"Connections" Technology Column by Edward Rothstein

November 11, 1996

A New Form of Life, or Revenge of Machines?

We are living in organic times.

Once, not so long ago, everything was described in mechanical terms. We understood the body to be a mechanism responding to stimuli. We thought of society as a machine in which gears meshed; work was done, pay was earned and entertainments enjoyed. The economic system was considered to be a delicate Swiss-watch action, needing occasional adjustment and lubrication.

But the paradigm has changed. Machines are out. Organisms are in. First the earth was imagined as an enormous living being, Gaia, whose self-regulation and balanced ecology could only be interfered with by meddling humanity.

Now cultural ideas have been described as memes, as if they replicated and spread like disembodied genes, acting to preserve themselves. Computer simulations of life forms have been referred to as primitive forms of life themselves (known as A-life). And some treat the Internet itself as almost a living object, transforming and evolving in unpredictable ways. One commentator recently suggested that it will be the primal cybersoup out of which intelligent cyberbeings evolve.

About six years ago, even economics was remade in an organic image, one that is now flourishing and sprouting extravagant variations all over the Internet.

Michael Rothschild, a business consultant, argued in a 1990 book, "Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem," that it was time to stop thinking of economics as if it followed mechanistic laws of Newtonian physics. Instead, he suggested, it was time to imagine economics as a variety of biology. He wrote: "A parallel relationship exists between an ecosystem based on genetic information and an economy derived from technical information."

In this new bionomic system, as he called it, companies and individuals found ecological niches that were suited for the kinds of information they possessed and could pass on, and evolution was taking place at a phenomenal rate.

The book interwove discussions of biological evolution with analyses of poverty, Japanese industry and school education. The point was not that we should adopt a crude notion of social Darwinism. Rothschild instead wanted to encourage a way of thinking, treating economic systems as developmental organisms whose life processes needed to be reinterpreted.

He was also urging a form of laissez-faire economics, since when dealing with an organism of this complexity, intervention can cause unforeseen problems.

And if Rothschild tended to overdo polemics against classical economics and neglected to mention that many theories already view an economy as a complex interactive system, his images and arguments still had resonance.

The book was hailed by The Wall Street Journal as "revolutionary," and important industry figures cited it. Testimonials and reviews have been gathered at the gargantuan World Wide Web site of the organism to which Rothschild gave birth, The Bionomics Institute.

But something strange happened once this organism came into contact with Internet culture. There were adaptive mutations, a mixing of gene pools. Rothschild's own laissez-faire inclinations found supporters at the Cato Institute, but also caught the attention of countercultural devotees of Internet culture who had been developing the organic metaphor in other arenas.

Kevin Kelly, executive editor of Wired, gave his 1994 book "Out of Control" the subtitle "The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World."

And bionomics began heating up. An article about the fourth annual bionomics conference in San Francisco appeared in Feed last month. An Internet course is being given in bionomics. Darwin discussion groups are starting to analyze whether the analogy with economics is appropriate. The tent seems to be getting larger.

The bionomics conference gathered Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, programmers, technology gurus and social scientists. The program announced that one speaker would discuss the ways in which humans and technologies are merging, creating a new kind of "bionic planet"; another argued that the "organic, geometric growth of the Internet" is an example of bionomics in action.

Meanwhile, Rothschild has found the Internet to be a perfect host organism. On his Web site, he says the Net represents "the emergence of an entirely new domain of human economic life," one that has emerged "like a deep-sea volcano bursting to the surface."

And he becomes positively Bible-thumping when he argues that because of technological innovation, we are now going through a "compressed surge of evolutionary invention" comparable to the Cambrian era, 543 million years ago, in which multicelled organisms evolved.

It may indeed be that the Internet will someday cause dramatic changes in the economy. It is true that computer simulations and complexity theory have made it possible to visualize processes and transformations that were once invisible or difficult to explain. This has helped support our inclinations to see organisms and ecology wherever we look.

But the new technological culture, which considers nearly everything to be bionic, has created a mythology. Treating culture, the economy and computer processing as if they were ecologies consisting of life forms may provide them with an aura of great promise. But behind the promises of evolutionary miracles is a reductive vision: right now, anything is treated as life if it is a sufficiently complex system requiring the transfer of information.

The crucial aspects of life become its mechanisms for reproduction and communication, the principles by which it mechanically replicates and transmits data. And what does that sound like? The revenge of the machine.

Copyright (C)1996 by the New York Times. Reprinted by Permission