queen. She’s buried at the nest’s base. She can’t move, far less leave her cell. Even if she could, the tunnels are a hundred times too small for her. Plus, her pinhead brain is no larger than that of any other termite. Just keeping in mind a map of the nest alone may be more than it can handle. And considering that she may be as much as 16 feet below the top of the nest, her scents can only diffuse a short part of the way. Relative to the size of a single termite, that would be like one of us living at the base of a skyscraper two miles tall. So central control can’t explain how termites work.
Something is organizing the colony but it isn’t the queen’s brain. It isn’t even the queen’s genes alone. Geneticists can explain why ants, bees, and wasps behave as they do, but not termites. Termites in a nest aren’t near-clones the way bees in a hive are. We recently figured out that they don’t even form a separate order of animals. They’re really cockroaches. Why aren’t they loners, like all other roaches—and nearly all other animals? What we’ve missed all these years is the nest itself. Termite interactions create it, but then it aids their further interaction. It’s a huge investment, made over generations, but that investment also pays huge dividends—and for many more generations. It keeps them warm, dry, fed, and safe. It thus lets them avoid the expense of having individual defenses and temperature-control mechanisms. Most of them aren’t just blind—they’re eyeless. They’re also wingless and sterile. And future generations will inherit all those benefits.
In exchange for a posh hotel with an all-you-can-eat buffet, their nest gives them just one headache: how can they cooperate to build and maintain it? The answer is surprising: they use the nest itself to help them organize. Their nest induces them to form a nest-maintenance network. Kill their queen and they soon make a new queen. But destroy their nest and they soon nearly all die. Now, none of us wants to be compared to anything as icky as a cockroach. Termite lives also seem quite far away from our lives. But the organizational principles behind how they work help us see some principles behind how we too work. We too make nests. We too found colonies.
The Admiral of the Ocean Sea stood on the poop deck looking west, trying to stare down the setting sun. The lookout in the forechains had just shouted that land was ahead and he hoped to find an anchorage before nightfall. The last heavy storm had scared his fleet greatly. He’d made this voyage west once before, the previous year, and with just two small caravels and a nao, but this, his second voyage to the far west, was an invasion fleet. It was packed with court hidalgos, who, unused to the sea, had grown restless. Promised women and gold, not toil and trial, they’d grown weary of manning the pumps and mucking out the bilges during the three-week trip. Nor did they like being led by a jumped-up commoner. They didn’t much like the rotting food either. Only the excitement of this novel get-rich-quick scheme kept them in line as they sailed into the unknown.
What drove Columbus across three thousand miles of open ocean in the teeth of his near-perfect ignorance of what he would find? One answer could simply be his own desire. But that wouldn’t have mattered much without Queen Ysabel’s interest. Then too, she couldn’t have done much if Santángel hadn’t extorted money from Spain’s Jews to pay for the trips. Yet his efforts wouldn’t have changed much without the Pinzón brothers’s support. Then there’s Toscanelli’s new map. Marco Polo’s and Niccolò Conti’s trip reports. Portuguese competition. The increased price of spice. The development of ocean-crossing caravels. The fall of the Mongol empire, the rise of the Ottoman empire, and so on backward through time. We know many pieces of the puzzle. Putting them together gives us our usual style of explanation. It’s some combination of desire, new knowledge, and new pressures. Typically it foregrounds Columbus, and maybe a few others. It’s all about individuals, or individual nations, not our species as a whole.
Such an explanation is common. It satisfies many of us and is true enough, but is it big enough? Try the same kind of explanation with the above female termite, flinging herself out into the night for the first and only time in her life. They all amount to saying that she did what she did because she grew wings. How she grew those wings (and eyes) deep underground, where she could use neither, is interesting but the real question isn’t so much how she did it, but how her nest did it. She was just one small actor within a far larger, and far older, system. So was Columbus.
A termite colony isn’t a nest of insects ruled by a queen—put the image of zombies marching in lock-step from your mind. It’s much more like a plant that makes spores, which then scatter. It’s thus like a composite being—not a plant, not an animal, something new. It’s something we don’t really have a word for yet. It’s made of tangible parts, but it itself isn’t tangible; it’s a self-sustaining pattern. An ever shifting but still stable pattern moving through time, it’s a time-traveling termite-thing. Call it a termite swarm.
That swarm has a brain, of a sort, but it’s quite alien from anything we’re used to. We look at termites and see a boiling mass of insects. We don’t see that mass as a kind of plant on a million legs. We track one of its successful spores and ignore the thousands that got munched. We then look at Columbus with a microscope and make the same mistake. Caught up in his life story, we lose the bigger picture of which he forms a small part. We lose the time-traveling human-thing—the human swarm.
Just as termite genes shape them to do what they do, our genes shape us to do what we do. Just as termites build a giant nest out of clay and spit and dung so do we build a giant technological nest. And just as their nest shapes them, so our nest shapes us. That didn’t start happening last Wednesday, or even just since Columbus. It’s been going on for thousands of years. We’re all forever shaping and reshaping our shared nest. Like termites, we mostly do so without knowing it. Like termites, none of us need know what we’re really doing. Our changing nest still changes us. In a sense, that nest is us. Kill our leaders and we’ll make new ones. Destroy our nest and nearly all of us would die. Without it, you and I are no more than clever mammals endlessly worrying the lock of a cage we can never escape.
This book is about how we organize to sometimes do things far beyond the reach of any one of us. We all depend on such a system for our daily bread, our jobs, our health, our lives. We aren’t merely individuals contending against each other, we also work together. Sometimes we’ll even die for each other. Each of us fits into a large and old pattern moving through time. How does it work? Where’s it going?
By now you’re probably pretty suspicious. You’re right to worry. We have a word for people who claim to explain the world with one idea—they’re called cranks. Our nest, and the swarm it induces among us, can’t explain everything about us. The world is too complicated for that. Plus, we still know very little so a lot of it is going to change as we learn more. Still, this book will give you some idea of how we fit into something far larger than ourselves. It will also give you some idea of where it might be headed.
First food, then morality.
Bertoldt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera
We together form a giant complex system, a swarm. It exists because we’re born defenseless but with a big brain. Lacking claws and fangs we need each other to get food and we’ve organized ourselves around that basic fact since our species began. Despite walking upright, making tools, and talking, we did what most other animals did—we roamed to gather our food. Then, millennia ago, some of us started to farm. That then triggered many changes in our swarm’s structure. Our actions cause its changes, but we needn’t have planned that, nor must we have changed in some fundamental way before it could change. Our swarm falls into certain styles of organization because that’s how certain kinds of complex systems link themselves over time. It’s not special to us; it’s something that all networks beyond a certain level of complexity can do.
This chapter sketches why our swarm is important by telling the story of how we turned into farmers millennia ago. Instead of that being a conscious act, it likely happened because as the last ice age ended our swarm fed back on itself in a process called autocatalysis. Its structure also changed a lot in a process called phase change. Those two kinds of complex system behavior have shaped us from then through the middle ages until today. They’ll continue to shape us in the future. For instance, although no one planned it, we’re now well on our way to becoming an urban species. And despite a lot of worrying today, we’re also unlikely to run out of food anytime soon.
It’s 11,600 years ago, the last ice age is ending, and we’re heading into a big change in our food supply, although we don’t know it yet. Our tribes in the wind-swept hills of northern Iraq are out looking for lunch. There are about 25 of in a tribe and we’re tall and slim and fit and healthy. We eat anything we can find, from gazelles to berries to grubs. We’ve plenty of spare time and our dogs help with the hunt. We may not live long, but we’ve few diseases—there aren’t enough of us for them to persist. We’re also hardy from unceasing exercise. All of us are related, and all of us, including children, are armed. Anyone truly sick, or maybe even just lame, simply dies. We can’t stay to nurse them for long because to stop moving is to starve. We’re grimy, our table manners aren’t pleasant, and we don’t smell too good either, but we aren’t stupid. The stupid die. Things have been this way for at least the last 40,000 years and they seem set to continue this way for the next 40,000. Our only real problem is that we aren’t always certain of finding food, and right now we’re starving.
But now observe the fateful moment: One of our little Iraqi tribes nears a golden field of a strange long-stemmed grass. Perhaps we haven’t sighted a gazelle or wild ass herd in many days, or maybe we’d herded a few goats but disease killed them. Whatever the reason, we’re hungry. We’re so hungry we’re ready to eat grass. One of us, perhaps a woman, wonders if the grass seeds clustered on the waving stalks are good to eat. Squatting to pull some up, she finds that they come off in her hand, as if meant to be easily harvested. We then gather several lapfuls of seeds. That night we make unleavened bread, like today’s tortillas or chapatis. We pound the wild wheat seeds to a pulp, mix with water, and lather the paste on a flat rock near the fire. Painted by the warm firelight, our band forms a tableau, a freeze-frame of our species before the fast-forward changes to come. Perhaps months (years? centuries?) later, we discover how to ferment the same grass seeds. Now we have beer. We don’t, however, at once give up hunting and gathering to become bread-eating, beer-swilling hicks. Foraging is what we know. It’s kept us alive for millennia. So we keep roaming, following our food.
All that must have happened many times before, starting about 3,000 years further back in time, when our planet had first started to warm out of its long deep freeze. One of our bands in Iraq though was special. We kept returning to the field of wild wheat. One day, instead of discarding our brushwood huts and moving on as always, we built a more permanent camp of mud-brick. We returned to it seasonally as game dried up elsewhere, but we still didn’t settle. We continued to hunt and gather and harvest. We also didn’t plant anything for centuries. Perhaps the idea hadn’t occurred to us, but it’s just as likely that we simply had no need. Then one day everything changed. Our numbers had risen beyond the level we could support by foraging alone. We were trapped.
That little band of ours now had some place to defend and that one place had to give us everything we needed to survive. We formed settlments—they were too small to even call them villages. One of those settlements, Shanidar Cave in northern Iraq, gelled about a thousand years after our first mud-brick huts. Soon it supported up to 150 of us—perhaps six times more than foraging alone could feed. Grass seeds, which we today call wheat and emmer and rice and so on, then became ever more important to us. They became our only reliable food source. That’s the nexus at which everything started to change for our species. That’s when we began to become something truly new.
Look at those wild wheat seeds on a stalk. As they ripen, their stalk shatters and they fall to the ground to sprout. For a few mutant plants though, the stalk fails to shatter. Normally that genetic strain would occur only rarely since it can’t make new plants. But 11,000 years ago it was lucky because hungry people were roving nearby. We ignored all the wheat stalks that had done the right thing and shattered. Picking up their scattered seeds would take more energy than eating them would give. But the mutant plants still had their ripe seeds on the stalk. That put them in the perfect position for us to harvest them efficiently. Then, after a thousand years or so, we planted some of the mutant seeds we didn’t eat. That gave those mutants an advantage over their normal cousins, so they spread. And that was what led to our big change—and all our big changes since. With that, not just settlement but farming itself began.
Today we still don’t know what triggered our first settlements back then. Likely though it was linked to the melting ice because it was a global change for us. Within the next few thousand years our species also tamed rice, beans, squash, and yams—in southern China, northern India, north-central Africa, and central America. Today we still live with the genetic changes we started back then. For example, we first tamed maize in Mexico’s central highlands about 5,600 years ago. At the time, wild corn cobs were under half an inch long. By 1492, when the Spanish showed up in the Americas, we’d already been selecting bigger ones for four millennia. By then, some cobs were already six inches long. Today, some are 18 inches long. Without our help, such mutant maize plants would quickly die out. Their kernels couldn’t escape the cob to sprout. So today’s corn cobs exist solely because we support them. Wheat, apples, peas, watermelons—all our crops today are the same. None are ‘natural.’ If we were to vanish tomorrow, the corn we know today would grieve, for it would vanish within a season. Over time, its descendants would turn back into something small, hard, and dry. Many other gene distributions would change too. Poodles would transform back to gray wolves. Cows would go back to being wiry aurochs. Watermelons would turn back into small, bitter berries. Today’s sheep and wheat, and all our other tamed animals and plants, would all vanish. We’re as much a part of our mutant plants’ reproductive system as they are of ours.
That taming millennia ago didn’t only change the plants and animals around us; it also changed how we lived. For one thing, slavery became more likely. When we were all hunters and gatherers 11,000 years ago, we weren’t meek. We could maim and rape and kill just as well as anyone else can, but we likely didn’t take slaves. They would have had no point. Back then, we all got about on foot. Each new mouth would’ve meant having to add about 80 acres to our food-gathering range. Capturing someone to do your laundry would’ve made zero sense. But once we started turning into farmers, new hands became worth more than their new mouths. As farmers, we also had more work to do, and it was more continuous work. So slavery would’ve started making sense. We could both feed slaves and get them to make more food than they eat. Also, once we were stuck in place, we could invest in more permanent things—like slave pens. Even herders can’t stop slaves from running away as cheaply as farmers can. Then once we had long-distance trade, slavery would’ve made even more sense. Before the horse, the camel, the ship, as slaves we could just run away. Our ex-captors could only follow on foot.
But, for many reasons, farming’s biggest change was what it did to our numbers. First, as today’s female athletes and dancers know, low body fat lowers female fertility. Ovulation slows or even stops. Thus, hunter-gatherer females have few children. But as our food supply grew more reliable, female body fat grew more uniform throughout the year, so ovulation regularized. Birthrate rose. It rose for another reason too. Hunter-gatherer mothers are forced to carry their infants, so they suckle them more since infants are always close to the breast. Breast feeding releases hormones that reduce fertility. But once we settled, we no longer had to carry our babies all the time. That in turn reduced suckling. That then raised our birthrate. Settlement raised our birthrate for yet another reason. Once we no longer had to carry our kids around all the time, women could have more than one at a time. Plus, farming needs more labor than foraging. It also needs more continuous labor. So an extra pair of hands, enslaved or not, became worth more than an extra mouth. Thus, as we turned into farmers the cost of kids relative to their future labor value fell. Women, instead of reproducing every three or four years as before, turned into yearly baby machines. So once we settled down and also had a reliable food supply, we multiplied like rats in a grain silo. The more tamed plants we had, the more of us there would be to ensure yet more tamed plants.
That kind of self-feeding cycle isn’t unique to us. Chemists might call it an autocatalytic (‘self-stimulating’) reaction. A catalyst is anything that stimulates a chemical reaction while remaining unchanged. An autocatalytic chemical reaction thus helps itself continue. It makes its own catalyst. The more the cycle goes on, the more catalyst it makes, which helps the cycle go on, which then makes more catalyst. It’s a beast whose hunger rises the more it eats. Physicists use the same idea. A nuclear explosion starts when enough radioactive atoms release neutrons in a small enough space. As the number of neutrons rises, so does the chance that they’ll hit new atoms, which will release energy—and yet more neutrons. If the reaction starts with fewer atoms than the critical mass needed to chain-react, it dies quickly. If it has more than that critical mass, it quickly goes autocatalytic. A nuclear explosion results.
Something similar happened to us 11 millennia ago. The mutant plants we ate couldn’t flourish without us to nurture them. We couldn’t flourish without them to eat. The two of us thus grew on each other, like two intertwining vines neither of which could support itself alone. So just as we selected mutant families of crops, so too must they have selected mutant families of humans. Genetically, our species hasn’t changed much since then—there hasn’t been enough time yet—but we’ve changed everything around us, and that’s changed how we must live. We’ve changed our food, but our food has also changed us. But that’s only half the story of how we became farmers. Autocatalysis put us on the treadmill of technological change, but it didn’t nail us in place. That came next as we changed phase.
Today we like to congratulate ourselves on our cleverness in constructing the comfortable world that many of us live in today. But our lives today aren’t necessarily any better or worse than our lives were 11,000 years ago. Back then, we couldn’t amass much since everything had to go on our sweaty backs, but we weren’t naked apes hefting big stone axes. We each carried about 20 pounds of food, weapons, tools, and babies. Weight was the enemy, so we likely didn’t make most of our tools with stone. Instead, we probably made grass shoes, leather bags, and string baby slings. All that has washed away in the river of time, leaving only our stone, and sometimes horn, tools. We must also have made slingshots and bows, drugs and medicines, tents and waterbottles, plus clothes, ornaments, tattoos. In short, our technology was already well-developed, and after millennia of fine-tuning by clever people with loads of time on their hands, it was well adapted to our needs. Even so, only about four million of us were alive at the time. Our toolbase couldn’t support any more than that.
Today we number in the billions and half of us live in cities, with more moving to cities all the time. But we don’t live as we do now because millennia ago we foresaw our present lives, or even desired them. We made the steps but didn’t plan the journey. We’re half-urban today because we fell into our present, trapped in an autocatalytic food cycle that we unwittingly began 11,000 years ago. But once that cycle got going our growing toolbase then changed us permanently. Our tools change us just as much as we change them. We didn’t plan what happened next.
Skeletons from 10,400 years ago tell us why. Buried in the sands of Abu Hureyra, on the banks of the Euphrates in northern Syria, they speak of females in pain. They had enlarged and often injured toe joints, curved and buttressed femurs, enlarged knees, and damaged, or even crushed, spinal disks. They must have had to kneel to grind nuts and grain. Plus, with only stone grinders and sweat, it must have taken them hours each day to grind enough flour for just one family meal. Adolescent skeletons also speak of regular and excessive strain. They must have carried heavy loads on their heads daily. And everyone—girls and boys, men and women—also had fractured teeth. Likely, that came from eating partially ground grain and bits of stone flaked off during the grinding.
“In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground.” Wise words. But no one mentioned millennia of pain. Why did we put up with it? Why not give up the farming fad and go back to foraging? Perhaps many of us did, but after farming for a while it was too late for most of us. We were already too many. For instance, in Abu Hureyra we’d sited our village on a gazelle migration path. For a while the pickings must have been good. We grew fat. Our birthrate rose. But as the planet warmed and its climate changed, the herds declined. By then we were too many to go back to roving. Oops. Nurturing mutant grain became more and more important to us. We were stuck.
So we invented new tools. By about 9,000 years ago in Abu Hureyra, weaving had already become a speciality among a few women. Fewer fractured teeth overall suggest that we then figured out how to weave sieves fine enough to sift our flour. Then, as the climate dried further, gazelles vanished. We turned to herding sheep and goats, and more planting. Then we figured out how to hand-throw clay pots—perhaps we’d noticed that pots are good ways to store grain against rats. We may have then made more pots to soak our grain and cook it into porridge because our fractured teeth then disappeared. With our new soft foods though, tooth decay, once rare, grew. Our bodies aren’t built to live well only on starches. However, with no more teeth-breaking, our numbers also grew. Those of us with few or no teeth could survive longer. Before, we simply died. Disease then rose, presumably from more crowding and more tamed animals. Our larger numbers also served as a disease reservoir. Illnesses could then circulate for decades without dying out. They could even move back and forth between us and our newly tamed food animals. So they persisted. Infant deaths climbed too, perhaps for the same reason. Each solution to a problem led to a new problem, which led to a new solution. We were caught in an autocatalytic technology trap. We’re still in it today.
Even though we invented all those new tools, we didn’t intend their effect. What hunter-gatherer 11,000 years ago would’ve interrupted the campfire songs to say: “Let’s farm! Sure, we’ll lose about five or six inches in height. We’ll be sickly too. We’ll get less protein, we’ll eat too much starch, we’ll have less variety in our diet, and we’ll have to work harder. We’ll invent slavery, more women will die in childbirth, and more babies will die. Plus we’ll be in great pain for thousands of years. But we’ll just have to bear it so that our remote descendants can have mobile phones.” Who would give up millennia of one way of life to become a farmer?
That question is hard to answer if we assume that we foresee our future, or that our plans for it mostly succeed. But if we abandon those assumptions its answer becomes obvious since a thousand farmers can live on the land that 25 foragers need. If it ever came to war, those legions of runty, sickly, gap-toothed farmers would wipe out the few tall, healthy, nomads. Even when the rovers won, the hordes of farmers that they would then rule would swallow them, as a pond swallows a flung pebble. A few centuries later, the ripples would’ve died down and it would be much the same as if they’d lost. We’d farm mostly the same foods. We’d make roughly as many babies. We’d be able to feed about as many priests and warriors—although they might serve different gods and have different weapons. Life would go on much as it had before, except that we’d have changed some of our names and customs. So whether the rovers won or lost made no real difference.
That’s what happened to the Amorites in Sumeria over 4,000 years ago. They came with their flocks down from the hills surrounding Sumeria and took over. For a while life must have been good for them. But over time they had to turn into farmers just like the folks they ruled. That also happened to the Hyksos in Egypt 3,700 years ago. Same for the Vikings in Europe 1,200 years ago. The Turks in Persia, the Mughals in India, the Mongols in China, the Bantu in Africa, whether they came on foot or by longship, the farm swallowed them all. In short, become a farmer and you must stay a farmer. And anyone not a farmer who tries to make you stop being a farmer must also become a farmer. The only way to stay nomadic was to kill all farmers, keep away from them, or become a herder and trade with them. And every generation there’d be more farmers crowding your land.
As with autocatalysis, that reaction mechanism isn’t special to us. Physicists might call it a phase change. Water, for example, has several phases. In its liquid phase, it won’t expand to fill a room, it’ll dissolve sugar but not rubber, and so on. But all those properties change as it freezes into ice or boils into steam. The advent of farming shows that we too can phase change. As a species, we’re stable if we’re all in one phase or the other—either nomads or settlers. When we’re a mix though, rovers feel pressure to settle. It doesn’t matter whether we like it. It’s irrelevant whether we planned it. It’s unimportant if we even notice it. In time, most of us will phase change into farming. One way of life needn’t be better or worse. Both are just life. But inheritors of early farmers, descendants of their tools as much as their loins, choose not to see that. Instead, they see a wave of change across the world with foragers turning into farmers nearly everywhere. They thus conclude that farmers are ‘better’ than foragers. So they look at any remaining nomads and see ‘savages.’ Then, some later inheritors call them ‘noble savages.’ Both terms are about as sensible as ice calling steam hotheaded, or steam calling water dense.
In sum, we didn’t start to build our current half-urban world 11,000 years ago ‘because we grew smarter.’ Nor did we do it ‘because it was better.’ Farmers weren’t taller, healthier, better fed, or more relaxed than foragers. Nor does it explain anything to say that farmers were ‘less savage’ or ‘more civilized.’ Nor did we look ahead and see that we’d suffer for millennia but still decide to farm. We’re not stupid. Settlement, followed by farming, likely first happened because it was the only choice for some of us at some time. All our other groups in the same position died. Autocatalysis then took over. Once that happened to enough of us in enough places, network effects then amplified its spread until most of us phase changed. We didn’t have to like that, plan it, foresee it, or even notice it. The things we have today, the ways we organize ourselves, the lives we lead, aren’t here because they’re necessarily ‘good.’ They’re here because they are, or were at one time, good at helping us survive. However, once they trapped us into expanding our technology, we spread everywhere until we cultivated even marginal foods. So whenever the next climate change, or plant blight, or other food catastrophe hit, we were always caught with our populations rising. We’ve been hungry a long time.
Once many of us had phase changed into farming by about 5,000 years ago we began a way of life that then lasted for millennia, and it’s still the norm for about half of us today. For all that time we’ve been trying to make our food supply more reliable. Some of our biggest changes, however, have happened only since the middle ages. Back then, peasant diet varied with the region and the season but in Europe, to choose one particular case, our staples were, and still are, cereal grasses: wheat, barley, oats, rye. We made them into bread or porridge. We also fermented them to make ale, our universal drink. To those we added peas and beans, turnips and cabbages, leeks and onions, and honey. Most of our protein came from eggs, lard, or bacon drippings. Meat was rare. Oxen and horses were more valuable for manure and plowing. Cows were for milk, butter, and cheese. The forest deer were for our manor lords. Instead, as peasants we raised pigs. They can live on kitchen slops, forest beechnuts, and acorns. We built fishponds in the river, and we raised poultry—though not for the meat, but for the occasional egg. Men with swords or bibles took the rest. Most of our extra animal protein went to our lords temporal as tax and our lords spiritual as tithe.
Whether as peasants or lords, we built all our meals around the staff of life, bread. Mold was always a problem. Soft breads wouldn’t keep, so we often baked them into bricks. We didn’t eat them, we gnawed them. The toothless ate porridge. We salted what we could, but salt was so rare that we sometimes used it as money. We also had fresh fruit and vegetables, but only in summer. It was the same for dairy products, except for a little hard cheese and perhaps some salted butter. At year’s end, lacking enough fodder, we killed most of our livestock for winter food. A cow though was also a source of manure for the fallow fields—and thus future hay, and so future cows. Cow flops were also a good fuel source and building material. So we had to balance our yearly cow-killing against the amount of grass we could gather and store before the autumn rains spoiled the hay. Every decade or so we made poor choices, or the weather forced our hand, as when Europe first plunged into the Little Ice Age.
Starting in 1314, Europe then had a Great Famine. It lasted seven years. Triggered by the Little Ice Age, the cold and rain destroyed crops. It also killed both our food animals and draft animals. The poor among us, which was about nine-tenths of us, ate diseased cattle, pets, rats, insects. We ate the leaves off trees. We ate grass. Then all hope died and we began to eat each other. Millions of us died. That famine then worsened Europe’s Hundred Years’ War. Both then worsened Europe’s first visit from the Black Death. Millions upon millions of us died.
But while that was extreme, it was hardly surprising. Widespread famines had come to Europe before in 1257-9, and would come again in 1346-7. Just in the 50 years before 1314, England alone had suffered famine roughly every 11 years. Nor was our famine cycle special to Europe, or even the fourteenth century. In India and China we suffered just as badly and just as often. Everywhere that we could write, roughly every decade or so we wrote about hard times. One poor harvest was just about bearable. Two in a row and food prices went mad. Famine came. Epidemic followed. War wasn’t far behind. Then came pestilence. It was a familiar cycle.
Even without famine, most of us in medieval Europe went hungry twice a year—in the spring, after winter stocks were gone, then in July, the month before harvest. A failed harvest didn’t always mean famine, but it always at least meant hunger. First we foraged for beechnuts, berries, and nettles. Then we ate any older farm animals. Then we ate our future by eating all the rest. When those were gone, we phase-changed back into foragers. We abandoned our homes and tools and roamed the land. We risked death to poach eels from millponds, and squirrels, rabbits, and birds from the lord’s forest. If caught, we might be killed—if the wolves or bears or wild boars didn’t get us first. Granaries were our banks during such lean times, and mold, weevils, moths, and rodents were our eternal enemies.
Food wasn’t our only problem though. Damp and cold killed us just as casually as hunger did. The poorest of us lived in small, dark, smoky huts, which we built of poles daubed with clay, manure, and brush. We roofed them with thatch and covered their earthen floors with straw. We had no chimneys and no windows. At around five feet tall, we were short and bent. Our skin, like a cured ham, was leathery from our household smoke. By 30 we were nearly toothless. Most of us didn’t live to see 35. Dirty and rank, we lived with our livestock and we knew everything about lice, fleas, and dung—and nothing about microbes. One in four of us died before we were a year old. And all of us were always working. We tended the fires, the livestock, the fields. We made food, thread, cloth. We repaired clothes, bedding, cottages. In any scraps of time left over, we sewed or carved something to trade. Our bones from that time show extensive osteoarthritis, spinal deformations, bony growths, and joint enlargements—the result of decades of toil. When we were foragers, to stop walking was to die. Once we were farmers, to stop working was to die.
Of course, our lives weren’t always that hard. For much of the time we managed to stave off outright hunger. When we could control our numbers and the weather didn’t act up, we even feasted. Also, not all of us in 1314 lived hard. A few of us were ladies in pointy hats or knights in shiny armor. But the risks were always there for everyone. With over nine-tenths of us rural, and with many rustics owned by their manor lords, many of our lives were hard. For millennia, and all over the globe, our species lived on that tightrope. Then, a couple centuries ago, a fifth of us left that hungry world. Soon another fifth will have done so. Instead of constantly asking ‘When next can we eat?,’ we started asking today’s big three imponderables: Why are we here? Where are we headed? Do these clothes make me look fat?
That was a phase change just as big as the one that brought us into farming in the first place. How did it happen? Today we tell many stories about it. One of them has it that today’s rich are rich only because they stole from yesterday’s poor. That story makes some sense. The ancestors of today’s rich did indeed steal a lot, and killed millions to do so. For example, in the late nineteenth century, Belgians caused the deaths of at least eight million Congolese and stole literally tons of ivory and rubber. But is that mainly why their descendants are fat today? That story is certainly popular, especially among our poor. It’s also a good argument in the short run. Our rich can indeed steal. Our poor have indeed been stolen from. All our millennia of looting surely made a huge difference. Our rich can also be efficient thieves. Our poor might love to steal well too, but lack the really good housebreaking tools—inside information, numbered Swiss bank accounts, tanks. But the idea makes no sense in the long run. No amount of theft among ourselves can explain the difference in our lives between 1314 and today. All theft can do is rearrange who has what stuff. It can’t make more stuff. Most of what we have today we stole from the universe itself.
Most other animals can’t do that. They always have a carrying capacity; that is, some limit to how much their numbers can rise before dying back to a normal size. That’s true for us too, but we’re nowhere near our limit. Because we invent things and we trade things, there’s no fixed amount of human food. Even something as seemingly simple as our invention of pots changed our food supply. Suddenly we could store more food than we could before. Whenever we make an important new tool—the pot, the plow, the tin can, the train—we can use it to make or store or move lots more food. That works for our non-material tools too: a bank, a credit system, a pension plan. Each of our new tools pushes down our food-to-tool exchange rate. Gazelles can’t do that.
Further, the periods during which that exchange rate stayed fixed—once millennia, then centuries, then decades, and perhaps soon, years—are shortening. That’s happening because beyond a certain point we fell into a new autocatalytic cycle. Like radioactive atoms spewing neutrons, once we had a critical mass of tools, the more we had, the more new food we could make (or store, or move). The more food we had, the more of us there could be. The more of us there were, the faster our tools grew. In some parts of the globe today, our tool supply is now growing far faster than our numbers can, so some of us now worry about being too fat rather than too thin.
In essence then, it’s our tools and trade that determine the amount and reliability of our food supply, not our thefts or threats. Unlike food, a tool is often easy to copy and transport. It, or the ideas behind it, can also last a long time. So it can both spread among us through trade and add up. It doesn’t matter whether that new tool is a new fertilizer, a new vaccine, or a new banking system. One day, our newest tools may grow so cheap that their marginal food-cost may become negligible. We shan’t then need any more new food to produce more new tech. At that point we’ll have left the food economy. We’d be in the technology economy. We’re not there yet, but we’ve already made a vast machine that turns knowledge and tools into yet more knowledge and tools—and, almost incidentally, into yet more food. That machine is an amalgam of all our tools and ideas. To build it we didn’t merely cheat each other. We cheated the cosmos—and it’s far richer than any of us are. We found ways to make more food, to store more food, to trade more food. That’s what many of our technologies do. They reduce our ignorance and enlarge the possible.
But if that’s so, how come we usually don’t see ourselves and our food supply that way? Well, until a few centuries ago, big increases in our food supply used to be rare. Most of the time our supply really was mostly fixed. The only way for me to get more food was to kill you or steal from you. Thus the Belgian sack of the Congo, among many others. That then led to the belief, popular especially among our rich today, that we have a carrying capacity, as gazelles do. More of us—a codephrase for more of us who’re poor—are just a bigger drain on our resources. Sooner or later we starve back to our carrying capacity. But unlike gazelles we can change our limits. We make new tools, and we trade what we have. We band together into a giant swarm, inventing our way out of hunger, even though we don’t plan it that way. We needn’t make our swarm consciously, nor need we make it because we’re peaceful, selfless, caring, or farseeing. We do it because we can and because it benefits us. Trade is the glue that binds us all, and our wit is the weapon we use to carve a place for ourselves on this planet.
Back in Europe’s fourteenth century, travel was so slow and costly that most of our manors there had to be largely self-sufficient. When hard times came we had nothing to do but starve—or make someone else starve. Today, many of us, especially in our richest nations, have forgotten that past. We preach individual, familial, corporate, and national self-reliance just as our manor lords once did. It’s a wonderfully bracing fiction—the frontier life, rugged individuals, everyone for themselves. But in practice, and with rare Robinson Crusoe exceptions, we’ve never been self-reliant. We’ve always worked together. It’s our awareness of, empathy for, and network linkage to each other that distinguishes us from the beasts that perish. We live by each other’s grace.
We’ve changed our food supply a lot over the millennia, but our changes aren’t over yet. Today, 12 percent of us are still chronically hungry. That percentage has halved just since 1970, when 25 percent of us went hungry, but today’s 12 percent is still 852 million of us. That’s about twice as many as all of us alive in 1314. It’s over 200 times as many of us as were alive 11,000 years ago. We also still have famine today. It’s just rarer. When it comes, its effects are also more localized. Mainly it affects our poorest families within our poorest countries. Even in our richest countries, where there’s more than enough for everyone to eat, our poorest can still sometimes starve without enough money—or a gun.
So even though billions of us have now left the hungry world, millions of us are still starving. Today many of us explain that largely as a political or economic problem. We then use the magic word ‘overpopulation,’ as if it explained something. But while gazelles can be overpopulated, we can’t be. What population we can support depends on our tools and we still have far to go before we can’t improve them anymore. Although we don’t think of it that way, our food tech is still too costly and uncertain. To re-imagine our farms though, we must first re-imagine our food, and that means first recalling a little chemistry.
All living things on earth are mostly made of just a few elements. The big four are: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. Then there’s a little phosphorus, sulfur, potassium, and so on, then some trace amounts of a few others. A whale, a petunia, Diana Ross and the Supremes, they’re all made of exactly the same stuff. But to feed ourselves we can’t simply down a bucket of carbon and inhale a cubic foot of hydrogen. We need the stuff in particular structures. Glucose, for instance, is one such structure. It’s made of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. When digesting it, our body converts it into other structures of the same three elements. All such structures represent information. Arrange a bunch of the elements one way and you get albumin—it’s the chief protein in egg whites. Arrange it another way and you get urea—it’s the chief component of urine. All our foods are thus just particular structures of nine or so atoms. It’s their structure, their information content, that makes one a food and another a toxin. So when we eat, we’re not just taking in atoms for spare parts and gaining energy by rearranging them. We’re also consuming information. Matter, energy, and information—that’s all a lifeform is.
For example, for you to eat a slice of carrot cake, someone first had to get, handle, and transport a carrot seed. That seed contains all the information the future carrot plant will need to build itself. Someone then had to till some soil and plant the seed. The plant then built itself with energy from the sun. It also soaked up matter from its surroundings—mainly carbon dioxide from the air, plus its water and mineral supply. While it did so, someone watered and fertilized it, and protected it from predators, diseases, and competing plants. Then someone harvested it—discarding everything it took months to grow, except its root. Someone then cleaned and bagged that root, and either sprayed it with antibacterials or canned it. It also had to be handled and transported for display and sale. Then it was cleaned and grated. Then cooked. All that took energy. And that’s not even counting the rest of the cake.
That process seems both efficient and unalterable—until we look at it with a chemical engineer’s eyes. Our plants are good at what they do, but what they mainly do is make more of themselves. They use huge amounts of land, water, and energy to rearrange nine or so elements present in dirt, air, and water into more plants. Because they do that, they supply four-fifths of our nutrition. We’d die without them. Worldwide, the average adult human male today consumes about 2,700 kilocalories of food energy a day (an adult female, about 2,000). That’s about the same amount of energy we’d get by burning a pound of coal, which would cost about one U.S. cent. But it costs our species far more than that to feed ourselves today because our current food tech is vastly inefficient.
Take one of our crop plants at the equator. It uses less than one percent of the sun’s energy reaching it. It often doesn’t even bother to capture that much. Of what little it does capture, it uses about half that just to transpire water from its leaves, which is how it keeps its sap flowing upward. Its problem isn’t too little energy—it’s too much energy, and too little of either water or carbon dioxide. It needs carbon dioxide to make its carbohydrates, but carbon dioxide is scarce in the atmosphere. It also needs water to move minerals from the soil to its cells—plus about one percent more for photosynthesis. Any more energy than it can use is wasted. So a plant isn’t good at capturing the sun’s energy—it’s good at avoiding the capture of the sun’s energy. It throws away over 99 percent of the energy it might have used. We’re no better. We only get to eat about one percent, or less, of that. That’s because we discard around 93 percent of the average plant as inedible. Of the remaining seven percent, we eat only about 13 percent. We use the rest to seed, nourish, protect, harvest, transport, prepare, and sell those edibles. In sum, between our plants’ wastefulness and our wastefulness, when we eat a plant product today we’re failing to capture at least 99.99 percent of the energy that the plant originally got from the sun.
Said that way it’s clear that our food supply is inefficient. But we worsen the inefficiences beause we like to eat animals too. Making animal protein the way we do today means yet more waste because all animals eat food only as soup. That, for example, is what our body turns all our food into before it can use it for anything. Eating an animal or plant is like taking jackhammers and blowtorches to a jet until it’s in bits so fine you could draw them through a straw. Then we use its flecks of metal and plastic for spare parts and its jet fuel for energy. All the jet’s intricate parts, like its engines, which took so much energy to build, get pulverized into tiny pieces. Digestion is inherently wasteful. So when worms eat plants, then chickens eat worms, then we eat chickens, at each step we’re losing energy. We’re eating something whose plant equivalent could’ve fed at least ten of us. Thus, often when we eat an animal today our species loses at least 99.999 percent of all the energy we get from the sun.
To compensate, we add even more energy. For instance, on the Canadian prairies an acre of wheat annually needs about 80 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. So we inject into the earth about 1.6 million kilocalories of energy per acre per year. That’s not counting the cost of phosphorus, sulfur, and potassium fertilizer. Nor does it count the diesel fuel we burn for tillage and transport. Processing our food burns yet more energy. It costs three times as much energy to put a can of applesauce on a grocery shelf as it does to put the same amount of apples in the produce department. It takes 15 times as much energy to make a bag of potato chips as it does to make an equal amount of potatoes. Plus, managing all that takes the effort of at least half of our entire species. Our current food supply is very wasteful.
If we’re to change how we think about farming we must first change how we think about plants. To an engineer, a plant is a self-building factory. It takes in dirt, water, air, and sunlight and builds parts: a structural shell (its stem); pipes, filters, and hydraulic pumps (its vascular bundles); storage bins (its roots); and solar cells and gas exchangers (its leaves). It also builds a reproductive mechanism (its seeds). Those seeds can build yet more factories. They’re factory-starters, rich in the building materials that future factories will need to start building themselves. They serve to transmit matter, energy, and information into the future.
A few of those factory-starters—grains, legumes, tubers, and such—are so big, so easy to harvest, so easy to store, that it’s worth our while to eat them alone. Sometimes though, we instead eat the factory’s solar cells, as in spinach and lettuce. Sometimes, as in celery and asparagus, we eat its shell and hydraulic system. We might also eat its extractors and storage system, as in carrots and radishes. Or we might eat its outer casing (sassafras and cinnamon), its hydraulic fluid (maple), its capsule casing (dandelion, nasturtium, pansy), or the whole thing (sprouts and mushrooms—although a mushroom is a fungus, not a plant). When we eat a plant, we’re eating a factory.
Seeing plants as factories helps us see our farms anew. Today, we protect our little green factories by aerating and nitrogenating their mineral supply. We also raise their phosphorus and potassium supplies. We raise and control their water supply. And we separate them so that they don’t have to compete for such supplies. In short, when farming today, what we’re really doing is manually injecting our intelligence into a plant’s lifecycle. In the future we might pack all those smarts into the plant’s seed itself.
For example, every plant needs nitrogen to make its proteins and genes. We need it for the same reason. Nitrogen makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere. You’d think it would be easy to get. Not so. Most plants are such saps that they never figured out a way to capture it. So for them, nitrogen alone is useless. They can only use it in the form of ammonia or nitrates, and those get made only rarely (fire, lightning, rock weathering). Plus, once made, they dissolve easily. So it’s lucky for plants that animals concentrate nitrogen in their bodies. To a plant, an animal is a walking bag of nitrogen (and carbon dioxide). That’s why corpses, urine, and dung make such good fertilizer. So when we fertilize a plant, we’re mainly giving it more nitrogen. But we may not need to do that forever. Legumes, like peas, soybean, and clover, long ago found a clever way out. As symbionts, their roots make a place for nitrogen-fixing microbes, which makes them protein sources. And that’s where we get most of our protein today. We all make meals by pairing proteins with carbohydrates: soy and rice, bean and maize, lentil and potato. (And of course, bangers and mash, burger and fries.) So one day we might remake our cereals to extract nitrogen as legumes do. If so, we’d no longer need fertilizers. There are many more ways we could change our food plants as we learn more about their genetic heritage.
Such smart seeds would change us, just as mutant grass seeds changed us 11,000 years ago. For one thing, we’d need far fewer farmers. Our use of fertilizers, herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides would also drop. Also, more of the cost of farming would fall to the cost of the planting and harvesting machines, and the cost of the seeds. They, in turn, would cost more as they take more effort to debug and become more efficient at feeding us. Seed piracy would also grow since the biggest cost would then become that of designing the seeds in the first place. Real estate prices would also change as smart seeds change the meaning of the word ‘arable.’ We would also, no doubt, make many mistakes. We might even cover the planet in a new superweed, like kudzu. The effects of moving from plant farming to seed programming would be immense. Much of the planet’s biomass would turn itself into our food. But however smart our future seeds get, they’d still need much land, water, and energy. Even a smart plant is still a stupid food factory.
Genetically engineered seeds are already here, in early form, but we’re still not anywhere close to the end of our millennia-long sequence of food supply changes. In both our rich and poor countries today, our farms are, by far, the biggest modifier of our world. That’s because of the sheer amount of land and sea that today’s farming needs. Across the globe we give 4.4 billion acres to our crops, and 8.1 billion acres to our livestock. That’s about two-fifths of all available land area on the planet. We’re now losing about 15 million acres of primary forest a year. Farming on land and sea, far more than our cities or industry, destroys the habitats of millions of species. They’re now going extinct at the rate of perhaps 100 a day. Nine-tenths of all big predatory fish—including tuna, cod, and halibut—have vanished from the continental shelves just since 1950.
Our farms, no matter how ‘organic,’ are also, by far, our biggest water user. Our food, just as our body, averages about 65 to 75 percent water by weight. Most fruits, for instance, are 90 percent water. A pound of wheat needs 120 gallons of water to grow. A pound of rice, 144. We don’t see our foodstuffs that way, but they, and we, are mostly just bags of water. So when we grow food we’re mainly making tasty water. (Which we then turn into soup....) But we need a lot of water to do so because our plants need the stuff to run their sappy conveyor belts. Each of us drinks about a gallon of water a day, but the food we eat that same day could have needed up to 1,250 times as much water a day to grow. Growing the ingredients for a simple loaf of bread may have needed more than two tons of water. Thus, of all the water our species uses, we use ten percent at home and 20 percent in industry. Our farms gulp 70 percent. Plus, both homes and industry return up to 90 percent of water used. Farms return only 30 percent. Most of the rest is lost to evaporation.
Today’s food tech is thus a slow, destructive, expensive way to turn matter and energy into food. Will that ever change? Predicting the future of food is even harder than that of farming alone. It’s hard to step out of our place in time and distinguish between a thing and its function. Take your refrigerator. At first glance, it looks like it mainly keeps your foodstuffs cold. That’s wrong. Mainly it keeps them fresh. Today we use cold to do that, but a device that slows decay with radiation, drying agents, or electromagnetic fields, would turn our iceboxes into food closets. But such a change would have to wait until we better understand the proteins that make our food. And for that we need to understand a bit of molecular biology.
Until recently, we’ve focused on the genome—the list of genes that specify proteins in a cell. But it’s proteins that act. They build things, break things, move things, notice things, signal things. Over half our body’s dry weight is protein. (That’s why nitrogen, which makes up a big part of all proteins, is so important.) Identifying and classifying genes is called ‘genomics.’ Identifying and classifying protein function and relation is ‘proteomics.’ In a way, genomics is like building phone books: we’ve now figured out a long list of names (genes) and phone numbers (proteins those genes code for). We now have such phone books for hundreds of lifeforms, from viruses to fruit flies to us. Those phone books, however, so far only have a white pages section. To make sense of a lifeform we also need its yellow pages—we need to know what all those proteins do. Before we dial a number we want to know whether we’ll be calling a plumber or a hairdresser. That way we can start replacing one set of numbers with another.
That’s important because, like a plant, a single cell is a self-building factory. It makes whatever its genome tells it to make. If we change its genome we can get it to make new things. So if we knew what we were doing, we could make a microbe that eats plastics, thus making our plastics biodegradeable. We could also make one that cleans up oil spills. Or one that clears arteries. Or one that makes meat.
Figuring out how to do that is hard, but we have one irreplaceable tool to attack it—the computer. The problem is mainly that of teasing apart the effects of thousands of proteins interacting in giant catalytic networks in the cell. It’s a bit like crashing a big party and identifying circles of friends by seeing who talks to whom, then watching each circle to see who gossips most, and what the topics are. (It’s not really that easy. For example, topics can change depending on nearby topics; but you get the idea.) So once we understand how a strawberry plant works, we could start thinking about building one from scratch. Then we might modify it to make something that no strawberry plant has ever made—raspberries. Or potatoes. Or steaks.
Mere science fiction? Well yes, but we’ve already redesigned many microbes. We’ve remade some to use artificial amino acids to build new proteins. We’ve built viruses from scratch. We’ve changed cells to build themselves simple digital circuits. There’s no reason we couldn’t one day change cow cells so that they make a hunk of cow—without a cow. The hard part will be to make a life-support system for such artificial genomes to copy themselves in. Once that’s done, we’ll make such things by the vatful. But we’ll take a long time to figure it out. Before we do, we’ll likely steal a ready-made support system from somewhere: perhaps a strawberry plant. Once we do, we might start building a general food machine.
Today we think we’ve industrialized our farms, but all we’ve really done is mechanized them. We don’t make our food. We watch it being made by a large, automated factory we call the earth. We fiddle with its knobs and dials, but mostly it does the job for us. Only now do we know enough about genes to begin to make our own food, and that can’t happen overnight. Whenever our first food machines arrive, whatever they’ll look like, they’ll be prototypes. They’ll be too costly, awkward, or unsafe for the home. So at first they’ll likely only shift a little food production from farms to factories. Thus, just as we once shifted from wearing cotton and linen to plastics, so might we shift from growing potatoes to extruding potatoes. And just as with our first plastics, those potato factories might first shape their products to look just like natural potatoes. But one day we’ll get used to potatoes that come from a factory. New potato styles—new colors, textures, shapes, sizes—won’t scare us anymore. There’s no reason that meat factories can’t follow. One of the new foods may even fill a hugely desirable niche, as did nylons—whose only natural equivalent is expensive silk stockings.
Most of us needn’t even notice the new food factories at all. We’d continue to buy our food in grocery stores and markets. It’s just that the store would get some of its food from a factory rather than a farm. Sounds crazy? It’s already happened. Quorn, for example, is a cheap fake meat made from vats of fungus. And we’re already planning to make vat-grown pork from pig stem cells. Today, such meat-sheets would cost over $1,000 U.S. a pound, but one day that price might drop to $1 U.S. a pound. Food builders might then hop from factories to stores. Limited use in rich homes would then be just a question of time. The word ‘homemade’ would then gain a whole new meaning. As with the farms before them, our first food factories might then either go bankrupt, or shift to foodstuffs still outside the grasp of most home food machines. There would also have to be a whole new class of factories to build the new home food machines in the first place. Our fridges might then stop being food-storers. They’d become food-makers.
One day a fridge might even become something that some of us might call a ‘food machine.’ Perhaps it’ll be a plant-like device. Maybe it’ll even look like a strawberry plant. It might grow in a bucket that you plug into a wall socket and fill up weekly with water and minerals. As a byproduct, it might make oxygen, as natural plants do. Such food machines might even go into our spaceships. Dirt farmers may become increasingly weird atavists. Perhaps they’ll grow only the bulk plant-products we need for fibers, fabrics, paper, rubber, spices, and livestock feed. But even they could use the new machines to make such things. If that’s our future, our whole farming industry, from dairies to rubber plantations to fisheries, might well one day simply go away. And half our species would then be free to do something other than farming.
When we think about the future we often imagine that just because things have gone a certain way for 11 millennia that they must continue that way for 11 more. It’s a pity that more of us don’t think about just how strange the world is. If we did, we’d start thinking bigger than we’re used to. We might, for instance, imagine a future world where we’ve built cheap, hardy, rust-proof food machines that make meat from grass, or sweets from flowers, or fruits from dirt. If we knew enough, there’s no physical reason we couldn’t one day build such devices. Not only that, we might even build them so that they could repair themselves, or move around to find new inputs for themselves, or keep themselves out of harm’s way. We might even figure out how to let them reproduce. With such devices all we’d have to do is let them loose in a field of grass, garden of flowers, or patch of dirt and come back every now and then to harvest them. Why not? We already have such devices—we just didn’t make them. We call them cows and bees and strawberry plants.
By now, you’re probably rolling your eyes. Or you’re already on the phone telling you friends about this ludicrous idea. It’s loony to think about such a stack of possibilities today, isn’t it? Even if it were to happen, it would take centuries. Right? But what if food machines started showing up a few decades from now? Their existence depends on how much computational power we can muster, and that’s speeding up right now. Of course, even if they do come to exist few of us would rush out and buy such a thing. It’s too alien. It could break in all sorts of new and exciting ways. We won’t be prepared for any of them. It won’t happen tomorrow either; nothing does. Further, food snobs would continue to buy hand-grown food. Elites would continue to pay enormous sums for salted fish eggs. And connoisseurs would continue to drink hand-made fermented grape juice grown only in specially blessed earth. But bit by bit, as our computers continue to gain power, our vast fields of energy-wasteful crops may well wither away.
Once upon a time we invented pots to protect grain from rats. Then we found that we could also use them to make porridge. (Or perhaps it happened the opposite way.) Our teeth-breaking ended and our food stores grew. Just so might our fridge one day morph from ice-making to food-making. If so, its name would change as its uses and appearance change. Kids growing up with it won’t think of it as a ‘food machine,’ despite what their clueless parents might say. Nor would they think of it as a ‘refrigerator,’ regardless of what their even more clueless grandparents might say. As for the ‘icebox’ of their great-grandparents, they may not even understand the reference. Instead, they may think of it as a smart tree. They’ll compare it to things that look and act similarly, which may be apple trees or tomato plants, not washing machines or air conditioners.
A wise technocrat would stop talking now, but let’s press on out of science and engineering and see a little of what such a change might mean because nothing that large happens in a political vacuum—and if it does happen it’s sure to have economic consequences. First off, it still wouldn’t mean food utopia. For one thing, food machines, as partly digital devices, could crash. They could also be hacked. Also, even though they might live in kitchens and not gardens, as food sources they’d still have pests. Mice and roaches and microbes would still be hungry. Such a device might defend itself better though, since it could have digital pest sensors. Or perhaps it’ll just live inside a fridge. It needn’t need sunlight. (It plugs into a wall socket, remember?)
Further, such devices would bring wrenching change in the short run. Our present food producers won’t stand for that. They’ll fight that possible future, just as foragers fought farmers in the long ago. The whole food handling, processing, and distribution business would also be rigid with fear. They’re sure to lobby against any change, taking to the streets to warn us about the new frankenfoods. So politics, not science, would decide if food machines become widespread. Further, in countries with good distribution networks, economies of scale may well work against home food machines. After all, they do just that today for water and power. Few of us have our own wells or generators; it’s often far cheaper to centralize production then distribute its results. So economics, not engineering, would decide whether our future food machines might become more like power stations or more like washing machines. Finally, once food machines exist, someone, somewhere, will hack one. They’ll then use it to make homemade cannabis, cocaine, heroin—or gunpowder, gelignite, nerve gas. A food machine is really a disguised organic matter converter. It needn’t only make food. So legal and military needs would also matter.
So despite today’s climbing birthrate, rising urbanization, and wasteful farms, a food machine may still take us many decades to make—if we ever make one at all, that is. Although we’re most likely to need it in poor countries we’re most likely to create it in rich ones. And what’s the incentive? Today, food is a nearly negligible cost for our rich, but it’s still a huge cost for our poor. For example, average food cost in the United States is now around ten percent of income. In Eritrea, a former province of Ethiopia in Africa, it’s as much as 71 percent. Those of us who most need food machines can’t afford to make them. And those of us who can, don’t care.
But wait, we all care about starving babies, don’t we? Well, we sure say we do. But our rich also care about being too fat and that’s what we’re more likely to work on first. We also live with massive network effects related to food. Our rich nations already have a reliable food supply, and they’ve built a huge toolbase to ensure it. They’ve costly machines, trained farmers, and extensive credit systems. Those support huge equipment purchase and training, and vast storage facilities and transport networks. Add to that many schools and research institutes. Then add fast, long-range communications, and a wealthy and stable—and literate—home market. Our poor countries have little of that installed base. They also have less incentive to increase their food productivity since they couldn’t sell more of it abroad anyway. Rich countries won’t let ’em. Tariffs, quotas, subsidies, and dumping duties shut out foreign competition. We’re thus likely to make vast quantities of expensive, empty food—fat-free, calorie-free, taste-free—long before we make vast quantities of cheap, nutritious food.
Even so, what may happen around the world isn’t clear. For example, many peasants in our poor countries today lack property rights to their land. They’re already at the mercy of rich absentee landowners, who might choose to replace them with food machines. Also, a big and rapidly industrializing country—China, India, Brazil, or perhaps even Russia—may choose to spend the resources needed to invent food machines. They’d be more quickly freeing their people from the soil. A food machine might also fall out of research aimed at something else entirely. Sounds unlikely? Our first artificial fertilizers fell out by mistake when a French chemist tried to make cheap diamonds, a Canadian inventor tried to make cheap aluminum, and two German dyers tried to extract gold more cheaply. None of them planned to make fertilizer.
Finally, as the years pass, the technology behind food machines won’t stay there. It may enter our bodies. Some of the beings living off of a future food machine might be wearing bodies that look human, but they may be much modified from ours today. By then, some of us might have even remade our bodies to carry plant genomes. By carrying the full carbon cycle within ourselves, we’d end forever even the potential for hunger. If so, such beings wouldn’t need to eat. They’d also be wholly independent of nearly all of our planet’s vagaries. Perhaps they may sun themselves every morning and plug themselves in at night—the new couch potatoes. While doing so they might well wonder how we today could ever have been so barbaric as to kill and eat another living thing, animal or plant.
Today half of us live in cities and over a billion of us live in relative comfort. By 2015, another half-billion of us will likely have drawn ourselves up to that level of comfort. We’re doing well, all things considered. However, after millennia of business as usual our food technology might well change a lot this century. First off, our information tools, particularly computers, are now rising fast. We’re now learning a lot. That’ll give us new options. We’ll need them too because our species is heading for a peak population of roughly nine billion by 2050. For every three of us today there’ll be four of us by then. We’re not only increasing our numbers, we’re also increasing our incomes, and thus our overall energy demands. As our big and poor nations fully industrialize our wasteful food may become too fuel-expensive. Oil prices, at least, are certain to spike. Within a few decades we’re likely to enter a fuel crunch. We’re also now finally leaving the agrarian age that we started entering 11,000 years ago. Half of us are urban today, and more of us are quickly becoming so. We’re beginning our urban age. And the autocatalysis that’s phase-changing us into urbanites today is much the same as that which drove us to become villagers millennia ago.
Roughly speaking, our species today is about where Britain was in 1813, or where the United States was in 1880. That’s when farm labor first fell below half the workforce in those countries. It took another 40 or so years, till 1851, for most of Britain to become urban, and, similarly, till 1920 for the United States. So, by 2040 or so our species may be two-thirds urban. By then many more of us will be relatively rich, but billions more of us will be alive. Food demand, and thus land, water, and fuel demand, will all peak together. Large, long-term network trends are converging on a point somewhere not too far in our future. We’re nearing a crisis point.
Chances are we’ll survive it. We’ve already changed our food supply a lot. In 1998 Eritrea was one of our poorest countries. By today’s standards, three in four of us there were undernourished—the highest figure in the world at the time. Yet Eritrea in 1998 ate better than France did in 1705. Similarly, India in 1998 ate better than Britain did in 1850. Today, we live about ten years longer than we did just 30 years ago. Since then, our proportion of poor has dropped, our average income has doubled, our infant deaths have halved. Over four in five of us in poor countries now have at least adequate diets. In our poor countries from 1961 to 1992, our per-person daily kilocalorie intake jumped by a third even while our population doubled. By 2015, over half a billion more of us will join the world’s middle class. We’re doing better materially than we ever have, but we’re also straining our resources, given our current tools.
So one day we’ll again change our food tech—or we may again face famine and cannibalism, even in the richest fifth of our planet. Perhaps we’ll run out of one of our presently cheap resources. Or maybe we’ll suffer overly abrupt climate change. Or perhaps one of our clever genetic trials will go wrong and blight one of our chief cereals. (Rice alone feeds nearly half of all of us alive today.) Even with our paltry information tech today though, we have a far better chance now than before of seeing our next food calamity coming. Europeans in 1314 had no warning before some of them had to rob graves and eat their dead. Our swarm is now much bigger and stronger. Perhaps that’ll be enough for us to make new food sources before disaster is full upon us.
Or perhaps not. Maybe we won’t let ourselves see that our food supply is too wasteful, or that we can change it, until it’s too late. And even when we finally start to change it, we might simply prepare for disaster rather than try to solve our real problem: wasteful food. Why not? It’s happened many times before. For example, in China from 1958 to 1961, we let political insanity and bad weather kill 30 million of us. Villagers didn’t want to have to kill and eat their own children. So they swapped them with each other. As many of us died in China then as were alive in all of northern Europe in 1314.
Taking the long view though, famine management is part of a vast pattern of change going back at least to the beginnings of human settlement. From the moment that someone thought that certain grass seeds weren’t half bad when pounded and baked, we entered into a covenant with the soil. It hasn’t ended. Everyone whose hands have dug a yam or carrot out of black earth knows that. That covenant goes both ways though. Since at least the first ragged flint sickle tore through a sheaf of wild grass 11,000 years ago we’ve shaped our plants and they’ve shaped us. Pots to hold grain, granaries to hold pots, potters to build pots, masons to build granaries, soldiers to guard granaries, metal weapons for the soldiers, miners to get the metal, smiths to shape it, artists to decorate it, priests to bless it, raiders to steal it, more priests to pray for more pots and bigger granaries and fewer raiders, rulers to gather the surplus grain and feed the soldiers and priests.... Each step set up the next. We didn’t know where we were going, and we didn’t know what we were doing. Every change had a cost—often bloodshed, sometimes genocide—but always pain and dislocation. The strong often fought each change, and the past often fought the future. The weak usually only saw the sword or the whip. Each change also had ongoing costs, even after the pain of the change itself had smoothed away. Nuclear power plants have problems, but then so do hydroelectric dams. Trucking food around creates pollutants, but oxcarts have problems, too.
Unable to see into the future, we’ll always be like that. We change things around us for our own local, selfish, and short-term reasons, not knowing what their long-term network effects will be. The industrial phase change that gave us tractors, for example, had nothing to do with farming. As much as anything else, it started with trying to pump water out of Cornish tin mines. Our first tin can wasn’t made of tin—it was a champagne bottle. We got it when a Parisian cook found a new way to preserve fruits for his candy business. Our first fridge had nothing to do with preserving food. It started with trying to cure malaria in Florida. We’re always stumbling into our future, and mostly we’re looking at our sore feet, not the distant horizon. It’s always been so. It’ll always be so.
However our changes started, though, and for whatever goofy reasons we forced them through at first, many changes that our swarm let persist reduced our uncertainty about our food supply. A drought in northern China in 1877-8 killed between 9 and 13 million of us. Half a century later, famine came again. It was the most severe drought there in two centuries, yet, despite our larger numbers, and our usual bickering and muddle, only three million of us died. The earlier famine showed that far worse was possible. The railroad and the telegraph helped make the difference. Neither originally had anything to do with famine.
Until recently, change for us has nearly always been gradual, unforeseen, fitful. But such unintentionality is too untidy for us. So we ignore it. Instead, we make up stories about our past. We tell ourselves that we did it all deliberately and that everything was always heading to the here and now. That stance has emotional value. For instance, our history books often say that once we settled down 11,000 years ago we were no longer ‘forced to roam,’ as if roaming were a silly thing to do. Since we spent at least 40,000 years doing it, we must have been too stupid to see that farming was ‘better.’ Conclusion: our forebears were as dumb as a bag of rusty hammers—and we today aren’t. Even our science can be tinged with such stories. Four-limbed animals first colonized land about 360 million years ago. Many of our biology texts still couch that event as ‘the conquest of land’ or ‘the liberation from water.’ But what slavery was there in water? And did four-limbed animals really take away the land from the six-limbed and eight-limbed? There still are quite a few insects and spiders about.
We tell such human-centered, today-centered stories not because they’re true but because they give those of us alive today meaning and importance. If they were true, then we today must be the purpose of the universe. Thus, when looking back we often think we see a drama—sometimes a comedy, more often a tragedy, but always a simple story with vast and satisfying movements toward a dramatically pleasing end. Snipping and folding, embossing and rearranging, we made that story out of what to us at the time was merely a train of events. Stapled to one point in time, we look back and judge our parents by our standards, not theirs. And if we look ahead, it’s only to imagine that our children will live just as we do today.
We thus label an era the ‘middle ages,’ a name that says more about us today than it does about us back then. It’s a name as relative as place names like the Middle East, and it’s a name that those of us alive at the time surely didn’t give to our age. Back then, we didn’t think of ourselves as merely a way station on the road to today. Then, just as now, we thought we were the purpose of the universe. So just as we today look back in sardonic wonder on our lives in the middle ages, so too may our equally self-centered descendants write smarmy critiques of today’s way of life. They may pen endless diatribes about our wasteful farming, our pathetic industry, our limited knowledge—today’s equivalent of pointy hats and shiny armor. They may craft smug histories of our immense ignorance, bizarre beliefs, disgusting habits, appalling manners, and our short, ugly, boring, and pointless lives. By then, the technological juggernaut that they dwell within may well have catapulted their power over nature so far ahead of ours today that they’ll think of those of us alive today as savages. Perhaps they’ll rename today’s whole age—from around 1750 to this evening—the ‘later middle ages.’ All that will let them look down on us early-twenty-first-century, mobile-phone-clutching, half-urban savages. Maybe, if we’re lucky, they’ll call us noble savages.
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun
Food is the number one material factor affecting our swarm’s growth. Labor is a close second. The amount of physical and mental power that we can apply to our problems shapes how we, wittingly or unwittingly, organize to get what we want. That then determines how we arrange our labor lives, which shapes everything else. Our last big labor change, the industrial revolution, shows that. Normally we think of that change as something we planned, or as something that our leaders dragged us into. The way we think about the anti-slavery movement is another example of that style of thinking, as are our usual stories about the women’s movement, and the civil rights movement. But this chapter shows that our swarm grows at least as much by the near-accidental growth, then network linkage, of various material factors. It first shows that happening during the first and second stages of our industrial revolution in the eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Then it shows how those changes affected another of our changes, the women’s movement in the nineteenth century. It caps the discussion with some aspects of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century. While describing the processes whereby we change our labor arrangements it introduces two new complex system ideas: reaction networks and synergy. The first describes how we sometimes organize to do things, and the second describes why the effects of that kind of organization can sometimes be powerful. Added to autocatalysis and phase change, those two ideas then put in perspective today’s worries about offshoring and outsourcing while also suggesting how our labor lives might change in the future.
To her, the city is big and cold and foreign. Her journey to this place had begun the night that horsemen had raided her village, seven years ago. She was then about 12. They torched the huts, slit the men’s throats, killed the aged and the infant, and raped the girls and women. Then they took everyone between 8 and 13. The boys became cattle herders; the girls, house slaves. Seven years later her mistress gave her to another family. They lived in this place, this strange city of big buildings and a strange people who spoke a strange language. Four months after that, her new owners went on holiday. Then one day, left unwatched for a time, she gathered her courage and fled the house. That day she wandered the streets, talking at strangers, seeking a familiar face or a familiar tongue. She is a slave. The city is London. The date is Monday September 11th, 2000.
Today, many of us in rich countries believe that slavery is long gone. It had to do with wearing rags and picking cotton, we think, or with wearing chains and pulling oars. We also see slavery as always forced, and we think of slave life as worse than any alternative. We believe that slavery is about skin color, or perhaps creed, or maybe ideology. It’s something whites did to non-whites, we nod to each other—or Christians to non-Christians—or capitalists to non-capitalists. All those beliefs fit together. The trouble is, none of them are true.
Slavery isn’t dead. Today, counting all forms of bondage, perhaps 27 million of us are still slaves. Chattel slavery—fully legal ownership of our bodies—is now mostly dead, but debt slavery lives, especially for women and children. Sex slavery for women and girls, and some boys, also lives. Whereas our arms trade flows from rich countries to poor ones, our slave trade, like our drug trade, moves from poor countries to rich ones. Traffic streams from Central and Eastern Europe and Russia to Western Europe and North America. It also runs from China, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand to Japan, Australia, Western Europe, and North America. Today, perhaps 200,000 slaves are in the United States alone.
A black-market cousin of chattel slavery itself still exists in West Africa. There, children cost about $30 U.S. Dealers buy them as young as five from their parents in one country and sell them in another. As usual, poorer countries—like Benin, Mali, and Togo—supply richer ones—like Cote d’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Gabon. Full-frontal slavery, complete with slave markets, still exists in Mauritania and Sudan. Across the Atlantic, Brazil also has people in bondage. Tricked with promises of well-paid work, whole families are trucked or shipped around Amazonia. There they clear forests under armed guard. Haiti too has slaves. The poorest nation in the Americas, half its people can’t read and four in five live in abject poverty. It has armies of slaves, both for sex and for labor. That includes children as young as four.
Slavery isn’t always forced though. After some of us became farmers 11,000 years ago, kids could be born into a family that couldn’t support them, but who could be supported by another family. So rather than having to kill or abandon such children, as we probably did when we were all foragers, we could instead sell them to each other. Slavery among farmers or herders can also happen when a family can’t sustain itself during famine or war. To eat, such families can try to sell themselves. The alternative is banditry or suicide.
Slavery isn’t about skin color either. Sumerians kept slaves. So did Africans, Indians, Chinese, Japanese. Hebrews kept slaves. Mayans, Aztecs, Incas, all kept slaves. So did Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Arabs, Assyrians, Persians, Turks. You name ’em, they kept ’em. Europeans also enslaved each other. In Sussex a thousand years ago the king got four pence for every English slave sold. “They got the women with child and sent them pregnant to market. You would have seen queues of the wretches of both sexes shackled together... sold amidst much wailing.” Of course, the Catholic Church had a problem with that. But the problem wasn’t slavery. Churchmen owned slaves just like anyone else with two shillings to rub together. The problem wasn’t Christian slaves either. By then much of Europe was Christian. The problem was selling Christian slaves to non-Christians overseas. Two centuries later, Thomas Aquinas debated whether male slaves could become clerics (nope), whether their kids were slaves (yep), and so on. He argued that “offspring follow the womb.” So slave mother, slave child, even if the father were free.
Slavery in Europe also persisted long after that, despite what many books say. On May 19th, 1248, a slave girl was sold in Marseilles (and six weeks later her new owner resold her at a profit). In 1294, Marco Polo’s uncle died and in his will freed his slaves. (Later, when Marco Polo died, he freed his too.) Around then in Yorkshire, an English slave and his family cost just a bit more than a cow. In Genoa, slaves were almost all nubile girls from Russia, Greece, Bosnia, Georgia, Armenia, Bulgaria, and Turkey. In Venice between 1414 and 1423 alone, at least 10,000 such slaves changed hands. In England by 1547, all able-bodied vagrants were, by law, to be rounded up, branded, and enslaved. (Back then, being ‘branded an outlaw’ had literal meaning.) The next century, English theft of Irish bodies started at least by 1612. It continued until at least 1700. Nor did homegrown slavery then vanish from Europe. Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands enslaved their criminals until well into the nineteenth century. And back then, becoming a criminal could be as simple as shouting at the king.
Slavery also isn’t about creed. Buddhist China kept slaves. So did Hindu India. So did polytheist Africa. Christian Europe and Islamic Arabia were no different, especially on trips to Africa. Nor did they always have to steal to get more slaves. Many villages traded their neighbors for a bolt of cloth, a metal pot, a bead necklace. Christians and Muslims also took both Africans and Europeans by force. The European-run trade took over 12 million slaves. The Arab-run trade took another 12 million or so. At least one million of them were European. They then stocked the harems and swelled the armies of Arabia and north Africa.
Finally, slavery isn’t about ideology. Britain, a constitutional monarchy, had legal slavery. France, a republic after its Revolution, had legal slavery. The United States, a federal republic, had legal slavery. Soviet Russia enslaved perhaps 30 million in its slave-labor prison system, its Gulag. Communist China did the same in its equivalent, its Laogai. Fascist Germany also held slaves. So did Imperial Japan. Until at least the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth too, millions of us were little more than disposable tools.
In short, for all our history, many of us who could keep slaves, did. And many of us who couldn’t otherwise eat, sold our kids, then ourselves. We’ve been slavers and slaves for at least as long as we could write, and probably for at least as long as we’ve farmed. It didn’t matter what we looked like, where we lived, what we said we believed. In part, slavery is a response to a constraint and a need. The constraint is our food tech. The need is our demand for labor and sex. In Aristotle’s words, we all wanted ‘living tools.’ Slavery was thus long a part of our division of labor—the set of arrangements we have with each other, voluntary or not, that determines who does what work.
Today we often like to say that chattel slavery—human cattle—is ‘bad’ and that’s why we started ending it in the 1800s. But that can’t be right. If it were, why wasn’t that enough reason to end it long before? Further, why do other forms of slavery, especially sex slavery, still exist today? More generally, why did much of our farming world change in the 1800s, after millennia of not changing? And why did some of it not change much at all? Something big must have started happening to us in the 1800s—or, rather, the 1700s—something we didn’t plan or control. Starting around then we started changing many parts of our labor lives, but not all of them, and not everywhere, and we’re not yet finished changing. It’ll be a long time before slavery in all its forms vanishes completely. Still, much has already changed, and it all started in the 1700s, with the beginning of our industrial revolution.
Our industrial revolution came in at least four stages, with the first starting in 1769. That year, a Scot placed his first patent at the High Court of Chancery in London. His name was James Watt. His patent was for a steam engine.
Mention the term ‘steam engine’ today and most eyes glaze over. It brings back memories of dry schooldays filled with boring stories of grimy machinery and oppressed workers. But mention it two centuries ago and many eyes would light up. Back then it was the last word in high-tech, the equivalent of the computer today. It was the key to the start of our phase change from farming to industry. That then went on to change our labor lives just as much as our phase change from foraging to farming did 11 millennia ago. It was also a big part of why chattel slavery, at least, has declined. Slavery itself is just part of a larger story about our labor lives and how they change, and the industrial revolution is the last big labor change we’ve had.
But why did it start? Was it that we simply grew fed up with the limits we lived with in our farming world? Was it the next obvious step on a ladder of increasing power so that’s why we took it? Was it that a hero was born who showed us the error of our ways? We often tell the story of our industrial revolution all those ways. And mainly we center it on James Watt. Our phase change into industry happened mainly because of his effort, just as if he were a new Archimedes moving the earth with a lever. Or so we often tell ourselves anyway. But such a story ignores the effort of another man. And because it does, it distorts what happened, and why.
Step back in time to Russia in 1750. Ivan Polzunov, a military mining officer, then lived in Barnaul. Sited in the foothills of the Altai Mountains in southwestern Siberia, Barnaul was then a big (for Siberia) feudal mining town, complete with serfs. It was in the exact center of the middle of nowhere. It existed solely because it smelted about 90 percent of Russia’s silver. In 1758 Polzunov escorted a mule train carrying three tons of gold and silver on a 2,600 mile trip across the empty wastes between Barnual and Saint Petersburg. There he saw the czar’s fountains, powered by the first steam engine that Britain had ever exported. That engine excited him because back in Barnaul his chief problem was how to beef up the mine’s bellows pumps. He learned all he could about it. Over the next five years after his return he designed a 32-horsepower, twin-cylinder, reciprocating steam engine—the world’s first. Impressed, Russia’s empress, Catherine the Great, promoted him and gave him a grant to build his machine. But, stuck in Siberia, he lacked skilled machinists. So he mostly built it himself, by hand. Then he died, Tuesday May 27th, 1766.
Three days later his orphaned engine started driving four bellows in the smelting furnaces of the silver mine. But it was crude. As Russians say, it was ‘built by the axe.’ It worked from June to November, then it broke down. No one could fix it. Asking his unlettered apprentices to do so must have been like asking one of us today to repair a spaceship with a can opener and some chewing gum. In a world of serfs and carts and thatched cottages and muddy tracks, it was a piece of alien high tech. It never worked again. Polzunov was a failure. History forgot him.
But 5,000 miles to the west, while he sweated over his engine in Siberia, an idea for a new kind of steam engine, a new ‘Prime Mover,’ came to James Watt in Scotland. He patented it in London four years later. Then he took seven more years to build it. By Monday March 11th, 1776, three years after a bunch of rowdy colonists 3,000 miles further west had turned Boston harbor into a teapot, Watt’s first commercial engine was in use in a coal mine. Within a year, British industrialists were after it like a pack of rats after a plate of sausages. Everyone wanted to buy what he had to sell—cheap, relocatable, reliable power. Soon our labor relations began to change in response to our new tool, then many of our other relations began to change too. For one thing we began to seriously question our millennia-old institution of slavery. Over time our whole farming world began to crumble. Watt was a success. History idolized him.
Watt succeeded where Polzunov failed, but not because he was any smarter. He was part of a diverse and densely linked group of early machinists, proto-scientists, shop-owners, and investors. He wasn’t acting alone, lost in the middle of a vast and empty Siberian steppe. Like Polzunov, he first needed an engine already in use to then improve. That engine came out of earlier work by Thomas Newcomen, John Smeaton, Thomas Savery, and others. To improve it he needed to understand the physics of energy. He got that from his friend, Joseph Black, who was a professor at Glasgow University. To build it he needed brass cylinders that could withstand high pressure. He got those from other inventors, mainly Abraham Darby and John Thomas. That’s how he made his prototype. Then to make it cheaply enough he needed cheap iron instead of costly brass for his cylinders (Abraham Darby II). To machine it precisely enough he needed high-grade iron (John Wilkinson). He also needed crucible steel to cut precision-ground cylinders and pistons (Benjamin Huntsman). To run it cheaply enough he needed cheap energy. He got that from coke—that is, cooked coal—instead of wood or charcoal (Abraham Darby I). To sell it he needed heavy advertising (Matthew Boulton). He also needed a ready market (Richard Arkwright, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton). And to do anything at all he needed ready money (John Roebuck and Matthew Boulton). But it wasn’t enough for him to make his engine, as Polzunov’s story shows. For major change to follow his work, Britain too had to be ready for it. It needed growing banking credit outside of London. It needed ever improving steam engines. It needed ever improving machine tools. Plus it needed ever growing canal transport. The list of its requirements is long, and the list of people who developed them is even longer. Britain needed ever expanding markets, it needed ever expanding rail networks, it needed farm innovations until it could almost feed itself. All those changes catalyzed yet another network of tools made by yet another network of early industrialists in Britain who built the early machines of Britain’s textile industry. That then became one of the first killer apps of the new steam tech.
Bored reading all those names you don’t know? Good. Now you know why they don’t often appear in our popular stories. The real world is complicated. But instead of that complexity we mostly get fairy tales. Those tales have more to do with severe limits on the attention span and comprehension ability of the human brain than on what our past really was.
While we today often credit Watt with the steam engine, we might just as well nominate Wilkinson. After all, it was only after his new precision cylinders that steam engines took off. Darby would also do. So would Huntsman, Black, or any of dozens of others. Any one of them was a crucial lever of change. And why stop there? Newcomen got the idea of using a riveted copper boiler—which could withstand high heat and pressure—from local beer makers. Darby got the idea of using coke instead of coal from local brewers too. (Instead of idolizing Watt, why don’t we write books about how beer transformed Britain?) Black too was just as dependent on others. He figured out latent and specific heat. And why? He was trying to understand the fuel needs of local whiskey distillers. Huntsman figured out how to melt steel by using a special clay to reflect furnace heat. And how? He stole the idea from local glass-makers—who had stumbled upon it by accident while trying to figure out how to melt old glass. Wilkinson worked out how to make precision cylinders while boring cast-iron cannons. And why was he trying to do that? Armies wanted many new cannons to fight many new wars.
Watt was clever, and his work was important, but it was Britain’s nest of inventors, shopkeepers, investors, and engineers who made the steam engine practical there. So when trying to explain why Watt succeeded and Polzunov failed, we needn’t assume that one was smarter than the other. Polzunov was alone. Watt was part of a huge, spread out, multi-talented, unled, unplanned, unnoticed team. He wasn’t even the only steam-engine designer in Britain at the time. He’s merely the one we choose to remember today. In 1782 what got him steamed was that “Nature had taken an aversion to monopolies, and put the same thing into several people’s heads at once, to prevent them.” At the time, he was fighting for patents against other inventors. Even the steam engine itself wasn’t new with him. Only his improved design was, and that was possible in Britain only in his time. When he was working with steam in the 1760s, Newcomen’s steam engine had already been pumping out mines in Britain for half a century. Savery had patented the first prototype steam engine in 1698—the year Watt’s father was born. So James Watt didn’t invent the steam engine. He was merely the last of us to add a bit to it before it became really useful. He could do what he did only because he belonged to a large network of early industrialists, all of whom were alive and in communication with each other at the right time.
That pattern of something big happening only when a lot of small things come together in a dense enough network isn’t unique to us. A biochemist might call the system that Watt belonged to a reaction network. When one of the group built something, another reacted to build on it. They could do so because they had diverse talents and were densely linked. Because they had multiple skills they could solve problems as they arose, thereby helping each other—even if they didn’t intend to do so. Because they were densely linked they learned about each other’s problems and could supply solutions fast enough to be useful. Many molecular reaction networks work exactly the same way.
But where did that reaction network come from? And why did it arise in Britain first? Why not, for instance, Russia? Britain, unlike barely settled and still feudal Russia, had by then nearly stripped itself of all its usable trees. That had made fuel costly. But those vanished trees had also fed its navy, its glass-making industry, and its iron-making industry. All three had been growing since the 1530s. (Back when a panicky Henry VIII had started importing French and German experts to build his navy and weapons, but that’s a whole other story.) That unwittingly put precursors in place for the big network changes to come. But so did Britain’s growing slave wealth. That helped fuel new capitalist tools, like banks, mortgages, insurance, credit. Russia, meanwhile, had none of that. It was still mostly a land of serfs. It had vast raw materials but little industry—and little capital. Even Britain’s energy shortage helped. It increased pressure to find new fuel sources. In contrast, Russia didn’t have to worry about fuel; it still had huge forests to chop down. Britain, with few reachable trees left, had long before turned to coal. Then it looked for ways to make that coal less polluting in the towns and more useful for iron-making. So by the 1760s, tiny Britain, not huge Russia, already had the largest coal-mining industry in Europe. And it badly needed steam engines to pump water out of its ever deepening mines.
Britain also had several steam engines lying about the place to look at. Thus, many more inventors than just the lonely one in Siberia could have their imaginations fired with ways to improve them. Of 182 patents issued in Britain from 1561 to 1642, one-seventh were for the raising of water. Britain thus had far more experience with steam engines than Russia. Plus, unlike Russia, it had some idea of their value. So although it had exported steam engines since 1717 it banned their export by 1753. In Russia though, after Polzunov died, Catherine the Great could care less about homemade steam engines. She gave up the whole idea, continuing to import steam talent from Britain. So once Polzunov’s machine stopped working, Russia ignored it. Russia didn’t understand that building steam engines is useful not just for the engines themselves, but also for what building them taught its engineers.
Britain had still other early industrial advantages over Russia, thanks to religious repression. Watt, and most early industrialists in Britain, were Dissenters. As Methodists, Presbyterians, Baptists, and so forth, they were heretics in the eyes of the state. Their co-religionists had lost power soon after the English Civil War over a century before and they were still paying for it. By law, they couldn’t attend Oxford or Cambridge. They couldn’t join the army. They couldn’t hold public office. They couldn’t stand for Parliament. They couldn’t even congregate in public. Barred from high-status jobs, along with Jews and Catholics, and anyone else who didn’t fit in, they had only one option: trade and industry. There they stewed. Compressed into a small social space, many of them knew each other. So they did deals with each other. Their common repression pushed them together. That’s what formed their unwitting reaction network. Britain, unlike Russia, thus ended up with a large pool of literate, educated, mechanically minded people. They were all working on early industrial problems, and they were all linked. Meanwhile, Russia was still running pogroms against its Jews.
So Britain succeeded and Russia failed, but like Watt versus Polzunov, to explain that we needn’t assume that one country was smarter than the other. Britain didn’t plan to have an industrial edge in 1765 any more than Russia planned to not have one in 1765. Our surge into industry didn’t come about when and where it did because Britain happened to be full of geniuses while Russia wasn’t. An industrial reaction network existed in Britain then because of a long chain of reactions ging far further back in time.
That chain went back centuries because a steam engine can’t work without a vacuum, and for most of our history we didn’t believe a vacuum could exist. Denied vacuums, we couldn’t imagine making one. So we couldn’t use one to do mechanical work, which is what a steam engine does. So while both Watt’s and Polzunov’s steam engines used vacuums, neither arose in one. Before we could stumble into a steam engine, and from that, an industrial revolution, hundreds of early scientists first had to drop things from heights, go down mines, and climb up mountains. They had to figure out that even air could have weight. They had to discover the first principles of how liquids, gases, and energy all flow. Further, that pyramid of early scientists wouldn’t have existed without an even larger pyramid of people stretching back at least 2,300 years into the past to our first stirrings of rational thought about the universe. Finally, that pyramid is only for the science behind vacuums, which led to steam engines, which led to the industrial revolution. There are similar pyramids behind Britain’s reactions networks that built its new textile tech, its new food tech, it’s new banking tech, and so forth. The skein of links goes on and on. If we knew enough, they’d probably stretch all the way back to the first one of us who chipped stone, who knows how many millennia ago. In sum, before either Watt or Britain or even Europe could do what they did a huge number of us, spread over many countries and many centuries, had to do a huge amount of work. Our tools don’t simply arise whenever needed. Even Shakespeare knew that. We can call spirits from the vasty deep, but will they come when we call?
Thus the fuel of the industrial explosion in Britain wasn’t merely wood and coal and coke. Nor was it solely commercial changes in Britain as its slave wealth grew, money concentrated, and credit markets expanded. Nor was it only the toolbase that new money made possible—more canals, more ships, more insurance, more capital. Nor even was it solely Britain’s rising literacy, metallurgy, and scientific insight. It was a network made of all those things together. It was also the result of financial capital and social energy built up over more than a century of bigotry in both the slave trade and in religion. By 1776 we’d accidentally heaped up a lot of pre-industrial tinder in one place. Then, when Watt’s reaction network built a more efficient steam, it was like tossing a lit match onto that pyre. So our resulting industrial explosion wasn’t planned. It was the result of centuries of accidents in many countries, with none of us having any idea what was coming next. Our industrial revolution wasn’t something we did. It was something that happened to us.
That unplanned, centuries-long reaction network process isn’t unique to steam engines. It helps explain everything we do. In 1676, exactly a century before Watt’s first engine started to chuff, Isaac Newton, one of England’s superbrights, was in the middle of one of his usual catfights with another superbright, Robert Hooke. One night he wrote to Hooke that “If I have seen further [than you] it is [only] by standing on ye sholders of Giants.” Most of our books credit him with the saying, but he didn’t invent it. He was quoting an expression common in his day. The original went back half a millennium to a French monk. But that monk was only adding metaphoric color to a idea that went back a further half millennium. A Roman grammarian originated it over a thousand years before Newton. Yet even he may have only polished a hand-me-down thought. The early Greek story of Orion tells us of a blinded giant who carried a man on his shoulders to see for him. Of course, that’s only a myth, but, often, myth is history melted down into poetry. While history speaks only of our past, myth speaks of us. That long network dependence and largely unplanned network change is our story in a sound-bite. Blinded by our superbrights, we too often fail to see it. So we often can’t see the true details of our past, nor can we see its many links to our present—and to our future. Our prime mover isn’t the genius. It’s the network.
That network, and our resulting phase change into industry, has changed many of our lives in many ways over our past two centuries. It’s brought us many new goods, services, institutions, ways of life. Besides power from steam—its first stage—its later stages gave us mass production, combustion engines, electricity, and electric motors. It spun off many things that couldn’t have existed at the low cost they now do, or, in most cases, existed at all. Without it, we wouldn’t now have department stores, assembly lines, paved roads. We’d have no power plants, computers, pantyhose, cars. We’d also have few or no condoms, movies, lipsticks, plastics. All those new tools and resources changed how we labored, how we lived, how we traveled, how many kids we had, how we educated them. Without them, we’d all still be farmers. We’d all still get around on horses—if that. Women would still mainly be baby-makers. Children would still be cheap farm labor. But none of those changes happened simply or in any planned way. And although the steam engine helped trigger all of it, other things first had to come together before we could change in any major way. Principally, we had to change many of our tools and then link them in new ways. That process started a long time ago.
It’s Wednesday September 25th, 1585, and Pope Sixtus V has a problem. He wants to move an Egyptian obelisk. He’s rebuilding Saint Peter’s Basilica and in front of it he wants to stand the giant stone. It lay half-buried nearby. Sixtus was in trouble partly because just one decade after the Protestant Reformation had began, Protestant troops had sacked Rome. They’d spent six months pillaging, torturing, killing, raping. They even raped the nuns. As Protestant power rose, Catholic power declined. The Catholic Church was facing