We used to get excited about technology. What happened?(technologyreview.com)
technologyreview.com
We used to get excited about technology. What happened?
https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/10/21/1061260/innovation-technology-what-happened/
12 comments
The world used to be made of user-serviceable lego bricks. Parts of it could be yours to own. You could take them apart and put them back together any way you wanted them. New technology meant new bricks to add to your collection; new ways for people to impose their will on the world, entire new categories of things you could shape from your imagination.
The future used to be full of possibility. We would explore the universe! We would cure disease and push back death! We would automate away drudgery and lead lives of abundance free to create!
The world is now made of black boxes. Parts of it can be yours to rent. You can arrange them in precisely the manner the designer specified, and sit back on your couch and pay in some fashion to keep looking at the pretty result for as long as the owner is willing to accept your payments. New technology means more different pretty things you can rent and put in front of your couch.
Lego itself has gone in this direction: more and more large carefully moulded parts that can only be put together one way, for one specific design or theme. Once the design on the box is assembled you can place it on the shelf to admire from your couch. "Lego is great for encouraging creativity", people used to say once. "Lego is good for teaching kids to follow instructions, I guess", someone said to me recently in full seriousness. I imagine that the younger the reader, the less sense the metaphor in the first paragraph of this post will make.
The future is full of doom. We've abandoned space: there is nothing up there worth the cost of getting a canned ape up there and back. We've decided we are tired of experts, and only the rich deserve to be healthy. We've automated the jobs of telling people things they won't want to hear, and people are now drudges for machines when they are not sat on their couch renting chewing-gum for their brains.
...at some point, new tech stopped being exciting. What happened?
...I got old, perhaps. Try asking a child what excites them. Time to put the social media down and find something fun to hack on.
The future used to be full of possibility. We would explore the universe! We would cure disease and push back death! We would automate away drudgery and lead lives of abundance free to create!
The world is now made of black boxes. Parts of it can be yours to rent. You can arrange them in precisely the manner the designer specified, and sit back on your couch and pay in some fashion to keep looking at the pretty result for as long as the owner is willing to accept your payments. New technology means more different pretty things you can rent and put in front of your couch.
Lego itself has gone in this direction: more and more large carefully moulded parts that can only be put together one way, for one specific design or theme. Once the design on the box is assembled you can place it on the shelf to admire from your couch. "Lego is great for encouraging creativity", people used to say once. "Lego is good for teaching kids to follow instructions, I guess", someone said to me recently in full seriousness. I imagine that the younger the reader, the less sense the metaphor in the first paragraph of this post will make.
The future is full of doom. We've abandoned space: there is nothing up there worth the cost of getting a canned ape up there and back. We've decided we are tired of experts, and only the rich deserve to be healthy. We've automated the jobs of telling people things they won't want to hear, and people are now drudges for machines when they are not sat on their couch renting chewing-gum for their brains.
...at some point, new tech stopped being exciting. What happened?
...I got old, perhaps. Try asking a child what excites them. Time to put the social media down and find something fun to hack on.
[deleted]
To put it succinctly: technology used to be about tools that increase your (the user’s) agency on the world. Today’s technology (and “design paradigm”) are about providing services that maximize the service provider’s agency over the user — converted into a stream of monetization. Of course the latter feels exhausting, as a user.
The main point is that the balance between value creation and value capture got perverted.
The main point is that the balance between value creation and value capture got perverted.
This is pretty spot-on.
At the risk of sounding like a hipster, or gatekeeper, I think the biggest tipping point was around the time that smartphones became commonplace in the mid-late 00s. The internet and web was already gaining momentum, but smartphones put it in everyone's pocket. It also turns out that most (read: non-tech) people don't want to have to piece together their own set of tools, they want a set of matching Fisher-Price tools handed to them on a platter - hence the popularity of the iPhone and iOS ecosystem which Apple controls with an iron grip. They would rather have a magic black box that does what they want without having to think about how it works or what is going on behind the scenes. I'd say everybody is guilty to some extent, but generally I feel it's this mentality that is largely responsible for the frog-letting-the-water-boil situation we have gotten into with things like data privacy/user tracking/etc. There was a time when "don't post personal information" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a mantra, but now that the internet and web are mainstream, such advice has been ignored. Yet, people wonder why things have gotten the way they are and why bad actors are taking advantage of the situation.
At the risk of sounding like a hipster, or gatekeeper, I think the biggest tipping point was around the time that smartphones became commonplace in the mid-late 00s. The internet and web was already gaining momentum, but smartphones put it in everyone's pocket. It also turns out that most (read: non-tech) people don't want to have to piece together their own set of tools, they want a set of matching Fisher-Price tools handed to them on a platter - hence the popularity of the iPhone and iOS ecosystem which Apple controls with an iron grip. They would rather have a magic black box that does what they want without having to think about how it works or what is going on behind the scenes. I'd say everybody is guilty to some extent, but generally I feel it's this mentality that is largely responsible for the frog-letting-the-water-boil situation we have gotten into with things like data privacy/user tracking/etc. There was a time when "don't post personal information" and "don't believe everything you read on the internet" was a mantra, but now that the internet and web are mainstream, such advice has been ignored. Yet, people wonder why things have gotten the way they are and why bad actors are taking advantage of the situation.
We took the low-hanging fruit, and by low-hanging I don't mean it was easy to do, just that the next steps are much harder. Preventing most viral disease deaths, reducing the workload of laundry, energy, and food production, increasing the feasibility of sex without pregnancy, developing calculating machines and communication devices. Now the problems we have to solve imply deeper systemic issues and reversing our inner logic, such as consuming less or corralling vast pools of resources in a collective way to avoid the tragedy of the commons. Saving further labor time implies developing systems that can perform most complex tasks on their own that require humanlike cognition.
In addition, the West is gradually losing its relative first mover bonus from industrialization and colonization, which results in a sense of hopelessness as the living standard corrects towards the mean. People nostalgic about the 1960's style of tech optimism are forgetting the global living situation from that time and the historical bubble those people lived in. People didn't have more rights and opportunities because tech was more optimistic, tech was more optimistic because the surplus was such that it granted additional possibilities for a short while.
In addition, the West is gradually losing its relative first mover bonus from industrialization and colonization, which results in a sense of hopelessness as the living standard corrects towards the mean. People nostalgic about the 1960's style of tech optimism are forgetting the global living situation from that time and the historical bubble those people lived in. People didn't have more rights and opportunities because tech was more optimistic, tech was more optimistic because the surplus was such that it granted additional possibilities for a short while.
It used to be that you could rely on a piece of software to be good.
If it phoned home, we had a name for it - spyware. Almost everyone derided it.
Now, you can expect ~100% of closed source software to have surveillance built in. Open source is better, but there's still a lot around.
That extends not only to software. Cars, TVs, tractors, whatever.
I'm not even middle aged. The transition happened over around 10-15 years.
If it phoned home, we had a name for it - spyware. Almost everyone derided it.
Now, you can expect ~100% of closed source software to have surveillance built in. Open source is better, but there's still a lot around.
That extends not only to software. Cars, TVs, tractors, whatever.
I'm not even middle aged. The transition happened over around 10-15 years.
For me it has been mostly ruined by the exploitation of privacy, planned obsolescence, leasing vs owning strategies, and snubs to right to repair.
As the article points out, there is this feeling of no longer being in control. That we used to buy technology that benefited us, that changed our lives, now a days mostly everything feels either derivative and incremental or coming out as a sort of double blade product. I mean, people love to shit on Tiktok but... it's a great product, it's extremely fun, if only it didn't come with the whole "but it might literally be a government weapon" attachment and even if this wasn't the case it might also come with a "but we kind of just want to monetize every aspect of it".
It's just... tiring. Some devices that I've found to be really comforting are music players (that you can install rockbox in them), small portable chinese consoles (that you can also install custom firmware on them) and e-readers (that I also install custom firmware in them). I guess... I like being in control, a little bit. I like the tinkering culture, I like that alternative life.
In any case, this article was pretty good, thanks for sharing it.