Each act of obeisance to technological innovation assigns away part of our franchise to participate in shaping human destiny, and affirms a greater faith in robots, chips, and bits than in people, ideas, and institutions. By the time most people notice their powerlessness in the face of innovation, their condition will simply seem inevitable.
Bill Joy concludes with a suggestion that less innovation might leave us happier as well as safer:
... I believe we must find alternative outlets for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and undirected growth through science and technology and the clear and accompanying dangers.
In one peppy tract after another, innovation management gurus invoke the conceit of "disruptive technologies," hammering at their readers to come to terms with the revolutionary consequences of the Internet, genetic engineering, wireless communication, and other big tech trends. Imagine what might have happened if such a corps of sophisticated flacks had comparable influence when an even more disruptive (social) technology -- Marxism-Leninism -- was on the march, threatening the established order. Such writers, orators, and organizers (variously labelled as propagandists and subversives) did of course exist at various times and places, but either failed to influence industrial elites to change their ways or where they succeeded, effected institutions (such as labor unions and social welfare programs) that have come under renewed attack. Clearly, not all disruptive technologies are created equal, nor is their success inevitable.
Karl Marx certainly believed in material progress every bit as much as General Electric ("where progress is our most important product"). The difference is that Marx thought its direction and value added ought to devolve to everybody, not just to owners of the means of production.
There aren't going to be any more communist revolutions, and trendy corporate reinvention campaigns to empower innovators are a pathetic substitute for grass-roots change. Innovation fever certainly won't dampen lust for corporate control or executive booty; concentration of ownership madly proceeds, consolidating wealth and squeezing it toward the top of the curve. Innovation has come to be prized mainly because it provides more stuff to own and control.
Such is human nature, and it isn't likely to undergo revolutionary change particularly soon.
We need to remind ourselves, however, that life doesn't have to be like this. We've allowed commercial interests to define innovation with a blizzard of high-tech trial balloons, intellectual property scams, and harebrained management fixes. As a result, almost all discussions of it bespeak corporate means and mercenary ends. The fact remains, however, that organizations don't invent; they just implement -- poorly or well, and usually for very self-aggrandizing reasons -- innovations that individuals have conceived. It's time to turn to other pathways for invention, for example by favoring appropriate technology, placing intellectual property in the public domain, and invigorating social structures.
As MIT's President Vest insinuated, we are morally obliged to repair damages wrought by previous generations of technological solutions, and new approaches will indeed be needed. But no number of clever inventions can save us if we conduct business as usual, by which is meant overreaching pursuit of wealth and control without regard for human and environmental values and consequences. We need more common sense and less consumer confidence, more collective wisdom and less competitive ways, more inner vision and less intervention. To secure these ends, we can:
May the god of innovation bless and keep you. You may return to your computer now.
Copyright © 2001 by Geoffrey Dutton. All rights reserved.