How Technology Stopped Being Innovation

What Happens When Technology Takes Us and Makes Us Backward?

Here a tiny thought. If you feel — as many do — that the world feels like it’s moving backwards, then perhaps it’s not just about economic stagnation and political extremism — but because fueling those, technology isn’t really innovating anymore, but reinventing a bygone past of serfdom, feudalism, and tribalism.

History’s repeating itself because technology’s recreating ancient history. Not creating the future. And worse, because history isn’t something you’re rewarded for studying in Silicon Valley, it calls all this “progress”, when it’s really turbocharged regress. Hence not by accident, nor by design — more through ignorance, blindness, and folly — technology is moving us backwards now, not taking us forwards.

Let me begin making my case here. I read a very interesting article today about a writer who moved into WeLive today. Dorm-style living with free designer coffee for yuppies, more or less, cleverly branded as hippie-esque “community”.

Listen. I lived in such a place for a time, when I was a dirt poor student. It was called a bedsit. A holdover of a dingy past. Four grungy dudes, sharing a common living room and a bathroom. I’d probably sooner eat my arm off than go back. The point is this. The Soviets, too, had dorm-style apartments. The Victorian age did too. And so on. You might think “well, they didn’t have designer posters!!” but the Soviet ones in fact did. They even proclaimed similar sets of values — the joys of asceticism, the virtue of self-denial, the triumph of the new rational man.

Techno-bedsits aren’t an innovation. They are regression. An innovation is something new, untried, unseen. “Communal living” is old. It’s something that’s recurred in every dismal, backwards age in modern history — and in that way, it’s a tiny example of a larger trend. Silicon Valley isn’t really innovating. It’s reinventing the past — right back to the ages of masters and servant, lords and serfs, peasants and nobles.

Let’s continue with the example of communal living. What are the big economic trends in America? Well, inequality is spiking. The young have no savings, meagre incomes, and no real futures — they’ll never retire…