12/26/25 — SOCIETY | ESSAY

[I did not invent the concept of a perpetual human evolution through the inception and continual innovation of technology. It was through some internet exposure, likely a podcast, that I was first introduced to the idea. The outsourcing of human evolution, from biology to technology, is a fundamental human progression that I would like people keep in mind when embarking on discussion of our ideal relationship to technology. I expand upon it for this reason and in hopes that its insight will prompt nuanced judgements of how next to evolve…]

For your nature to become an external manufacturing process is a kind of strange (stolen?) evolutionary agency. And here emerges the confusion of "nature". This might not be the story of "Prometheus Bound". Did evolution give it to you in the first place? Then everything is natural, but not everything is good. What is good? I guess biology also gives your species the power to make that decision now. And so is waged the war on progress...

Maybe we are the only species which evolved to innovate evolution (though no one can really say). We didn’t win it. This Anthropocene is merited on different pretenses. The [(x)ocene] was won outright, so was the [(x)ocene], and the [(x)ocene]. Their species peaked biologically to the end of rapid population growth and the domination of ecosystems. To that same end, we, on the other hand, outsourced biology. It is said that once a species succeeds to proliferate gene-reproduction, evolution begins to halt. But we continue to evolve indefinitely — for making evolution our survival.

It is probably important to requalify our understanding of species-evolution, at this point. Given that the human experience identifies at least two forms of evolution in the success of its species, I am employing an expanded definition of the word that includes non-biological processes as well as biological. In this, I must concede that human biological evolution approaches a kind of stasis at the anatomically modern human. But it’s through some metaphor that an appendage of them continues to evolve — in technology.

This is a paradox.

For how can evolution satisfy the need to evolve? Somehow it is true. Instead of the standard biological reinforments, to bear and fight off natural elements, we inhereted some need to manipulate them: the invention of tools where we lacked brute force and the innovation of earth where it failed to cooperate. This tendency, to — instead of changing ourselves — evolve the world around us to the end of our species alone rendered us dominant and perpetually equipped. Surely it was a quicker evolutionary process than the slow molecular tranformation of biological evolution. It became satisfied with itself at some point, our new evolutionary disposition, and so the anatomically modern human prevails.

Still to highlight the peculiarity of that project,

Did evolution, itself, evolve in the human?

Does life learn in our unique expression of it, not a new way to hack at the organism but, instead, the organic? Does every organism become a trial in this way, to preserve that “moment of stasis”¹, life, for as long as possible? And are we a success story in that project? These questions should probably remain unresolved. For I have already tread too far outside of my own competency to create them in the first place. Be warned, I am not a biologist nor any type of anthropologist. I am barely even a philosopher. Tempted — human as I am — to search for the narrative consistency in everything, I remain unsure about whether this approach is persuasive or merely aesthetic. Whichever of them is the attempt here is the attempt here (behold).

Really,

I wanted to write a treatise on the ideal human relationship to technology. But I suspected that the above discussion was preliminary to this one. It is a popular strategy to make broad and sweeping appeals to “nature” whenever claiming the modern harms of technology. I, myself, have often been the first to tout human misalignment to dissociative devices. But obviously, the “natural” is a more complicated category than it at first appears; and technology might be just as natural to the human as bilateral symmetry is to the butterfly. I romanticize the idea of life without a smart phone. I keep resolving to buy the flip again, and again, and again. But nothing, really, is unnatural. Some things are just father removed from themselves, their original state of being, than others. Everything, even the most horrid things, came from that same place we all share, here-wherever-we-are. The problem, then, really must be with the natural.

“Then everything is natural, but not everything is good. What is good?”

Convenience succeeds species death, the interest of life, but it does not succeed the interest of species²; i.e., the supreme court on our perpetual evolution in technology fails, again, to make a substantive decision regarding the success of third wave industrialism…

Can I offer the common proposition to you, again? The one with the interest of species instead of life alone, ever eager, in mind? It fails. It fails a resounding failure.

The same failure that failed second wave industrialism has become inverted to fail this one. Convenience. Convenience encouraged second wave industrializers to distribute and specialize labor. But for third wave industrialism it encourages specialized laborers to conglommerate and unify products. One specialized laborer tinkers with the packaging instead of the product, but everything gets sent to the same supermarket to super your life. There is dissociation on both ends of this issue. In the former, people are dissociated from the value of their labor. In the latter, people are dissociated from their external reality — for requiring less movement through time in space. Used to be that need was specialized and work unified. But the need for landlines, cameras and typewriters, darkrooms and mailrooms, purses, mirrors, libraries and encycopedias, etc find themselves supplied in one compact object today…

Our biological evolutions had nothing to misalign themselves with. Biological evolution knew itself and what human movements would sync perfectly with the human self. Biological evolution knew human biology. Technological evolution does not. Technological evolution knows the world. It tries against physical instead of biological constraints to maximize life. This to manipulate the world to humanity instead of humanity to the world after all: life’s brilliant move. But why? Why was biological evolution satisfied to hand the torch down, nature itself, to such a hasty successor?

That common force behind every kind of species-evolution, the world’s formidable eager to sustain that “moment of stasis”, life, is it hasty?

I notice you and I have become increasingly atomized in this world, self-reliant even. I wonder if we discover practical need for each other anymore, us people of those hyper-industrialized capitalist economies who move less — encounter diverse spaces and diverse people less — for having every subsidiary, even complex desire satisfied through one object. And here comes the rise of remote work: this big world evolved into the size of a human palm… globalism and derealization in tow.

And I think the world’s formidable eager is hasty. At least for a moment. It must be. To create notwithstanding the character of said creation is to create with one hundred percent success and zero percent traction. It is a proper utilitarian strategy — to swap biological evolution for the technological variety wherever the former is outpaced. Maybe the primitive underestimation of life’s ability to succeed still prevails. Its reasonings echo begrudgingly in a seemingly lonely space. Is earth overcompensation?

“I guess biology also gives your species the power to make that decision now. And so is waged the war on progress…”

Summer Arukwer-Strother

Footnotes

1. I believe Paul Rosolie coined this term. ↩︎
2. I have expanded upon the ideas of writer, Sheehan Quirke (The Cultural Tutor). He remarks (though I paraphrase) in some long-form interview that the human instinct to maximize longevity dampens our ability to confront moral life with courage and skill. Find his work here. ↩︎

---