Let’s go forty years back in time
It’s a common experience for all of us, human beings living at the beginning of the third millennium, that technology moves forward at a rapid pace, and that despite being incredibly fast, it also get faster and faster every day. We are able to do things that we were not just ten years ago, and that were not even imaginable twenty or thirty years ago. I belong to the so-called GenX and I remember that, when I was a child, color TV was just starting to appear and it was not so frequent to hear and have news from relatives abroad. When I came to age, Internet was still something restricted to universities and research centers, ignored by most of the people on our planet. Mobile phones started to appear when I was about to get my degree, and they were just able to make and receive calls (paying absurd prices) and send and receive small text messages, that appeared magic to us. No videos, no songs, no games. At the time, accessing Internet required a sort of mysterious ritual, with a long preparation, that was possible only from a workstation physically connected to the fixed phone line. Laptops were very uncommon, and smartphones did not even exist. My first son was born twenty years ago, more or less contemporarily to 3G connections and mobile Internet, and my daughter 4 years later, just after the advent of Facebook and the beginning of social networks. The recent history is known, with Generative AI and all those miraculous technologies, so I’ll spare you the rest.
For sure, current generations that live on planet Earth are those who have experienced the highest rate in technological advances in the course of a lifetime. This is impressive, amazing and exciting! Or maybe not? Let me try to elaborate a bit on this. For the purpose, I’m going to rewind the tape and go back about forty years in the past.
And so, let’s go back to 1985. I’m little more than a child sitting in front of the TV, which is playing a commercial of a well-known German TV manufacturer. On the screen a close-up shot of the protagonist, with a series of light rays of different colors behind him (and reflections on his glasses) and with a rather disturbing noise in the background. “We could have impressed you with special effects and ultra-vivid colors…”, he says, then he suddenly turns the face on one side and orders someone to immediately stop that deafening chaos of lights and colors, and turns back towards the camera to conclude the statement in a rather determined way: “… but we are science, not science fiction”. At this point, the frame zooms out, showing a dark and rather aseptic environment, and the protagonist moves away with decisive steps towards a television set. The shows ends up with a TV set in the middle of the screen, and a blackboard behind it with the following words: “Constant quality over time”. If you are curious, this is a link to the commercial (it’s in Italian, but you can easily activate subtitles).
Let’s come back to 2024. This was a very simple and straightforward message, but it has remained in my mind for forty years. It was quite different from current commercials of technology products (such as smartphones), and this in my opinion shows how technology, and technology perception, has changed in the last four decades. In the 80s, a high-tech product was advertised in an aseptic way. The key feature for such a product was the ability to fulfill its purpose without frills; it simply had to work well and no one expected it to be able to amaze its users. At that time, users were looking for “constant quality over time”. Anyone buying a television set in 1980 wanted it to last for decades, always the same and always with the same quality: it wasn’t expected to evolve, improve, update, or be subject to phenomena like technological obsolescence.
Today, this is completely changed. Technology is not aimed at solving an actual problem (at least not only); rather it has become something that has a value per se. We buy the last model of a smartphone not because the old one does no longer work, but only because it is more cool. We have appliances that work fine for 5–6 years and then must be replaced, because fixing them costs more than buying new ones. They are not designed to provide “constant quality over time”, as the 80s TV set. They must break at most within 6–7 years. Where this concept does not apply, technological obsolescence comes into play. The final effect is the same. Technological goods are not thought to provide “constant quality over time”, but to be replaced on a regular basis with a new version, often more bloated and full of features that no one asked for.
This is how technology has changed in the last decades. It is no longer something that arises from a need with the aim of solving problems; rather the technology itself becomes the ultimate goal. This is the final reason that explains why things that did not even exist some years ago are now absolutely essential.
This creates a lot of problems, abuse and injustices, both for all of us as individuals and also from a global point of view. The FOMO syndrome created by mobile appliances, the dopamine dependency caused by social networks, the lock in phenomena caused by the enshittification process (definition by Cory Doctorow) that limits our freedom of choice are well-known and documented aspects on which there is a lot of literature and debates. But also, on a global perspective, the rise of the surveillance economy (which treats all of us as raw material within its distorted business model) represents a big issue, even if not completely evident to most people. What about the excess of production, that clashes with a situation in which we are over 8 billion of people on Earth, all consuming resources (food, raw materials, energy) that are inevitably going to be depleted at faster and faster rates. Arising from that, all the problems related to waste disposal, excessive energy consumption, impacts on the environment, and so on.
Which is the solution to that? Maybe the only answer is to return to the vision of the technology we had in the 80s. A technology really useful to solve actual problems, not aimed at creating artificial needs to get rich to the detriment of people and environment. A technology without side effects on final users, such as dependency or lock-in. Finally, a technology meant to last in time, in order to limit resource and energy consumption and the need for disposal. For sure, this mindset change will not be originated by those who are accumulating wealth today (such as big techs and all the related ecosystem). The only possibility to achieve this objective in the medium-long term shall necessarily start from an increase in people’s awareness and in an active involvement in the society to achieve the purpose.
