Most of us have grown up with an implied Whig theory of history. That is, things always progress.
And who’s to blame us? For several centuries, technology has always gotten better. It seems impossible that it could go backwards. We can simply keep building on what we have, right?
Apparently not.
There are many baffling disappearances in history. Entire advanced civilizations leaving nothing but amazing technological achievements that no nearby cultures could replicate let alone improve upon. Somehow their advanced tech didn’t spread, it died.
There are even more baffling cases of the same culture having once had tech that it lost. China has some epochs where tech seemed to go backwards.
So it’s possible. And if it’s possible, we should think about what might make it reality, and look for signs even now. When you start looking, you find some odd things.
Yesterday while mowing the lawn, my plastic gasoline can got a crack in its seam and gas started dripping everywhere. Plastic gasoline cans swell and bloat in heat, have been known to explore, leak often, have unmanageable safety caps, and pour excruciatingly slowly if you’re filling up a 3.5 gal mower tank. Gas cans were better 20 years ago.
Jeffrey Tucker has written an entire book on gas cans and similar household technologies like showerheads and water heaters and toilets that are worse than they used to be.
In all of these instances, the culprit is not loss of technical ability, it’s government regulation. The “Safety” terrorists get in bed with industry lobbyists to restrict product design with a classic Bootleggers & Baptists combo of good intentions and intentional barriers to competition. It’s people’s willingness to tolerate these regressions that allow them. But what happens over a long enough period of time when every company and every consumer is conditioned to the worse tech? Factories are tooled to produce it, workers trained to make it, users accustomed to its inferiority. How long until the superior versions of the past get forgotten?
Some see similar plateaus or regressions in things like automobiles, air travel, roads and bridges, home construction, etc. They call this “The Great Stagnation”, and long for a more technologically ambitious age. I don’t know these technologies well enough to know if they’re gotten worse when you compare outcome per dollar spent, but I do know the experience of them is inferior in many ways to the past. Air travel, if measured by the time you leave your house to the time you arrive in the hotel at your destination, is slower than it was 60 years ago. The planes themselves may have WiFi and some other upgrades, but the quality of the experience as a whole is worse. Again, we find the Safety cartel behind it.
While Stagnation apologists give too little consideration to information technology, they do seem to correctly identify a lack of technological ambition culturally, as compared to say the 1950’s.
The insane advances in the past 3-4 decades around information and computation should not be overlooked. But it’s also easy get too caught up in the advances that are easy to see and ignore the ways in which tech can or has slowed, stopped, or regressed.
I don’t have a tight causal theory to the hows and whys of tech regression, but I suspect there’s a reason for so many ancient myths like Atlantis and Babel. It seems tech advancement can lead to moral and cultural arrogance and decay, perhaps what Thomas Sowell calls an “unconstrained vision”, which leads to tech directed in the wrong places, which leads to decay, regression, or cataclysm.
I’m not proposing any strong theories or answers here. But I am proposing that technology can go backwards. It is entirely possible that in 20 years, kids will want to hear stories about how amazing the internet and iPhone were, compared to whatever they have.