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Elin Whitney-Smith
Hunter/Gatherers and Digital Natives
In the mid-eighties, I lived in a camper on the back of a pickup-truck. I was a graduate student, studying the transition from hunting/gathering to agriculture and grappling with how hunter/gatherers lived several thousand years ago in the middle of Silicon Valley’s computer boom wealth.
My day job was as an archaeologist recovering archeological material just ahead of the bulldozers building San Jose’s technology corridor. Once I’d walked the construction sites I was assigned, I knew the how likely it would be that artifacts would be found. Construction workers knew me and would work elsewhere if something surprising came up. So I could sit in the camper write reports or read. Nonetheless, I was uneasy if I didn’t check each site frequently during the day.
I was experiencing what Lewis Binford observed of Inuet hunter/gatherers: they didn’t move because they ran out of game; they moved because they needed to know what was happening over the next ridge. Even today, Inuets leave secure jobs to travel their territory and return with stories of their adventures –- their material security is less important than their need to know.
My studies showed that modern hunter/gatherers, such as the African Mbuti, know about agriculture but prefer their nomadic and, from our perspective, materially poor lifestyle. Why? They have no sense of scarcity – agriculture is “M’bafu” -- stupidity. If hunting is bad someone will share -- no one goes hungry. Archaeological evidence confirms this -- showing a reduction in the quality of life with the beginning of agriculture. Hunter/gatherers live today as they always have -- by knowing where the animals and plants are -- as if they have a continually restocked cupboard.
I was a contributor to the “WELL” (an early on-line community) and both my “on-line” friends thought a lot like hunter/gatherers -- they shared computer code, writing, and ideas, perhaps because, unlike material goods, giving information away increases information.
My camper-acquired consciousness suggested that there are two very different lifeways: the “information-adapted” base security in information, believe in plenty and therefore share; the “material-adapted” base security in owning material goods, fear scarcity and therefore hoard. Humans originated in a world of plenty, but -- since agriculture -- we have lived in a world of scarcity.
Today, digital natives, who have grown up with the internet, are even more I-adapted; Wikipedia, Linux, open source, and even zip-car and bike-share, where one uses rather than owns, are part of the emerging I-adaptation of today’s world.
Moving from M-adaptation to I-adaptation, or coming to a synthesis of the two, we can let go of a number of fears: fear of scarcity, other nations, people, and lifeways that are different from ours. We can trust abundance enough to let go of violence and incarceration as our first response to our fears.
The talk will examine how we, today, can use hunter/gatherers as a model so we can embrace the new I-adapted world rather than fear it.
About Elin Whitney-Smith:
Elin Whitney-Smith has supported her passion for studying change in complex systems through three graduate degrees by driving a bus in New York, waitressing in Maine, archaeology in California, teaching in various universities on both coasts and, with her partner founding – Netalyst – specializing in social media and web applications, in Washington, DC.
