innovation

what is innovation?

political and economic change

Xiaowei Wang writes in Blockchain Chicken Farm

It’s not clear what exactly innovation is, but whatever it is, there is apparently a paucity of this golden resource everywhere except Silicon Valley… The word “innovation” was derogatory in the age of monarchs, as it referred to political and economic change that could bring down empires, threatening the status of kings and elites.

Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm, page 123

The origin of the word was a surprise to me. On the one hand, Silicon Valley’s usage of the term innovation is still consistent with this medieval definition, as their brash move-fast-and-break-things approach has indeed heralded massive political and economic changes (whether the rest of us wanted it or not). These changes have in many ways been for the worse when it comes to the working class (platformization, enshittification, gig economies, …). On the other hand, instead of bringing down the empire,

Contemporary innovation in the United States and China appears to strengthen rather than threaten the political and economic order of the world… Our modern-day monarchs, corporations and CEOs, are unthreatened by innovation. It begs the question: If innovation is so disruptive, why would it be embraced by people with so much to lose?

Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm, page 124

They are pointing out precisely this class character of Silicon Valley’s so-called “disruptive innovations”, which unravels the seeming paradox posed by the question.

innovation sublime

Sadowski, in The Mechanic and the Luddite, takes a different approach. He approaches innovation-as-idea:

It is a value that people prioritize over most others. It is a goal people strive to acheive. It is an end that justifies almost any means necessary… Innovation is a fetish: an object of obsession. Innovation is a feeling: a sense of the sublime.

Wang, The Mechanic and the Luddite, page 50

This is innovation as viewed through the rose-tinted, venture-capital backed Silicon Valley metaverse goggles. Sadowski urges us to descend from the idea-l and return to the material:

Innovation is not a timeless category that exists across all space-time but is instead the product of its context. That context determines the creation and application, purpose and value of things marked as innovations.

Wang, The Mechanic and the Luddite, page 52

In our present neoliberal capitalist context, innovations are LLM-powered search engines that are confidently wrong more than 60% of the time and short-term rental platforms that destroy housing markets. Our societies’ notion of innovation is not worked out democratically, Sadowski notes, but instead “defined by what fits into [a VC’s] portfolio of investments. Progress becomes defined by what aligns with their profit motive.” (p54) Again, the class character of innovation is transparently clear.

culturally constructed

Wang provides an example of the historical and contextual contingency of innovation in arguing that the distinct cultural notions of innovation in China prevented Western tech companies from taking off there:

Companies like eBay floundered in China, straining under the local advantage that Taobao had in understanding the Chinese market. Key details were missed, including the fact that eBay brokers secondhand goods, but in China, buying secondhand goods, especially clothing, is frowned upon… The great innovators of the United States found that innovation was culturally constructed.

Wang, Blockchain Chicken Farm, page 126

This is an interesting argument, although Wang doesn’t provide too much more evidence to support it directly. I don’t doubt that culture is a significant influence, however, and much of their book is implicitly supporting evidence for the claim.