In 2018 the nicest compliment you can give a tech startup or product is to call it “innovative” or even better, “disruptive”. These are the ones getting the most press, biggest investments and if they’re lucky, biggest acquisitions.
“Innovative” means you’ve done something new, or something old in a new way. “Disruptive” tends to mean you created an entirely new industry, often killing a whole bunch in the process (“Oops, collateral damage captain”).
Much recent so-called progress is built on a kind of neo-religious belief our collective lives and humanity are flawed, while technology is perfect. We are in exile, and technology is the path back to paradise, the Garden of Eden. Our salvation. Our eternity.
Technology is the purest form of progress, we are meant to believe. As such, we should be ready and willing to replace any aspect of our flawed existence.
You may have read about forced obsolescence, where products are designed to be replaced as soon as possible. You pay less but you also get less use out of it, and get stuck in a cycle of buying and replacing cheap things.
In the big picture, this is expensive. But our most avid consumers are not long term thinkers. And many companies capitalize on this. They know that many people are a few clicks or a holiday clearance away from replacing perfectly good products.
The shiny new things have a catch. Sometimes it’s fully hidden, as is the case with the Samsung audio surveillance. Other times the catch is more subtle and creeping, the way text messaging has changed the social landscape under our noses.
We gain and lose something at the same time, and while we all suffer the consequence of this loss, it’s rare people can even put it into words once the new technology has taken hold. It’s like we’re intoxicated by the newness, as well as the social impact of everyone we know using it.
Progress.
In fitness, people understand the basic trade-off in gaining muscle: They must tear it in order to grow. There’s no other way.
At the same time it’s understood that tearing muscle can also be bad. It could mean you tried to lift too much, had poor form, or should avoid that exercise entirely. Yet this common sense is rarely applied to societal changes.
Technology as a rule offers an addictive mix of good and bad effects. These effects are not always obvious, but can warp our personal lives, communities and even entire economies.
Consider drugs. They are heavily regulated, with page-long mandatory disclaimers, and long waits before entering the marketplace. On a common sense level people know to be skeptical of new drugs, and weigh the benefits against the side effects.
In the case of drugs, bad side effects tend to be sharper and show themselves early. Remember how we tend to be short term thinkers? I believe if people experienced the side effects of certain technologies quickly, you would see warning labels and regulation left and right.
But the effects of technology are slow creeping. The good effects come first, and by the time most tech shows it’s consequences, you’re addicted, and worse, may not even know the source of the ill effect. The bitter consequence was downed with the sweet chaser, and the bitterness is only felt deep down.
Weighing the pros vs cons is a decision any individual person has to make. Much like any person who chooses to consume a drug. Some have sharp pros and cons. Others are mostly pros until they are abused, at which point they become mostly cons.
I believe in free will. But I also believe in informed choices.
Tech doesn’t come with warning labels, due to a loophole from the past century equating all change with progress while treating all its symptoms as collateral damage. In other words, we get “Trojan horsed” on a regular basis, invaded by something bad only after we let something new into our lives believing it’s a gift.
And it’s not all marketers’ faults. We have a strong pull toward novelty and conformity, and we’ve put enormous trust into technology as an endless fountain of security and happiness. Marketers can only exploit what’s there.
It’s no wonder we miss the trade-off. We have alot invested in ignoring it. What if we could step back a little, and see it in a new light?
To reframe it a little, if you take your car to the mechanic for one problem, and the mechanic fixes it while leaving you with another, was it a worthy visit? What if you complained to him about it, and he refused to fix the thing he broke, calling it the “price of progress”?
What if it you couldn’t even understand what was wrong with the car, enough to describe and complain about it?
Well, if you haven’t figured it out, you won’t see tech startups complaining. In most cases, their survival is based on changing your life and environment. They walk a treadmill of profits and user metrics, giving very little care to whether their contribution is necessary, or even something positive.
At their very core, most believe life is broken, to be fixed by more convenience, dissociation. The world is a bad place, and they can make it better with this app or gadget.
I disagree. And for every mission statement claiming so, it’s exceedingly rare they make the world a better place. But what many have succeeded at is making it a different place.
That’s OK. I’m here to help. We’re going to dig a little deeper, past these flowery mission statements, to explore what’s truly being given and taken away.
In my next post, I’m going to explore some of the criteria we’ll be using.