Challenging Cultural Orthodoxy: Unpacking The Myth of Progress

The whole headlong run into faster/more powerful/more complicated is rooted in something larger than gaming. The concept of innovation and progress have become so ingrained in us as a people, that we tend to view it as a natural given, like gravity. We expect it, and consider it an irresistible force. This has turned us into a bunch of neophiles - people obsessed with novelty.

This obsession was folded into marketing and advertising, creating a steady drumbeat that makes people anticipate the “next thing,” and fear being “left behind.” Many products have generated revenue off of this fear and expectation, without actually bringing anything really compelling to the latest iteration. We just expect it, like a pack of Pavlovian dogs.

This drumbeat of progress tells us that the new thing is naturally better. Sometimes it really is an innovation, and sometimes it’s a bunch of hype. But we’ve been on this ride for so long, that now it’s just part of how we look at things. The idea of inevitable forward motion in all things - progress - has take on mythic proportions, and shapes culture in ways that can be hard to recognize because they are so familiar to us. This mythic quality doesn’t mean that progress doesn’t exist, because of course, it does. What it means is that the way our expectation has been trained, and the way in which we relate to the new through that expectation, has distorted the way we evaluate whether something is or is not actual progress.

Another important consideration is that we’ve been so trained to excitedly run to the next thing, and the pace of cultural change has so increased, that we do a lot less reflection and long-term follow-up evaluation than we should. New steps are very often follow-ons to previous changes that we haven’t really evaluated. We end up with a pile of poorly-examined premises we’re building on.

This elevation of change also trains people to look upon the past with derision. Look around, and you’ll see this kind of past-deriding everywhere. It’s a common-enough formula in viral social media posts - get some yuks by laughing at how silly that old stuff was! It shows up in advertising all the time, especially when tech is being advertised. It’s not just the speed and power of our silicon and software, but the paradigms that shape its purpose and use. Unfortunately, our reflexive derision of the past makes us less likely to revisit it and re-evaluate the paths we’ve taken.

Yes - there are many ways in which newer things are demonstrably better. They help us perform some task more accurately, or efficiently. But that leads me to the crux of this thing:

How are we defining “better?”

What happens when we realize the yardstick we’ve been using to measure “better” is not what we thought it was? When we realize that this particular measure of overall improvement is only partial, and at times arbitrary? Even some of our tried and true “objective standards,” like the ones I mentioned above: accuracy and efficiency… They measure specific aspects of an experience, but do they objectively hold a lock on the definition of better? If they do, why are vinyl records so popular right now? Clearly, even these sacred measurements are imperfect. Vinyl lovers have decided that records are better in some key ways, in spite of (and also because of) not being more accurate (in sound fidelity) or efficient (as a means of playback). Alternate criteria for “better” in this case include things like having a physical object, the “ritual” aspect of getting a record out, cleaning it, placing the tone arm, flipping to the other side... Even the primitive method of record grooves mechanically recreating vibrations in a stylus, is part of the charm. We just like it that way.

It’s at this point that we realize that this headlong run into an arbitrary future defined by narrow focuses, can put the blinders on us. We need to look around and ask not if something is “better” according to the criteria marketed to us, but according to more considered criteria that involve overall quality of experience, and by extension, life.

This isn’t a novel idea. Giants of the tech world, such as Jaron Lanier (founding father of virtual reality and Silicon Valley insider) have been actively questioning various aspects of tech world “progress” for years now - questioning fundamental choices, and how “In Tech We Trust” has directed cultural trajectories in negative directions.

Popular Linux insider and spokesperson Bryan Lunduke has done informal self-experiments, such as the one where he decided to do all of his computing for a month according to the paradigms of 1989. He emerged with some interesting insights, and found himself overall happier, and more relaxed. His takeaway was that he liked the idea of going back to certain ways of thinking about and relating to technology, and wanted to bring those reclaimed values into the present.

Once we prick this mythic bubble, we can stop being so focused on short-sighted understandings, look around, and see a much bigger world around us. It’s a world composed of entire cultural histories waiting to be explored, and their discarded benefits reclaimed. I believe our best future requires key ingredients we need to retrieve from our past.

In addition to accuracy and efficiency, another of the criteria we have been sold on is the idea of sophistication. We love that our entertainments have become so big, so richly envisioned, so epic! We’re at a point now where digital entertainment (gaming especially) has become so immersive and rich, it can nearly replace your real life. We need to recognize that right now, it is a well-documented fact that modern tech has deployed an army of psychological manipulators against us - from the macro to the micro - making their offerings both addictive and manipulative.

Consider also that we know smartphones, apps, and social media are intentionally designed to be addictive - not just enjoyable, but inducing compulsive behavior. Facebook, the masters of addictive manipulation, are pushing hard on VR gaming. Surely, some future entertainment mashing up VR, AI, and addictive manipulations is being cooked up into a culmination that everyone will have been trained to find irresistible.

Is that really the future we want?