Marginalium

Innovation Bends Towards Decadence. You won’t have to read far before you get it, but it’s a fun alternative to, as the author puts it:

Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the innovation-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be alarm. “Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, summing up the by now familiar argument, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” … Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation “on hold for a generation.” … Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation … Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.”

He then uses Maslow’s hierarchy to make the point:

In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

Similarly, he reckons tech goes: survival tech, social organisation tech, prosperity tech, leisure tech, and self tech. But even if we squeeze Maslow until his hierarchy worked that way, I reckon that’s a bit of a long bow to draw. Feels a bit like we’re abandoning leisure for productivity, which is not obviously ‘self’ motivated. Or, newer generations are going the other way, resisting the kinds of self-tech the author describes, which means we’re going back down for some reason? And, is social media an innovation in self-expression? Or just rent-seeking on our impulses there?

This and many other questions about his specific crack at this. But bending toward decadence is an interesting idea.