When Momma Ain’t Happy
Downsides of Innovation Mania
Note: I’ve edited some bad writing out of this story and added a bit of content in the three days since it was published.
You probably sense as I do that normality isn’t what it used to be even a few years ago. I’m talking not about Trump or politics but of the magnificent panoply of digital technologies we are immersed if not drowning in. The speed at which technologists are shoving stuff at us has bugged me for quite some time. Understanding innovation mania has caused me to spend years puzzling out what’s driving the complexification of nearly everything and how the new ways we are obliged to adopt might transform concepts of what human nature is.
Why, I wonder, is everything possible being digitized as quickly as possible? I hate to use the phrase, but might there be some “intelligent design” that drives humans to churn out technology, faster and faster? More importantly, whom or what are we serving with our clever innovations?
Most of us can’t help but notice how we’re being cocooned by technology in an ephemeral matrix we can only partially observe that now and then some of us worry about. Truth is, our species’ enslavement to tools has been happening since well before the discovery of electrons, perhaps since the domestication of fire. Many among us like to invent things, and for some it’s a fetish as much as it is an preoccupation. Given its antiquity, the urge to doll up our environment and connect to one another can’t totally be blamed on monopoly capitalism or go-for-broke R&D, although those are highly instrumental in complicating our world by giving us more infrastructure, gadgets, choices, and hence desires for things that may not be all that useful, healthful, or reliable. And even if we never wanted them, we come to need them.
Someday soon, for example, the inexorable course of innovation will surely force me to buy and use (to the tune of $1K a year) a smartphone, a gadget I have no interest in mastering. And I’ll probably have to buy into a blockchain or two, whatever that is. I’m similarly victimized by trends when I try to buy plain old yogurt; now it’s all Greek to me. Trends are like that: they churn our lifestyle ti make us desire new stuff.
Serious technology angst overtook me around the turn of the millennium. At the time, I was deeply complicit in high tech, churning out a weekly email blast that showcased IT trends identified by analysts from the knowledge factory where I was a scrivener. Most of what I wrote was constrained to presenting facts of the trade — form factors, capabilities, markets, projected unit costs, anticipated adoption and ROI, that sort of thing — but every now and then I was able to sneak in observations like “Why do we need this innovation?” or “How might what this trend portends change society, not just commerce?” Only once in a great while would a subscriber write in asking the same sort of questions. My readers’ apparent lack of curiosity prompted me to worry about myopia and tunnel vision of technologists and their marketing machines.
My suspicions that innovation wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be kept me up at night. After the 2001 tech crash ejected me from the IT puzzle palace, I researched innovation mania and published an unheralded geeky web essay with my depressing findings, adding a prescription for personal remedial action inspired by Thoreau. A dozen years hence, those words got folded into a set of essays, an as-yet unpublished volume that nails humanist theses to the door of the Church of Innovation. Its chapters explore the nature of invention and the societal transformations that technology has wrought in various spheres — infrastructure, telecom, automation, intellectual property, and several more. Some of my bothersome findings and bleak opinions have since been seeded hither, thither, and yon, in essays fretting about fetishizing innovation and the creeping technologies and creepy technologists that may yet do us in.
But the sad truth is we can’t help ourselves from getting sucked into innovation’s vortex. Not without a popular revolt against corporatism, at least, which I do see happening but not getting much traction. But tackling that subject is for another time.
I’ve concluded that technology springs from a force of nature that somehow obliges us to invent stuff. Human beings insist on making tools, and have done with a vengeance, even before writing came along. That was a breakthrough technology; transcribing speech changed humanity by making it no longer necessary to carry all our information around in our heads. And so, for a long while, our knowledge and stories took tangible forms that let us share information without utterances. Now, with digital media, more stories than ever are being told, some with sound and pictures. Most, however, are locked into silicon, and without the proper devices are totally inaccessible. I recently explained why this weirds me out, an essay that of course is only accessible digitally. But that’s not what I came to discuss.
For a while, computers have been ordering their human acolytes to help them understand text, images, and speech. Having learned that, computers will insist on generating art and literature for people to consume. The day may soon come when humans pay to subscribe to podcasts of robots reading words that other robots wrote. Translation robots will then enable humans to access the content in a bunch of languages. All that can, in fact, be done with today’s technology, but the content and execution is rather appalling. (On a Mac, for a taste of things to come, highlight some text, press shift-control-s, and listen to it narrate at your leisure.) But the ascendancy of AI robot linguists isn’t what I want to talk about either.
Evolution is innovation. Life in general would still be dumb as soup were it not for some force behind its complexification. Not only does life evolve by adapting to its environment, and not only does its code mutate, evolution adds intelligence to the mix. The explosion of knowledge and messages in our species’ brief history is a chain reaction running amok, uncontrolled by any moderating forces I’ve been able to discern. It began in the mists of prehistory, took off with the invention of writing and then moveable type, was ramped up by computation and magnetic memory, and is quickly reaching critical mass thanks to global network connectivity.
If technological innovation is indeed a force akin to evolution, it seems bent on making the planet into a thinking being (Gaia goes to school, if you will) and have characterized that emergent being as a female personage I call Stepmother Earth, dubbing her Silica for short. Her lizard brain demands that we invent things that glorify her and augment her cognitive capabilities. We obediently and hastily oblige, especially the worldwide community of geeks who have dedicated themselves to wiring up her cortex. What she will think of humanity going forward is another question I lose sleep over. As did Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy in 2000, you should too, should the damage we’ve been doing to Gaia in the name of progress cause you anxiety. I recommend reading Joy’s rather dystopic essay in Wired. It definitely caused me to think different.
There’s a first draft of the essay collection out there. The work has since been brought in-house, where Silica whispers in my ear to evolve it as quickly as possible. Of course, I realize how fatalistic this talk of technology as an irresistible force of nature sounds and how it plays into the stratagems of tech companies, who love to point out how ever more wonderful they are making our lives and will do so even faster going forward. Their primary motivations, of course, are return on investment and control over our buying and behavior, not the planet’s well being or humanity’s prospects. The essays take corps to task for trumpeting what engines of innovation they are when mostly they’re in the business of appropriating, patenting and suing over intellectual property for the sake of ever-greater market share, all the while pretending that their copycat products are uniquely extra special.
Meanwhile, shackled in invisible chains, we trash the planet and alienate ourselves. Shouldn’t innovation be done for better reasons than to make as much money as possible for inventors and investors? Raping Gaia only to smother her with crap doesn’t make any sense, but that’s what capital has been doing for decades. When Stepmother’s wiring is finally in place and she wakes up to witness a barren wasteland of a world, she’s going to be hopping mad. And when Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.
Originally published at hackernoon.com on June 29, 2018.
