Technological innovations can be helpful, but they won’t solve our fundamental problems.
For that, we will need social innovations.
The explosive rise and global impact of technological innovation has persuaded us that technology is the ultimate solution to all our problems.
This assumption is rarely questioned; it has become like the air, unseen and unexamined.
The solution to the coming energy dislocation between supply and demand is technology: alternative energy, innovations in deep-oil recovery, etc.
The solutions to our epidemics of declining public health (diabesity etc.) is more and better medical technology–more stents, more diagnostics, more medications, etc.
The solutions to our problems in education is more technology: a laptop for every student, etc.
The solution to a no-growth, jobless “recovery” is more technology.
All this boils down to a cargo-cult in which a better battery, a better software package and a better diagnostic tool will enable us to avoid any changes in our lifestyle and culture, which is based on three basic principles:
1. Ever-rising consumption of goods and services
2. Ever-rising levels of credit/debt to fuel that consumption
3. Ever-rising complexity on a systemic, structural level
The notion that technological innovation is intrinsically incapable of “fixing” our problems is not just alien to our collective mindset, it is essentially sacreligious. In the current cargo-cult of technology worship, the basic assumption is better engineering can solve every problem.
This includes social engineering, of course–“nudging” the populace to modify their behavior as deemed appropriate by the Central State, and punishing whatever populace veers away from the chosen path.
Thus we have two powerful cargo-cults influencing the American economy, society and government: the Keynesian “monetary easing,” borrow-and-spend your way to permanent prosperity Cult of the Fed and its Keynesian priesthood, and the cult of technological innovation as the fount of all solutions.
The idea that both these cults are the equivalent of the Mayan priesthoods which oversaw the decline and implosion of the Mayan Empire is not just an outlier–it is heresy of the first order.
Ironically, perhaps, it is glaringly obvious that both cults will fail because they do not understand the problems and are automatically applying tools that cannot possibly fix what is broken: the three basic principles undergirding the American economy and society are crumbling, though that devolution is mostly hidden from view.
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