Technology and innovation, for all the benefits they bring to society, are also frequently implicated in discussions around our society's "degeneration". An axiom of computer science, though, says the computer is never at fault when there's an error, its operator just programmed it wrong. Shouldn't the same thinking apply to technological advancement, writ large?
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Magnitude and Direction
It occurred to me last night that I never actually sent out the Moment of Inertia following last week's Magnitude and Direction, and in the ensuing week I came across some very interesting pieces on the internet that have inspired me to hold off on sending out my original piece. In particular, I was taken by Drew Austin's article in this week's edition of Kneeling Bus (which is a great newsletter and some of the most beautifully written content on the internet,you should definitely subscribe- it's in large part the inspiration for Moment of Inertia).
Much like myself, Drew frequently muses on topics of technological progress and its implications for society - typically with a more civic bent than my own thoughts. This week, he was exploring the notion of a "gold rush" and the way progress inevitably leaves some behind.
Whether it's the actual Gold Rush of the mid-1800s or the tech gold rush that currently has innovators and "innovators" flocking to roughly that same part of the world, there are winners and losers (both by accident and by design). As Drew also notes, every gold rush also has its detractors. I'm sure you're familiar with the ones around our modern tech gold rush - the people who are saying we don't actually talk anymore, and that our values and priorities have eroded.
I've said here before, though, that this isn't anything new:people thought the telephone was a horrible innovation because people would stop writing letters to one another- that conversation would become cheapened and informalized into barbarism. Now, people say the same thing about texting relative to talking on the phone as was said around 100 years ago about writing letter and talking on the phone (there's a bit of irony here, for sure).
The concept of"nothing new under the sun" turns up here probably every other edition (I even dedicated an edition of MoI to it), but it was the way the idea was framed in Kneeling Bus that really captivated me:
"...Most of the good and bad in the world is incredibly resilient—technology isn’t creating or destroying it but reshuffling it. Community, collective joy, and creative play as well as propaganda, envy, and harassment have existed forever in various forms. Whenever someone complains about fake news or kids zoning out on their phones, the lazy rebuttal is that “this is nothing new.” And while that’s correct, technological change—particularly unbundling and rebundling—determine where that good and bad exists, who experiences it, and how it’s packaged. The texture and distribution of the good and bad change constantly, and technology certainly drives that.
So, the position that the aggregate human experience remains fairly stable and that there is almost nothing new under the sun is broadly correct (or “directionally correct”), which could be a license to stop trying to do anything because lol nothing matters."
His idea of reshuffling was particularly fascinating to me and, indeed, it rings true: our complaints about the detriments and evils of technological innovation aren't always the same. Sometimes we really do change things, bringing modes of societal engagement in and out of existence.
It's also important to note that Drew's thoughts don't stop at the above excerpt. He goes on to say:
"Maybe we’re not all advancing together toward an objectively brighter future, but just eternally trying to hold it together?"
In my opinion, that sentiment is, in its own way reassuring, a kind of universe-wide acknowledgement that things aren't always going to be perfect and no innovation comes without its side effects, but we're all doing our best to make it through.
The thing that jumped out at me most, though, was Drew's use of directional and navigatory language. A lot of it turns up when we talk about the forward march of progress, but we don't always consider that the forward progress we see an experience isn't just a single vector moving in the direction of the future, but rather a composite of many vectors going in many directions (and maybe now you can see where the resolution of this article is going, but please bear with me here). The forward vectors of our gold rushes create corresponding backwards vectors of the people, things, and ideas we leave behind when we get swept up in progress.
We only move forward when the benefits of something outweigh its detriments - progress has both a Magnitude and a Direction.
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P.S., This is not how I came up with the name for my newsletter, per se, but my sentiments around this concept are a happy coincidence.