Notes on incrementalism, solutionism, and prosperity (Across the Sundering Seas #30)
Hello again, readers. It has been a few weeks courtesy of weekend travel around Thanksgiving: cross-country plane rides with kids (even really great travelers like our girls) are no joke!
This week, a few of my notes (very lightly edited where appropriate) on sundry topics I’ve been thinking about lately!
1.
Incrementalism’s failure mode: incremental solutions can sometimes ameliorate the worst ills of the present system just enough that doing the hard work of making deep, systems-level/structural change seems less necessary. Make things just enough better that people get comfortable with it, even if things remain deeply broken, and the urgency of real change goes away.
(A few earlier notes on this: Winning Slowly 7.04: Not Better Enough—Rejecting solutionism, the problems of the humane, and wise change, which was itself largely a further extension of issue #10.)
2.
A friend proposed an app idea—for what is basically a very carefully tailored, and genuinely novel, “social network”—that I really like (so much that I actually really kind of want to build it myself, even if I shouldn’t because of other commitments). But I do have one significant reservation about it, and it is the fundamental tradeoff the confronts any “solution” of this sort: to what extent does it merely reinscribe the status quo? The idea is a great idea in the small, but how much does it fall into incrementalism’s failure mode with regard to our current technocratic regime—both in the sense of ameliorating some of the worst ills of suburban sprawl just enough that we don’t feel the pressure to actually move closer to our friends, and also in the sense that we just keep building more technology to solve problems created by other technology? Is it worth that tradeoff?
(My sense in this case is yes, but I think it is the kind of question we should be asking!)
3.
I’m not a technological determinist, to be clear, but I also think underselling the ways that tech habituates us to certain patterns, and that it is an essential ingredient of that political economy: they’re mutually reinforcing. This is a broad trend that dates to the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment and the general tendency toward technocratic/bureaucratic solutionism.
Technological solutionism is only one part of that; the root is “solutionism” and a kind of perfectionism that thinks that human nature is fundamentally malleable such that if you just apply the right techniques (in Ellul’s framing) you can make society work the way you want it to. The fact that it is not the whole or sole driver doesn’t mean we shouldn’t consider it and its effects. For me, it’s a primary area of concern by dint of vocation—but that doesn’t mean I think it’s the primary category or area of concern more generally.
4.
Consider the cost of storing, and retrieving on demand, the billions of tweets that have been sent over the years, or the posts and images on Facebook, or the Instagram pictures, or the YouTube videos. These things have some (varying degree of) lasting utility, but does anyone consider the long term costs—just the sheer energy costs and impact to the environment—if permanent storage?
5.
While technologies like Netlify Deploy (and CI-powered systems in general) are really nice, we should consider their ongoing costs. What happens when CI is readily available everywhere all the time? Does it incentivize just doing things via CI rather than running and checking locally once? It seems to have done so for me, for certain. It is doubtless cheaper than having a WordPress server running all the time, especially when hit by massive traffic, but it is non-zero in impact.
6.
In Ed-Tech Agitprop, Watters cites Robert Gordon as arguing that technology is not changing faster than ever before, and indeed that the fastest rate of technological change was through the Industrial Revolution. I might—might!—be willing to grant the point when it comes to the speed at which significant changes swept through the West. However, I think it misses a key factor that makes the advent of digital technologies and especially the internet different in this regard: the nature of its impact. By this way of measuring things, the printing press was an iterative change on the technologies that came before. It did not revolutionize travel or economies (at least: not overnight). It did, however, change the world in ways far more radical than did indoor plumbing (much as I’m grateful for the latter). The “rate of technological change” is not just “how many new technologies appeared and how quickly did they reach the population at large?” but also “what kinds of shifts did the advent of those technologies produce?”
7.
It seems there are two basic competing theories explaining American prosperity and its fluctuations over the last century. In one, the American economy flourished because of careful design and regulation; in the other, it soared as a result of deregulation. Proponents of each of these point to certain kinds of success (the kinds they value, of course!) as indicators that their theory is right. What neither seems to do much of is consider how the technologies driving the economy in the era they point to are factors. The structural effects of the post-war boom in manufacturing are, minimally, very different from the structural effects of the boom in the high-tech industries. The fact is: we just don’t actually know which components dominate there. No doubt both are involved in some way—but the proportions and the dynamics of the interplay are difficult to suss out, at best.
The pro-regulation folks have to grapple with the fact that the ‘tech’ industry as we know it didn’t exist yet—and so neither did any of its effects, good or ill. The tendency toward massive aggregation is novel (although not necessarily in a global historical sense: prior eras have seen similar trends toward centralization, albeit for different structural reasons), and it is specious to claim that the regulatory regime that arguably served well for the post-war boom years would have worked equally well to reign in wholly different industries whose successes have been predicated on entirely new economic forces and structures. Those forces and structures are emergent properties of the microchip and internet revolutions—that is, as any good leftist ought to be able to tell you: they are features of the material conditions, natural outworking of the structure of production itself in this era. Regulation may have a role to play in how that works itself out, but the technologies themselves are important in ways that merely economic analyses tend to overlook.
At the same time, the anti-regulation folks have to grapple with their own challenges—of much the same nature. First and foremost of these is the hard fact that much of the growth of the current era is built on technologies which were incubated in a more heavily-regulated era. That the boom coincided with massive deregulation seems to have been a coincidence; it is difficult at best to draw a causal line from Reagan-era deregulation to the success of the tech industry. More, while internet-powered globalization has certainly had a number of positive effects, the plateauing of the middle class in this era certainly seems to be a negative effect of the factors at work in the same time frame. The economy endured a period of significant stagnation of one sort in the 1970s (and there was considerable unrest to match, even if we seem largely to have forgotten it!)—but the boom of the ’80s and ‘90s was a boom that was coming no matter what: because the advances in silicon manufacturing and the advent of a literally light-speed global communications network radically altered the economic terrain.
And many of the ills people on both sides of the aisle would like to address—in their disparate ways—come down to structural shifts driven by those changes in technology. It is fair to point out both that the economy has boomed in real and measurable ways since the early 1980s, and that the effects of that boom have been profoundly unevenly distributed. At root, though, both of those are merely symptoms of the fact that the boom in question has radically shifted the kinds of jobs available. It is not merely that (as the left would have it) that boom in technology was left unregulated; nor is it that (as the right would have it) the boom has failed to lift the lower and middle class directly in line with over-regulation. Instead, it is that the nature of the changes in question is structural and therefore overwhelming any such policy regime.
I’d really love to hear feedback/thoughts on any or all of those, as always. (A few of you have emailed me, and don’t worry: I will get around to replying! The same travel which meant I missed a couple weeks led to my not having time to keep up correspondence.)