I thought highly enough of this Atlantic piece on tech stagnation to tweet it earlier, and I’ve been thinking about it all morning, but the more I do think about it the less I agree.
Or rather, I don’t think the analysis is wrong but I don’t see that it should be anything to cry over.
The basic idea is that the present has caught up with tech innovators’ predictions of the future - all the stuff people were talking about in the early days of the mass-market Internet has been successfully built, and there’s no great new narrative to energise people (meaning developers I guess). Alexis Madrigal laments that social, mobile and tech have basically been at a standstill since the iPhone - everything since 2007 or so has been incremental.
And this may all be true but, ah, so what? Expecting a paradigm shift every five years isn’t “disruptive” or “innovative”, it’s just greedy.
What’s actually been happening in the last five years may be bad for tech-oriented neophiliacs but tech’s loss is culture’s (and commerce’s I guess) gain. The filtering and diffusion of already-invented stuff through society is still ongoing, and frankly a pause while we get a grip on what it means economically, culturally, and politically is a good idea. (Tech writers think they have a handle on all that stuff too, of course, but I don’t believe that’s true.)
As the piece shrewdly says there IS new stuff coming down the pipe but it’s mostly advances in data crunching, algorithmic predictions, and so on - things that we are told work in ‘our’ favour but seem as likely to reduce our agency. Even leaving that aside the last five years have seen a load of cultural shifts or flowerings that are a product of steeping ourselves in already changed technology. Eg.
- Social media as an accelerant and mediator of protest and social justice movements.
- Second-order networks (like Pinterest, Instagram) piggybacking on ubiquitous networks like Facebook
- Continued development of meme culture, ‘viral’ culture etc as a pop cultural form.
- The - with hindsight inevitable - politicisation of the previous generation of web-native nihilist techboys
- The Occupy movement which can be ‘read’ in a lot of ways, but one is as a real-world manifestation of web collectivism in collaboration with old-school activism
- Ongoing disruption, disintermediation of privacy, print media, ‘ownership’ of media, celebrity, etc etc.
- Lots of amazing videogames.
Some of these are ‘good things’, some of those are ‘not so good things’, individuals will disagree on which is which. What I’m saying is that all this stuff is important and is happening without the need for anything other than 2007 base tech/ways of thinking. The cultural moment we’re in is fertile, scary, wonderful and horrible enough that it doesn’t need any new toys quite yet.
