Technological Change and Nostalgia

The 'Shitification' of the world

The concept of change is central to our existence. Nearly every religious ritual is concerned with bringing about change, preventing change, or celebrating change. Around 2,500 years ago the greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, ‘the only constant is change’.

But change is not just a concept to be pondered by philosophers, or something that we might think about in the moments before falling asleep at night. From the moment of birth we are immersed in a world of change. Our bodies and our mental map of the world are changing minute by minute, and the external world is in constant flux around us. Adapting to change is necessary for survival, but it can also be stressful. When we adopt new technologies the changes are not necessarily limited to one small area of our lives. The changes can be all encompassing and profound. Inevitably we long for times when things seemed to be simpler or subjectively say that life was better before.

The concept of change and our feelings of nostalgia seem so inextricably linked that I can’t help but wonder if it has not been part of human thought through all of time. Did the first Homo sapiens yearn for a prior golden age? How long after the invention of the wheel did somebody think, “this is changing our way of life and not necessarily for the better.” Over 3,000 years ago the old testament recorded echoes of the tensions brought about by the neolithic revolution and the transition from a hunter-gatherer existence to an agricultural and pastoral mode of life. The garden of Eden is a hunter-gatherer paradise and in the fallen state of mankind we are condemned to toil. All of mankind is doomed and yearns for a return to paradise. Nostalgia seems firmly set into our consciousness.

In modern times the pace of change has accelerated. The invention and adoption of technologies that change our lives in fundamental ways has become overwhelming. At the beginning of the industrial revolution the Luddites protested against technology that threatened the traditional way of producing knit goods. This history has been reduced to a meaningless cartoon where the luddites are opposed to the use of machinery. The truth is that the framework knitting machine had been invented nearly two hundred years prior and was the machine employed by the workers that made up the luddite movement. What the luddites were opposed to was some improvements to the machines, the factory system, and the use of apprentice labor to lower costs. These changes resulted in a lowering of wages and a diminution of the quality of the product. The framework knitting craftsman earned a decent wage for the production of high quality piecework after climbing the ladder of apprenticeship. They may have worked long hours but they did so in the relatively peaceful setting of a cottage in the countryside. Now they were required to spend up to sixteen hours a day immersed in the cacophony of sound produced by up to twenty noisy machines that produced coarser knit goods and pay was reduced to that of an apprentice. The luddites were not acting on a desire for a nostalgic past. They were protesting the changes impacting their lives directly. In the bigger scheme of things they were protesting the greed that came to characterize the industrial revolution and they were standing up for the individual’s right to define progress according to their own values. The luddites were not a revolutionary movement with an intellectual elite to give voice to the broader concerns of mankind. They were peasant workers trying to preserve their traditional way of life.

The mythology is that new inventions are “better mousetraps” and make life better. The truth is more often that they make more profit for one small segment of the population and that an inferior product is produced by a workforce who’s standard of living is diminished.

the industrial revolution took place against the backdrop of a tidal surge of the age of enlightenment and the flowering of capitalism. The enlightenment idea of progress was deployed as justification for any of the negative impacts and depredations brought about by the new technologies. The pollution that resulted from the widespread burning of coal, the unsanitary and unsafe conditions under which the working poor lived and toiled, and the exploitation of child labor were all prices to be paid for “progress”. The dominant idea was that humanity was on the path of progress and that any conflicts or suffering was the inevitable and necessary result of the historical forces at work. Simply put, an individual's life might be worse, but humanity as a whole was moving in the right direction and the changes would lead to a better life for everybody in the future. The problem with the myth of progress is that there really is no collective life, only individual lives, and most of us know that our lives are not better by the standards and values of what is really important. Every generation reaches the point where the changes have accumulated and they find themselves living in a world that has lost much of what they knew to be a better life. By this time they are old and their warnings and admonitions are disregarded as nostalgia for a mythological past. The proof of progress is overwhelming. Any argument about a better past can be easily refuted by the mention of electricity, or antibiotics.

World War I ended the idea of historical progress . The industrial slaughter of a generation of men could not be accounted for as the price of progress. In order for the idea of progress to overcome the evidence of the horrors that industrialization had brought about there had to be a moral element to it. Saying that mankind is better for it implies a moral progress as well as a material one. Since that time technological change is justified as being the result of market forces. It responds to the “needs” of the marketplace. Marketing and advertising of consumer goods replaced any larger purpose for mankind. We are no longer on a collective historical path to perfect the world. Now we just want as much stuff as possible. Without any moral claim to making the world a better place it becomes much more obvious that what was formerly proclaimed progress was just changing society for the benefit of a few at the cost of lower standards of living, and a worse mode of life for the many.

It has been accepted that there is a public good to be considered in making choices that sometimes outweighs the market forces leading to technological change. Greed does not do a good job of protecting public safety or the natural environment, thus we have laws and regulations that aim to prevent drugs being marketed that are either not effective or actually harm the public. We regulate automobile exhaust emissions, license who can drive, mandate the use of seatbelts and require insurance. The technologies that we adopt and the patterns of innovation that we see are still primarily influenced by greed. This leads to the same pattern being repeated over and over again. I call this pattern of making our lives worse in the interest of private greed, “shitification”

Let’s take a look at the invention of television as an example. When television broadcasting began it had great potential to bring the dramatic arts to a larger audience, to educate and inform. Some of the best of what was being produced for radio and on the stage was brought to television and some new forms were developed. The model for revenue was sponsorship. Paid commercials financed the production costs and the profits. The companies had to persuade potential sponsors that their programming would find an audience and they argued that association with a high quality product would bring prestige to the sponsor. Over time the argument for quality fell away. Ratings became the dominant measure and quality barely thought of. The content began to fall to the lowest common denominator. The advent of cable changed the formula. You could now pay for the content directly and do away with commercials. In order to draw large numbers to cable services some programming that the network broadcasters couldn’t offer was brought online. Not only did you not get commercials, now you could get soft core pornography and your favorite sports team's home games as well. The next big breakthrough was streaming services. Initially they competed as content providers along the cable company lines. Subscription services offered exclusive content and the various services competed for subscribers. The innovations in streaming have been about compartmentalizing the content and selling add on subscriptions in order to get a customized variety of the programming that one wants to watch. What you used to get for free, or at the cost of your attention span for a few commercials, you now have to pay for, and in the latest innovation they have added the commercials back in. So now you must pay an additional fee to be relieved of the obnoxious commercials that the service promised to free you of in the first place. So to recap, television offered high quality programming for free. The quality of the programming fell over time to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Then you had to pay for the programming, but the commercials were eliminated. Now the programming is worse than ever, you have to pay an ever increasing amount for it to get the variety that you want, and the commercials are back as well, or you have to pay even more. This is ‘shitification’. Take a product or service and reduce the quality or quantity and sell it for more.

This pattern of shitification can be found wherever you look and it is why people who have lived for a long time are universally of the opinion that things used to be better. Of course you can find instances of genuine progress, where technology has solved some big problems or improved our lives in important ways, but by and large the overall view is that we now have to pay more for things that used to be free, or what we had was of much better quality. In addition to the tangible effects of shitification, many effects are intangible. The changes in our mode of existence brought about by technology are everywhere. The industrial revolution was not just a matter of the invention of machines. The biggest changes were in peoples modes of existence. Most went from an agrarian rural way of life to an urban existence. Instead of working in time with the daily cycles and seasons people now became regulated by the clock and by the needs of factories. A childhood spent playing in open fields and woods vs. a childhood spent on a factory floor. Is there a comparison? In our times we have seniors who heard their parents complain that the television was robbing them of their childhood. That it was far better to be outside in the sunshine, hearing the singing of birds and playing with friends than sitting in front of a television screen for two or three hours. Now we have progressed to the full time occupation of the game console and online games. One may not be morally better than the other, but they are not equivalent. The world was a better place when children played outside with others and exercised their imaginations as well as their bodies. Almost everywhere you look you can find examples of this same process. It is not nostalgia, it is observation of reality. Those that rely on us continuing to consume and participate in the shitified world are invested in us not looking to the past and making comparisons or demanding that we as a society do better. If we demand that values other than greed are taken into consideration and that technology is regulated to promote a better way of life, not just higher profits, then the world can change for the better.

All of the technological choices that we make, or fail to make, impact how we live. This is too important to leave the direction to greed and market forces. Our technologies have become powerful enough to threaten our continued existence and the existence of other life on the planet. The promise of technology is to usher in a utopian future where all of the needs of man are met without the toil that has been our traditional lot since our expulsion from the garden of eden, but the reality is often closer to a dystopian nightmare. History may write that the changes in communication technologies, and our failure to regulate and control them, were responsible for the collapse of democracy in the U.S. and elsewhere.

It’s time for change to become directed by forces other than greed and self interest. We need to evolve new institutions to direct the creation and adoption of technology. We need to better anticipate the changes that will be brought about and make sure that they align with our needs and desires. The classic economic argument, that any regulation distorts the market and will stifle innovation, is insulting to our intelligence. If innovation destroys the environment or negatively impacts peoples lives or health, then it needs to be regulated. Furthermore, there is a public interest in assuring that technologies are not created and used to rob people of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. The problem of regulation under our current system is that it is subject to the same corruption that has overtaken almost all other areas of government. The wealthy and powerful are able to gain control and turn it towards their own self interest. This is why I say we need to evolve new institutions that will be immune from this kind of corruption. At a minimum we need to evaluate technology based on the promotion of the value of sustainability. Our adoption of fossil fuel technology less than two hundred years ago has put our society under the threat of catastrophic collapse. Can we afford to keep developing and adopting unsustainable technologies?

There are many critiques of capitalism, and there have been many efforts made to ameliorate some of the worst effects of a society who’s prime motivation is greed, but overall these efforts have failed to create a society that is sustainable. Furthermore, the society that has developed over the last several hundred years has not appreciably advanced to make life better for the vast majority of people in the intangible ways that are most important. As our lives are so heavily impacted by technological change it only makes sense that if we want to make the world a better place, and our way of life sustainable, then we are going to have to learn to control and direct our technology towards purposes other than greed.