Dragging innovation into the future
Do a quick web search for “innovation stagnation” and you’ll find a flurry of articles bemoaning the state of innovation. Take Bloomberg’s “Innovation won’t overcome stagnation” or Business Insider’s “Silicon Valley is stalling out as the pace of innovation slows down”. It’s hitting every industry imaginable. Virtual reality is increasingly thought of as a gimmick rather than the ubiquitous next step for the internet that everyone thought it would be. Automation is prolific enough to undermine the financial stability of large swaths of the population, but not prolific enough to create the work-optional society that economists foretold only a few years ago. According to popular media, innovation in every field- from art and medicine to the legal industry– is notably lackluster.
I think this phenomenon can be explained, in part, as a leftover from the pre-digital world. The internet revolution was supposed to restructure the world’s sense of itself, giving people new agency, freedom, and purpose. We dreamed of it replacing all the inefficiencies in the business world. Why didn’t it?
Before communication technology became ubiquitous, businesses, cultures, and institutions of all types adapted slowly and were naturally fragmented. When the internet was invented, fragmentation bled into the digital world. And that fragmentation persists.
Take my life as an example. I use three different social media apps. I don’t have a single radio and TV station where I get my news; instead, I get it from Reddit, Instagram, various podcasts, my news app, various websites, and more. I am often surrounded by an iPad, a computer, and my phone. Though I respect the different needs all of these tools meet, I also believe this type of excess is overkill and far from elegant. Fragmentation is inconvenient and limiting. Above all else, I want technology to let me rapidly communicate anything with any audience I choose.
Perhaps so many people believe in innovation stagnation because they naively expected technology to naturally provide ever- increasing freedoms. But innovation and technology were always destined to come up against the barriers of modern society. We have simply reached the point where we ought to consider traditional societal norms, and the fragmentation built into them, as design problems with design solutions. Though there has never been an alternative to fragmentation, we must consider the possibility of a cohesive system.
I know that this is a tall order. It will require an iterative, data-driven overhaul of every aspect of reality as we know it. I don’t quite know how to get there, but I know we should not be declaring innovation dead when the internet age has barely begun. The first generation to be fully immersed in digital society is barely reaching adulthood. They are the first generation who, from birth, view their lives as a collection of stories to be curated and shared. They have an unprecedented amount of control over their audience. They create complex, adaptive webs of culture. When this generation replaces the old guard of the business world, they will likely want to create systems as complex and rapidly adaptive as their social circles.
Of course, this will only be possible if their environment allows it. After studying and practicing design ethnography for a couple years, I’ve come to understand how an innovation’s potential is limited by its environment. Innovations need a framework in which they can flourish. To understand why the modern environment is apparently not conducive to innovation, I’ve been on a long personal quest to figure out what the alternatives might be.
In my search, several consistent features have come to the surface again and again. I tentatively subscribe to the theory that capitalist economies follow cyclical patterns of decline and growth. I also believe that automation and increasing inequality (among other things) prevent society from innovating its way out of current issues as rapidly as naturally would happen in a world without neoliberal domination and suppression of organized labor.
There’s a lot of buzz in the economic world about the sharing economy, but I haven’t yet read about a model that I fully believe will work. I’ve found myself turning to unexpected sources to find more about it. One of these sources is science fiction. Modern fiction offers an insight into the way modern society perceives itself and its future. I’ve begun treating regular, fictional comics as accidental ethnographies. As a chronic doodler, I’ve gained a strong appreciation for graphic ethnography and its capacity to succinctly express complex research concepts.
I bring this up because I recently read a comic based on the premise of a sharing economy taken to a logical extreme. It centers around a woman who, in the midst of completing her fifth gig of the day, finds herself the target of a crowdfunded campaign offering a million dollar bounty to the first person who kills her.
The comic is a fun read and raises some interesting questions about morality, social estrangement, and the proliferation of “BS jobs” in a hyperconnected world. But it also helped me see ways that the sharing economy, in my eyes, misses the mark. Aside from the domination of the new gig economy (complete with monetization of small social interactions and a largely freelance workforce), the world in the comic is identical to 21st century America. Businesses look the same, friend groups look the same, and so on. Though the jobs in the comic are somewhat different from the ones today, they have the same amount of control over regular people. The few physical innovations in the comic’s world are aesthetic. For example, the main character is woken by a hologram of an alarm clock instead of a physical one.
This exemplifies a trend that’s far too common in innovative design and futurism: a tendency towards aesthetic over substantive redesign. Though I obsess over petty, pretty design details as much as any other amateur design anthropologist, I think it will take more than an aesthetic revolution to save floundering markets and create a livable world.
One particular failing of the comic (and of the speculations of many economists) is that many of the predicted sharing economy jobs are service jobs rather than knowledge jobs. I think this stems from a failure to imagine technologies that could provide people with more freedom, not less. I believe that an open-source, data-driven community network of knowledge workers could eventually dictate the actions of the service sector. A paradigm shift like this would threaten traditional businesses because it would be positioned to replace them altogether. But the transition time would likely take decades. In that time, companies who invited crowdsourced elements into their workplace would likely experience unprecedented growth and influence as the public shares, grows, and adapts their methods and information.
People change their behavior every time technology changes. From the invention of the printing press to the invention of Instagram, technology has emerged to suit a need- and then needs adapt to suit the technology. To stop being controlled by our world, we must stop adapting to it, and instead make it adapt rapidly to human needs that we haven’t yet identified.
Humanity, more and more, functions as a sort of brain. But its pathways are antiquated. We have the technology to turn all of society into a massive, adaptive, intelligent information system. It’s high time to stop wishing it would work itself out, and start working it out ourselves.
Dragging innovation into the future
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