"my gut feeling is that we need 0 innovation to tackle at least 90% of the problems that challenge our societies, us as individuals and humanity as a whole. We just need to grow up and start doing the actual work."
(Original title: Innovation is a distraction)
https://tante.cc/2025/02/03/innovation-is-a-distraction/
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@tante i had hour long fierce discussions with my mechanical engineer boss at the time about whether innovation is the natural enemy of standards and standardisation... we never settled on any side
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@Heliograph @tante I say no; instead, they're natural complements.
Standards enable people at large to get the benefit of prior innovation.
Innovation is how we get better standards.
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@KatS very good! but then what is an acceptable timeframe for"newer" innovation, when standards haven't even been rolled out yet, haven't been applied yet... @tante
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@Heliograph @tante That's an important consideration, and it occurred to me, too.
I think it's important to distinguish between the two.
Innovation largely works on its own timetable(s), and it's not necessary to wait for standardisation in order to make use of it. There are myriad instances of un-standardised proprietary technology in use, for example. Also, sometimes innovation is only relevant within an organisation, so formal standardisation isn't really relevant anyway.
Standards are different. If an existing standard hasn't had time to be rolled out, it's probably too soon for a new one - unless the new one is a response to a fatal flaw that was discovered late in the process or after publication. Or the introduction/rollout never really worked out properly, for whatever reason.
But then we get into the issue of competing standards, purpose-specific (e.g, IMAP vs POP) and market-specific ones (PAL vs NTSC), and the question of just how important it is to have a global standard for this particular thing anyway.
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@tante see public transport and the constant nonsense around things like Hyperloop or autonomous transport solutions. When actually we have already solved this problem ages ago with trains and buses. Just get on and build the bloody things.
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@smilingdemon @tante this is the wild part. We literally had electrified transportation in the past with interurbans and street cars.
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@andrew773 @tante exactly, but no its not sexy enough for politicians, so instead we will spend millions on sensors and computation to drive a bus, but still need a person to sit in the bus at all times (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAVForth, maybe this should just have been a normal bus and all that extra cost could have paid the drivers properly eh?) or to build a private single lane car tunnel on the premise of non-existent self driving vehicles (Vagas Loop) which do nothing to meet any actual needs.
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@smilingdemon @andrew773 @tante "We do not need driverless cars, we need carless drivers" - dixit A Dutch professor in mobility
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@tante oh yes - a thousand times this…
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@tante While I agree with your sentiment, I think it can be worthwhile to think about innovation in different ways. Innovation is often used to mean invention, especially when it comes to technology, but invention is only a small part of innovation. Building new business models, or adapting technology and business models to new situations, is the main part of innovation.
Inventing new tech to solve the climate crisis is of course bullshit, but using existing tech in novel ways to solve the climate crisis is also innovation. We probably need to think outside of the narrow business sense as well, but changing society still requires innovation.
We need disruptive innovations, not in the sense of a new app, but as something that disrupts the fossil fuel economy.
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@audunmb @tante My take would be that innovation, and associated notions of progress and efficiency obscure actual solutions, that we know work, that are not sexy, require work, but are actually better solutions. Think of processed food: innovative yet more expensive, less nourishing even harmful. By eating fast food you do not acquire cooking skills, miss out on sharing culture etc. Or think using an app instead of asking for directions cuts you out from other people and their experiences.
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@tante The "we" in these kinds of statements always has me confounded. I am almost certain 95% of people would do "the right thing" if the other 5% wouldn't beat them, arrest them, harass them, fire them, etc. If it's a "we" statement for the 95% it needs to be "we need to smash the 5% to bits and then do stuff" and if it's a "we" statement for the 5% it needs to be "we need to get the fuck out of the way" but things being as they are... 🤷
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@tante yes!
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@tante Technology is a longer synonym for tools.
You can invent wheels, put them on a cart, and haul your crops to market, or you can jump in the cart and roll off the edge of the nearest cliff. Your choice. The wheels don't care.
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@tante The problem is capitalism.
"Innovation" is just "something new that we can sell you". "Doing the work" generally means buying less. Nobody is ever gonna spend millions to blanket society in that message. Nobody's going to become a billionaire off that message.
Our entire society is designed around selling you stuff, and designed to give all power to the best salespeople. Until that changes you will never see society at large adopt any solution that is not fundamentally a sales pitch.
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@tante Innovation is not sufficient alone. We're always looking for a magic bullet to solve our problems when the existing solutions work, there just needs to be leadership and the will to apply them.
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@tante Sure innovation can produce useful things, especially when grounded in the work, but much of what we get is labelled innovation without any particular purpose other than to extract profits.
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@tante Bill Nye's speech in Last Week Tonight was brilliant in that regard. I'm sure everyone has seen this a number of times, but this one, really, can't be watched too often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-KmkWSKrmM
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@tante Moreover, isn't innovation basically planned obsolescence? Ah but it has this new button you see, so you'd better throw out the old one.
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@tante For the examples mentioned (nuclear fission) this might be true. On the other hand it's a bit bizarre, that you are able to write this on a decentralized social network (ActivityPub = innovation) running on a bunch of servers (computers = innovation) connected by the internet (protocol = innovation). So it appears the term "Innovation" is first labelled narrowly in order to run a (valid) argument against it. I would go for "reclaim innovation" instead.
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@tante humanity, author. We're not pretending men/man stands for everyone anymore, it is 2025 (for most of us?)
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@noodlemaz good point, thanks for calling me out.
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@tante Thank you for considering!
Here's a post I wrote ages ago https://noodlemaz.wordpress.com/2018/08/16/on-gender-neutral-language/
And I'd highlight the oxford dictionaries link for future use but I've just discovered they've scrubbed/redirected the entire site, so, wayback machine it is (also possibly an angry email to them about that)
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@noodlemaz thank you for the link. Especially as a non-native speaker it's sometimes too easy to use exclusive language.
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@tante that's true! Many languages are super gendered and it's confusing.
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@tante I absolutely agree, in fact, I would argue we are getting close to no innovation now anyways. The actual innovation in last decade has been mostly focused on more effective marketing and faster delivery times. And although these are great things to have, they aren’t particularly innovative or changing lives for the better. Also, reading into works of stoics, Freud, Fromm etc, one sees no progress in terms of social issues. We are dealing with the same issues for millennia
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@tante Yeah. We really don’t need futuristic technology to solve the majority of the world’s problems.
We just need to figure out how to defeat and dethrone the people who are standing in the way of a better future for all.
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@tante it's a shame "innovation" has been colonized so thoroughly by tech and whittled down so narrowly that to most people it now exclusively means "a technology product or service you can buy" rather than what it really means, doing something we haven't done before. but also agree that most of what we need to do to meet the crises we have already done and simply need to do more of.
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@tante boooring
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@tante well put
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@tante
Innovation is figuring out what CAN be done
Standardization is figuring out how ANYONE can do it
They serve different communities and different functions. They're adjacent, but easily separated.
I own a 3D printer. Little, simple thing. Sometimes I use CAD software to make my own models to then print - lowest tier innovation.
I use an app to choose models that other people have uploaded with predetermined settings for the printer to use for each model - lowest tier standardization.
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@tante Yes!
Though I'd say what we need is social/political innovation, not technological innovation.
@jplebreton
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@tante
"Innovation" is just laundering the concept of "growth" for a certain type of person.
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[#]quote | «The demand for more Innovation (and sometimes even the request for more research) has become a way to legitimize not doing anything».
this!
https://tante.cc/2025/02/03/innovation-is-a-distraction/
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@tante
Most of the big problems, such as the climate crisis and the rise of the extreme right, are caused by human action and don’t require technology to solve.
Sure, technology can help, eg., PV cells, climate-neutral concrete, but ultimately it’s a matter of politics.
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@tante I agree with the examples, but it is still a bit too simple to me. Air source heat pumps are an essential part of fighting climate change for heating our homes. They are not an “innovation” today, they are boring technology. But they have been an innovation at some point. And without that innovation, we would be in trouble. Same is true for photovoltaics etc. I strongly agree with “Let’s not do anything now, innovation will save us” to be entirely bullshit though.
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@moonglum Absolutely. I am also not saying (and hope that it did come across) that we are "done" finding new things. Heatpumps are as close to magic as we can come, they are amazing.
But for many of the massive problems we all face today we have the solutions. We don't need new better ones as much as we need deploying what we got (and deploy better things later when we find them).
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@tante Maybe I read the post in a wrong mindset because of the “clickbaity” title 🤔 So what you are saying is “Sure, invent new things. But don’t let that stop you from using the solutions we already have.”?
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@moonglum Pretty much. My complaint is that a lot of required changes don't get implemented because "no, we'll invent a new thing that has not inconvenient side effects when applied. Just keep consuming"
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@tante Yes, totally agree with that 👍 Thanks for the clarification 😀
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@tante @moonglum
Great conversations, and I think the added examples of Heatpumps and PV really clarifies the difference between innovations for innovations and ultimate just "consume more" v scientific engineered with make things actually better by using less, or renewables or using in an optimised way.
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@tante Innovation has thusfar proven to be of limited effectiveness in correcting social issues. Univesally it's always billed itself as providing easy answers to difficult questions. Only in astronomically rare cases has it been proven correct.
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@tante
Can't imagine how I could possibly Favorite and Boost this hard enough.
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