On innovation
Never underestimate our cleverness.
We’ve built it all up such that we now live within an institutional and technological environment that’s very at-a-distance and very complex. But we find ways to innovate in order to cope.
The smartphone is now like a sensory organ apropos of the environment. Communications, feedbacks, alerts: your bank balance is low. Good to know.
Buy innovations can be disruptive. They can further complexifications and dependencies. We then are motivated to do auxiliary innovation that enables coping.
When we can cope, we’re proud of our capability. For those who can keep up, who are institutionally and technologically savvy, the paradigm works.
For others . . . not so much.
Paradigm shift is indicated by what Paul Goodman said: “Innovate in order to simplify — otherwise as sparingly as possible.”
https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/345-winter-1995/catching-fish-in-chaotic-waters/ . . .
“Technology imposes not only form but content wherever it comes into use. Industrialism is the grand example, shattering the medieval world with its dynamism and synergy, its tendency to irreversibility and pervasiveness. But even one supposedly isolated technological addition can easily come to reshape society, creating qualitatively different conditions, a famous example being how the introduction of snowmobiles rapidly exploded Sami (Lapp) society in the 1960s. In a matter of a few years, the snowmobile undermined ancient modes of life of the reindeer-herding people, altering the behavior of the reindeer, further opening the society to the world market, and creating new dependencies and a class society where there had previously been none. The process is not entirely deterministic, but clearly, technology is more than the sum of its parts. The automobile, for example, is more than a tool; it is a component in a total system of production, energy, distribution, roadways, techniques, laws and other attendant processes that extend throughout the culture and reshape it behind our backs. Thinking in terms of our individual, enlightened use of a single component — be it a snowmobile, smartphone, or car — misses the whole picture. We forget that a socialization process is taking place in individuals and their society, that the totality of means, apparatus and organization is having its effect.”
