The invention of the ship is the invention of the shipwreck
On technology and progress and other people's poetry.
I got the above title from Mark O'Connell's great book Notes from an Apocalypse, in which it appeared as a quote from someone called Paul Virilio. O'Connell didn't say very much about who Paul Virilio was, and I never got round to googling it. So in my memory the quote just hung there in the text, a mysterious context-free thought from some clever man with an especially evocative name. Probably he was a poet, I thought.
Also, I didn't need to know who said it because the beauty of the line was enough. There are clumsier ways of saying the same thing. When I tried to recall it off the top of my head the other day, for instance, all that came out was, “The ship always contains the shipwreck.” But that doesn’t make sense, and it's not the point anyway: The line isn’t just some banality about the inevitability of death. The inventing is the point. And the ship is also the point. Inventing a new piece of technology is the same as eventually destroying it.
I have now googled Paul Virilio after all. It turns out he was a French postmodern philosopher who wrote about the impact of technology on society and our psyches, specifically what speed and information does to us. Some of his analogies between scientific concepts and cultural theory have been discredited (philosophers don’t always understand science), but evidently Virilio had an ear for mysterious, poetic phrases, because he also said things like: Modern wars “take place in orbital space.”
But we can’t help inventing new ships. The idea that technological progress will save our society is so deeply taken for granted that it's even factored into the IPCC climate targets that the Paris Agreement of 2015 was based on (the same Paris Agreement that no one is sticking to).
In other words, the climate targets we think we can bet our futures on already include technology (renewable energy boom, tree plantations, carbon capture etc) that hasn't been invented or proven at scale yet and which might not make a difference anyway because the carbon we emit now will already have done the damage by the time we have got our act together and stopped murdering each other. (This is all explained more cogently in Jason Hickel's Ted-Talky degrowth book Less Is More). As a species, armed with trillions of gigabytes of data and decades of computer modelling of the climate, we are just vaguely hoping it’ll be alright. At least if we had faith in god, there’d be something to hang to. But hope is little more than an objectless state of mind.
It would be stupid to dismiss the possibilities of technology, of course. We’re gonna need technology whatever happens. At some point, humanity will certainly be capturing carbon and renewing energy like there's no tomorrow, even if there isn't — even if it's just to keep feeding the bloated, dying beast we call our economy. But technological complication, like an endlessly growing economy, always brings with it vulnerability, and the more faith we put in technology, the more we invite catastrophe. Once it’s built, eventually the ship will wreck.
If you’re in Berlin, see Ben's film We're All Going To Die at the Festival Zeichen der Nacht in Berlin this Friday, November 3, at midnight.
Or if you’re in Vermont, come and see it at the Off Center on November 8 - Tickets.
I followed the link for tickets to the VT event. Looks like it has already happened.