Innovation is Eternal, Universal (And Quixotic)

Masdar City

If you look at any ancient civilization you see that there isn't necessarily a continued accelerated growth--and if there was, limits to growth would eventually become a terminus for it. Take for instance Gobekli Tepe, a civilization from more than 12,000 years ago. That civilization was a hotbed of knowledge and innovation--not unlike any modern large metropolis. Innovation based on a growth trajectory is a universal idea and will continue on for tens of thousands of years. 

The idea that ours is the first new civilization that will extend deep into the future is fallacious in retrospect because ancient civilizations ended seemingly abruptly, then built anew much later, sometimes without any knowledge of the previous ones. That's been the established pattern in history--not the one we force on it. It's even made more interesting in light of our fetish for inhabiting other planets to continue the same patterns--except nature is more inimical on the surface of Mars or Titan. It drives home the point that we'll risk our lives and do anything just to continue the current idea of innovation.

"...in order to stoke an accelerate growth, new, paradigm-busting inventions like smartphones, robots, and drones must not only keep coming, but keep coming faster and faster regardless of what the past has taught us about moral hazards. The math doesn't work: we are quickly approaching the moment when we will need a major, civilization-changing innovation to occur on a monthly or even weekly basis in order to support the rate of growth demanded by the underlying operating system. Such sustained exponential growth does not occur in the natural world..." [1]

At the same time, this heroic drive toward the future is essentially archetypal, so it is consistent that we are passionate about innovation. But that archetypal passion from 12,000 years ago won't inform inhabiting Titan. Regardless of whether we consider ourselves religious, agnostic, or atheist, heroism about the future is spiritual in nature and is universally expressed. We don't only want to survive, but thrive and be more fit as a species. The invention of agriculture has certainly done that and perhaps arose out of similar "New Age" ideas. The innovations that are epochal are spiritual in nature, and we aren't aware that we're in the same "morphic field"--the container where the ideas go and are shaped by the form of the container. But we don't determine the shapes of the existing containers, which may have existed for eternity.

“it was the essence of the game, lies in the reinforcement of the ability to face risks, to behave according to rules in and predicted but familiar situations and to handle and predicted, unfamiliar, and novel situations by deducing new rules from existing rules. Hence when people are weary of a game because they are encountering no truly not will situations, they develop old ones...or invent new ones on the models of old ones.."  [2]

Since at least the 1970s, spiritual principles have been used (perhaps appropriated) to the business world, fostering the idea that a cultivated inner life would enhance economics, and what was termed "metaphysical management", and was used in early technology industries such as IBM. By that point, the IT industry was firmly rooted in 60s counter-culture and so-called "pseudo-spiritualities", many who used psychedelics. The door has already been opened to the idea of an inner life. They were the "cosmists"--the Russian version of New Age fashioned on eccentric Gnostic philosophies, such as immortality, and the "singularity", which has been increasingly popular over the past decade. They're all "sunk costs" at some point because so much time, effort, and money have been sunk into an idea, that it's too difficult to give up. It's all about the cultural narratives (the "morphic fields").

"[The Gnostics] understood their election to ascent; they recognized the interior divine spark. They had heard the Savior's call, and they oriented themselves completely to their ascent to the divine realm." "The Hermeticists helped people break through the barrier of their limited knowledge, experience the wide complexity of the universe, and contemplate the mysteries of life with confidence and grace." [3]

According to Daniel Dennett, “Innovations must have fitness-enhancing effects from the outset if they are to establish new “encodings."

Take social media: Facebook, with its multi-billion dollar valuation, might be viewed as being hugely creative, but it is not that innovative, and per Dennett, has not enhanced our fitness, and has made us more distracted and perhaps less fit. We already had good communication with regular mail and landline phones (“encodings”), which allowed us to collaborate and work in teams and create robust economies. It is generative in the sense that it uses the old backbone of the internet, and combines the bulletin board and listservs of the 90s with home pages (“walls”). It sells the idea that  Facebook is the easy turnkey solution to having your own website, and creates its own separate internet of personal websites through the social graph, designed to generate ad revenue using your data and social behaviors. It is now obvious that its business model is in direct conflict with its primary mission, and the fact that it is a publicly traded company constrains both its capacity for creativity and innovation through various betrayals of trust--cloaked with the idea that whatever disaster happens, Facebook is on it to fix it. Facebook might go the way of the Space Shuttle, or be remade from a scaled-down version of it, say perhaps as a subscription-only collaboration tool. Or we may revert to a version of Web 1.0, without a social element, which we would have to pay for. (Everything is driven by demand. If enough people demanded privacy we wouldn’t have social media). The internet developed in the 1990s is still the basic building block, and we should always be able to use it as-is, without having to think that it has been replaced by the systems that simply ride on top of it, like Facebook, or whatever supplants it. But the main innovation is still the Internet. Many people may prefer it to not be social, and that could be a potential “tier” or “lane”. It is now more clear that Mark Zuckerberg sees most of his work with Facebook as a defensible sunk cost, which is perhaps how he wants us all to see it--as the Facebook Revolution--like agriculture 12,000 years ago.

This could be another ancient trope of civilization and we're not aware of it, or don't see it because we can't see the innovation for the history, and properly "encode" it. The people of Gobekli Tepe got the encodings right, and we have inherited some of them. But innovation just for the sake of itself (like a Facebook) won't make us as fit as agriculture did.

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1. Rushkoff, Douglas. Team Human. , 2019. Print., p. 105.
2. Peckham, Morse. Man's Rage for Chaos. New York: Schocken Books, 1973. Print., p. 59
3. Valantasis, Richard, and Marcus Borg. The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities. New York: Three Leaves, 2006. Print. pp. 26, 122