People Are Tired of Innovation
Both economically and culturally
America is known as the place where people spend. We have our nice houses, we buy our nice things, we like to have the best. Every day is Christmas, and actual Christmas is Super Christmas. As George Carlin said, we turned this place into one big shopping mall, and we all started trying to impress each other.
But that’s changing. Americans can no longer afford the best — and, as far as I can tell, people are no longer really interested in the best. We want what works. Our priorities are changing.
Modern America was built on the aspiration towards the newest and most exciting; the innovative. Whether that was the newest design in home refrigeration (see 1950s ads), the fanciest new features on a car (power windows, brother!), or the newest smartphone. Our attitude towards luxuries was “more,” and our attitude towards “more” was “yes please.” But I’m seeing a shift in people’s attitudes. With two different cultural and economic forces in flux, people’s attitude of keeping up with the Joneses is moving towards an attitude of “to hell with the Joneses, I have to pay my rent.”
Those two things, the two big things that are changing, are the affordability crisis (a new-yet-already-overused term), and the train of “innovation” going way past the station.
For about 15 years, from the first iPhone in 2007 through the Covid era of 2020-2022, people were positively enthralled by iPhone features. Or, more generally, smartphone features… although the most likely culprits in all of these snobby conversations were in fact iPhone users, because that’s how iPhone users are. Android users aren’t nearly as tech-snobby, because their personal identities aren’t linked to their phones.
With each new generation of the Apple Rectangle, the status-thirsty Spending Class would covet the latest features and race their friends to be the first to own it. Look how many megapixels my camera has. Does yours? Ohh, no, I’m sorry, yours doesn’t, because you’re a piece of human garbage. This was most visibly a Millennial trend because we grew up inseparable from our phones, although Boomers and Gen X were equally guilty. It wasn’t generational, it was just deeply American. It’s how we were.
Apple became synonymous with consumer attitudes; Apple became synonymous with being a Spending-Class American. The number of megapixels on your selfie camera became your status indicator, your signal of participation, your directly-quantifiable value as a human being. If you’re not American you may think I’m exaggerating, but this really is how people treated each other. People, including me, actually got criticized — like, earnestly and non-ironically criticized — for not having the latest iPhones. I never paid it much attention because I have better things to do than impress zealots, but it did happen.
Oh, what luxury we had. How magnificently unencumbered by worry and self-respect we were. This was also the era of phrases like “first-world problems,” a term used accusatorily and pejoratively to describe spoiled Americans complaining about problems that folks from less fortunate countries would have to win the lottery to have. To the rest of the world, Americans are simultaneously cultural leaders and trust fund babies. They love us, hate us, love-hate to hate-love us.
But things have changed. Both because we can no longer afford to be so snobby, and because I think we’ve become unimpressed by the concept of “innovation in and of itself is a good thing, no further questions thank you Your Honor.” And not only have Americans’ attitudes about technology become less high-minded and self-righteous, but they’ve actually become actively jaded and annoyed. In a few short years, most people seem to have gone from tech-obsessed to tech-annoyed; from “innovative please” to “functional please.”
And to me it’s the natural consequence of where we are. Everything moves in cycles. Since the 1990s, we have been absurdly fortunate and theatrically prosperous. Apart from the post-war period of the 1950s, we just lived through possibly the most optimistic time in all of world history. (We didn’t feel like it while we were there, but that’s because we’re negative, not because it wasn’t.) Every year, your iPhone was more feature-rich and your home went up in value.
And all of that prosperity is, for lack of a better word, ending. This is the part of the cycle we call necessity. Where people can’t afford to be decadent about technology, because they’re too busy trying to get a job on Indeed. It’s hard to be a snob about your megapixels when you’ve applied for 400 jobs in the last 3 weeks and gotten 2 emails and no interviews. It’s hard to be grateful for your iPhone when you’re still paying it off after 3 years and the screen is cracked and the first chill of winter crept into your furnace and ruined it to a sum of $1,700. It’s hard to enjoy luxuries like electronic devices when the entire country just found out that our insurance rates are going up by a percentage so high that it feels like a prank.
The economy has gotten not just worse, and not just dramatically worse, but comically worse for the average person in the last 10 years, and especially in the last 5. Other people have covered the Affordability Crisis at length so I won’t go too deep into it, but let it be sufficient to say that things are just absurdly more expensive than they were before Covid. Homes, rent, cars, food, services, and just about everything the working class spends on. $150 used to buy me three weeks’ worth of groceries, easily. Now it buys me 8 or 9 days’ worth — and that’s only if I’m not buying meat. Homes have gone up in price, but not in value. (Because everyone else’s have, too. That’s the tricky thing about value: it’s relative.) And guess how many of your friends and acquaintances got raises to match this enormous inflation? Not most of them.
(Oh, and now everybody wants a tip, which is just big service chains asking us to redistribute some of our stagnant wages to their employees.)
Old people and bad economists like to point out how “your technology is so much better, you’re so privileged, you don’t know how good you have it.” Yes, old person who likes to accuse his youngers of perpetual ingratitude, our technology is better. Yes, we have a supercomputer in our pockets. Yes, my TV is better than my father’s was. Yes, we have more high-quality devices in our homes these days, and our cars can jerk the steering wheel this-a-way if we miss someone in our blind spot. Yes, our technology is “better.”
But, as Michael Green said, “You cannot pay your rent with ‘better.’”
That’s the headline of the affordability crisis, and that’s where most Americans are at: we’re back to worrying about paying rent. We didn’t grow up like this, and we’re not used to it. We’ve gone from being the Spending Class to the “What the fuck am I going to do” Class. Over the course of one or two generations, our economy has gone from a luxury economy to a participation economy. In other words, your quality of life is no longer measured by what you can afford extra of, but what you can afford.
Your financial outlook is no longer dependent on having the discipline to save more than you spend, but on hoping and praying that none of many possible financial disasters will befall you and your loved ones. In the U.S., your financial outlook is now based more on luck than it is on skill. Breaking an arm in this country can now be financially ruinous. Having diabetes is financially ruinous.
This is what eludes those pretentious economists and prosperity grifters. Health insurance is not a luxury we afford ourselves with, it’s not a self-bestowed pat on the back. It’s a necessity for avoiding financial catastrophe — which is ironic, because sometimes the insurance itself is worse than the emergency. Health insurance in this country is little more than Mafia-style protection money: if you don’t pay it, you’re outright fucked; if you do pay it, you might not be, but you’re going to go broke anyway. Slowly instead of quickly.
Having home internet, a smartphone, and gasoline are not luxuries, as someone from the 1970s might look down their old nose and think. They are the toll you pay to get on the road. They are how you run your life; they are participation costs. Another thing bad economists like to say is that “young people, in real dollar terms, are wealthier than their grandparents.” Not realizing, or not caring and actively being deceptive about the fact, that Millennials have many, many more bills than their grandparents had, and that those bills are not optional. You used to run a five-person home through a single landline telephone. That’s not at all the case anymore. Our lives are overrun with technology that is great, but oppressive. Awesome, but required.
Now. Why have I said all of this? To get to my point, which is changing attitudes and changing definitions.
For a long time, “innovation” in the American dialect has been taken to mean “progress,” as in progress towards the satiated desires of the individual consumer. But the turning point we find ourselves at comes with a redefinition of terms: progress is no longer about desires, it’s about affordability. It’s about the freedom to participate. Progress now means “getting more Americans into homes,” which is a problem we thought we solved 60 years ago. Alas, cycles. We think we solved a problem, and we set right to work forgetting the solution. That’s just how we are. It’s the fundamental weakness of our species.
Innovation no longer serves the unawakened desires of the eager consumer; innovation now only serves the goal of increased prices. Tech companies want to increase the amount of features in your device so they can increase the rent you pay for it, happily ignoring the fact that you didn’t ask for any new features. And almost all of those features, people are finding, are not only unnecessary but actively hostile to our best interests.
As Brent said when he was reading this, tech is now just a bunch of solutions in search of a problem. The new stuff that comes out is not necessary, it’s just cool and dumb. And we’re now trading quality away for features, function for novelty, the lifetime of the object for the thrill of the purchase. Many people’s fathers (e.g. Brent’s) had washing machines that lasted 25 years. Now most of us have owned 3 in the last 20. I don’t know if we forgot how to make great stuff, or if we just stopped trying.
The horror stories we’ve all heard about printers are now coming for every piece of technology you own. “My printer won’t print,” someone says online. “My printer won’t connect to WiFi,” someone complains on the manufacturer’s support forum. “My printer requires a subscription, my printer requires me to pay high, high prices for ink and won’t print in black and white unless I refill my magenta.”
All of these horror stories are true, and entirely too common. Home printing is a needlessly oppressive industry. When you own a printer, you are a slave to HP and their fees. Which is why most people stopped buying printers; they simply aren’t worth the hassle anymore. I’d rather put on my scarf and go downtown to the library than be enslaved to a piece of technology that only ever had one fucking job to begin with.
And what I fear, and what I’m seeing, is that this same attitude is going to start applying to many more devices in our lives. We no longer look at our devices as consumer privileges; we look at them as attention attack dogs and extortion mechanisms.
People who bought the Cybertruck, the most embarrassing consumer product ever released to the public, are finding to their horror that when the vehicle is out of battery charge, it can’t even be unlocked. Because that process is electronic, and the supergeniuses over at Tesla failed to account for something that was absolutely going to happen. Or that taking it through a car wash voids the warranty. Or that an automatic software update at a bad time can make you tardy for work where you already have two strikes at the job you hate. Or that, in order to go fast in your futuristic vehicle, you have to pay a Subscription Fee™.
Ah, there it is. The latest innovation in our modern economy. The Subscription Fee. The sexually violent relationship that every company wants to have with your wallet now. The agreement that you have no choice but to make with each and every company you do business with, just to get access to a product that used to be your own property.
Everything in modern American life is a subscription. A home isn’t an asset that you live in, it’s a subscription to a roof. A liability. The cars being built today aren’t assets that you drive, they’re subscriptions to transportation. And you can bet your shiny little ass that if you fail to make a payment, they will shut down and lock out your vehicle while you’re on the highway. The fees you pay for Amazon Prime TV don’t unlock a premium service, they’re a subscription to your own time. You’re paying Amazon not to waste your time with ads (and then they advertise to you anyway, because fuck you). Netflix, Google, same thing. These companies now own every part of your life, and they sell it back to you via monthly renewal. You no longer have property. Not really. You rent the things you need from the people who really own them. Which at this point is basically just Silicon Valley. Your entire life is an ecosystem of things that aren’t yours.
The refrigerator you buy 10 years from now might be WiFi only, and won’t work at all unless you log into the manufacturer’s website and register your account. And you have to enable AI and turn notifications on, so that your refrigerator can alert you about new ideas it has about how to keep your produce cold. If you don’t enable these features, they will lock you out of your refrigerator. After all, you signed the 8-book series that is the Terms and Conditions. You agreed that in order to keep your account from being Delinquent, you had to enable all the latest features.
I already hate smart TVs with every fiber of my being. I don’t need my TV making decisions. When I buy a TV, I’m buying a machine that turns on when I tell it to turn on, and plays the program that I tell it to play. That is the entire list of features that I want on my TV. People don’t want a $2,300 fridge that makes decisions for them. They want a $300 fridge that keeps food cold. The only people who disagree with me probably have far too much money to be reading my blog.
And sure, people are excited about self-driving cars. That might be the one thing we’re all still pretty excited about. (Except me — driving isn’t that hard, people are just terribly lazy.) But everything else is going to be AI-enabled, subscription-based, and customer-unfriendly. And people are starting to realize exactly how cumbersome that’s going to be, both to our household budgets and to our overall well-being.
In the same way that old-school dudes have always paid a premium for classic cars, there will come a time soon when consumers will pay a premium for electronic devices that have tactile buttons. The kind of device that has mechanical features, no AI, and simply does what you tell it to do. I’m one of those. I will pay extra money for my devices to be my actual property and actually listen to me. No notifications, no WiFi, no subscription. I give you money, you give me thing that works.
All in all, innovation is played out. I don’t think that’s permanent — I think that’s just the part of the cycle we’re in. People are tired of innovation. People want good products that they can trust and that they can afford. People are already skeptical of washing machines with smart features; they’re going to be even more skeptical when AI slams through the wall like the Kool-Aid Man and yells at them about how to manage their daily lives. And that is definitely what’s coming, because the companies overinvesting in AI are forcing its features upon the public so they can tell shareholders they’re “increasing screen time and profitability with AI-first initiatives.”
I think we’re at a cultural moment — and inextricably an economic moment — where people just want what works. We’ve not only become emotionally and spiritually saturated with toys and social competition, but we have to get back to basics economically. We have to simplify. We’re on the cusp of a very weird period in our species’s story: we’re about to get, allegedly, the biggest productivity boom in recorded history, along with perhaps the biggest birth rate collapse in that very same lookback period.
Things are about to get weird. But for now, all I know is that people are tired of Apple and Google and Frigidaire injecting new features into our lives and then charging us money for them. We need to log off and worry about our god damned rent. Which is probably going up 10% next month.
The good news is, necessity is usually what brings people together. And we sure could use some of that.
“As we experience fewer problems, we don’t become more satisfied. We just lower our threshold for what we consider a problem.” - Michael Easter
Thank you to Brent Donnelly for reading a draft of this.
When I teach my course on the history of the future, I often mark off for students a moment that in hindsight is becoming much more clearly visible. Toffler's book Future Shock solidified a kind of trope of Cold War American life, that the future was coming at a faster and faster pace, both in purely technological terms but also in the transformation of social norms and practices, to the point of exhaustion and confusion. The flip side of that image was also a kind of anticipation that what was presently difficult would become easier, that everyday life would have less friction in it. But at the time many Americans accepted "future shock" as a description of their own mindset, the pace of technological and social change was already slowing or stopping. There weren't going to be Pan-Am flights to the moon in 2001--human travel to space had already become little more than a geopolitical stunt rather than the harbinger of change. Travel on the ground had settled into a pretty fixed state of affairs--it wasn't becoming relentlessly faster, more efficient, more 'futuristic'. Large infrastructural projects were becoming more and more unusual. Innovation in energy generation and transmission was grinding to a relative halt. Household appliances were not becoming more automated or innovative; indeed, two of the 'new' devices of the 1970s disappeared in the 1980s (the automatic can opener and the trash compactor).
The personal computer and the Internet became the only forward thrust of a "future shock" effect, largely unanticipated by the futurists and prophets in the 1960s and 1970s. And while the changes in that were profound, by the 2010s, they stopped being driven as much by the Moore's Law jumps in affordable processing power and started being driven by platform capitalism and by the easy money of low interests rates that allowed venture capitalists to underwrite ridiculous and fraudulent attempts to extend the marketing vision of Big Tech into consumer appliances that either didn't work or that offered nothing more in terms of capabilities or efficiencies. (Theranos, Juicero, etc.) And at the same time, the globalization of supply chains and their rooting in anonymized, cheap and mutable manufacturing in China meant that the durable goods that defined household life (and once had felt "futuristic") were increasingly interchangeable regardless of the brand name and increasingly disposable because of low quality of manufacture.
So now, yes, everyone is exhausted by "innovation" because it's almost entirely bullshit. We'd be exhausted in a different way if it were real--that would be "future shock". Now I think we're living with something more like "enshittification shock", as you describe: nothing that claims to be new or innovative actually is, but it often exacts a cognitive price anyway the same way that computer apps and operating systems do when they change interface design just because they feel that's the only way to make people feel like they're getting value.
When people first began to realize that the "future shock" future was not actually arriving as predicted, there was first cynicism and bitterness--think cyberpunk--then there was bemusement and retrofuturistic irony at how naive we had been to expect flying cars and jetpacks. Now there is as you say just exhaustion and exasperation. We just want the technological infrastructure of everyday life to settle and be reliable and affordable, and we just want the decaying infrastructure of our shared world to be repaired, updated and mildly renovated. And the answer from both government and capitalism is (so far) a resounding NO, no you cannot have that. You have to have the Internet of Things and the AIs and the hyperloop and the robots, all of which will exact new rents from ordinary people at a time when they are losing jobs, losing careers, losing aspirational possibility.
our generation got used to buying our way out of every discomfort, due to cheap crap from China and flat-packed furniture. Our parents spent more less often and expected to list everything they bought in their will.
There is indeed a change, and not just because we have everything we need. It's because the rest of the world is catching up, and cheap crap from China is going to become less cheap as we age and the Chinese discover that they too want a basic standard of living.
It's time to rediscover thrift. You know, that thing our Depression-era grandparents did instinctively. But it also takes another skill we've lost, due to our smartphones -- planning ahead. You don't need a smartTV or Netflix ads because you can rent a whole lot of entertainment from the library. But you do need to think about what you want to watch before you flop onto the couch. You can buy a lot of quality things secondhand, but it takes patience to stalk your wishlist and then drive somewhere to get it. It's way easier to push a button and wait for it to land on your doorstep.
Maybe we don't want all the features of our lives, but we've come to rely on them. The innovations of the past are just as much a problem as the innovations of the future.