The end of innovation as we know it is not the end of innovation

A call to harness the creative energy surplus into islands of sanity

Photo by Matthis Volquardsen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-open-field-2305169/

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My previous post introduced the research project I am hoping to be able to pursue in academic contexts. Meanwhile, I will keep exploring the topics here, and today’s post is about one of the key questions: what should innovation look like in the face of the multiple crises we are facing?

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Today’s title is a riff on the Dark Mountain project’s conclusion concerning the polycrisis, that “the end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world”. That even if we need to change our ways of living, this time of endings is apocalyptic only in the sense of the word’s etymology: it is a revelation about the potential for a world that remains habitable, an ‘uncovering’ of new possibilities while the past civilisation lies in ruins. Today, I suggest that in such an uncovering, the opportunity remains to keep on innovating — actually even more than ever before — but with a decidedly different motivations and focus.

Every civilisation is unhappy in similar ways

All natural phenomena run in cycles. It is difficult to face the idea that we live in a time of endings, but we are not the first.

The fall of western culture was already predicted by early 20th century historians such as Oscar Spengler, and more recently William Ophuls has written about the recurring ways of how civilisations fall. Margaret Wheatley has summarised the interpretations of civilisational decline as follows: “No matter the culture, geographic location, religion, or who’s in power, all civilizations decline in identical ways, a very predictable pattern of collapse.” (Restoring Sanity, p. 47). Distressingly, the collapse tends not to happen gradually (as the building of a civilisation does) but almost overnight.

In Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, William Ophuls draws from Sir John Bagot Glubb’s 1978 essay “The Fate of Empires and Search for Survival” to introduce a civilisational lineage. It would seem that the development of civilisations follows a pattern where an adventurous age of pioneering leads to the ages of commerce, affluence, and intellect, before the inevitable descent to the age of decadence. Ophuls summarises the latter — in all its grimness — as follows:

An Age of Decadence inevitably follows. Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanaticism, and other negative attributes, attitudes, and behaviors suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizenry, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have-nots. Mental and physical illness proliferates. The majority lives for bread and circuses; worships celebrities instead of divinities; takes its bearings from below rather than above; throws off social and moral restraints, especially on sexuality; shirks duties but insists on entitlements; and so forth. — Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness, p. 49.

Sound familiar? The decadence stems from societies losing sight of their original vigour, virtue, and morale. It is another way to articulate the erosion of meaning behind the crises; the metacrisis of the polycrisis.

To summarise, such analyses of civilisations remind me of what Tolstoy wrote in Anna Karenina: “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” — it seems that, by paraphrasing, we can observe that every civilisation is unhappy in similar ways.

The blind obsessions

What drives civilisation from one age to the next is expansion through innovation. In blindness to its trajectory, the civilisation promotes the thrust of innovation as the sole means of survival.

Post-growth scholars Mario Pansera and Mariano Frossoli describe this obsession:

Innovating has become the imperative for the survival and expansion of any form of organisation. But this ‘innovate or die mania’ underpins assumptions — such as technological determinism and productivism — that neglect the socially constructed character of technological development, its politics and its capacity to enable just and equitable societies but also dystopian technocratic futures. — Mario Pansera & Mariano Frossoli (2019) Innovation Without Growth: Technological Change in a Post-Growth Era ,p. 1.

Innovation is intimately linked with technologies that enable it. There is also an adage that an invention only becomes an innovation once it finds traction in the markets. Unfortunately, the criteria for that shift have too often been defined by scale and profit rather than, say, conviviality, to borrow Ivan Illich’s term.

Perhaps what is distinct about the current civilisation is the volume of innovation, in technology but also with it — is there innovation without technology in modernity? To get an idea of the role of technology and innovation in capitalism, we can go back to the original ideas about ‘disruptive innovation’, as discussed by Clayton Christensen decades ago. In the industry classic Innovator’s dilemma, he writes about a broad definition of technology that fits his agenda of disruption:

technology as used in this book, means the processes by which an organization transforms labor, capital, materials, and information into products and services of greater value. All firms have technologies, A retailer like Sears employs a particular technology to procure, present, sell, and deliver products to its customers, while a discount warehouse retailer like PriceCostco employs a different technology. This concept of technology therefore extends beyond engineering and manufacturing to encompass a range of marketing, investment, and managerial processes. Innovation refers to a change in one of these technologies. — Clayton M. Christensen (1997) The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail

Disruptive or not, despite all the innovation, civilisations decline, including ours. Civilisations crumble due to blindness towards their limitations — a left-hemispheric stance, which is unable to cope with the complexity it has built, focusing on the short-term, serialised, isolated innovations it has embraced. When the civilisation wakes up to the issues it faces, it resorts to solutionism, overreaching its ability to deal with the problems it has created, championing technology as the bringer of salvation. Yet, technological development is equally blind to the systemic implications, a symptom that frequently makes things worse while trying to address them (as expressed by Pansera and Frossoli above).

More optimistic views on the systemic blindness are frequently found in technology literature. The journalist and author Steven Johnson writes about the systemic effects in optimistic tones, referring to the ‘hummingbird effect’ familiar from chaos theory:

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether. Hummingbird effects come in a variety of forms. Some are intuitive enough: orders-of-magnitude increases in the sharing of energy or information tend to set in motion a chaotic wave of change that easily surges over intellectual and social boundaries. (Just look at the story of the Internet over the past thirty years.) But other hummingbird effects are more subtle; they leave behind less conspicuous causal fingerprints. — Steven Johnson (2015) How We Got to Now: Six Innovations that Made the Modern World

So, the techno-optimistic take on systemic consequences sees them as a positive, as something where an innovation in one domain triggers opportunities in another. I argue that this is how modernity wants to see itself, as the pinnacle of innovation where even the negative unforeseen consequences ultimately lead to progress — for a wealthy minority. My interpretation is less positive, following Ophuls, “thinking that we can somehow make our civilization in its present form “sustainable” by rejiggering technologies is a delusion” (William Ophuls, 2023, The Tragedy of Industrial Civilization: Envisioning a Political Future, p. 43.)

The question then becomes either whether innovation in itself is detrimental or are the incentives for innovation such that they ultimately lead to decline in overall well-being: the meaning crisis, if you will.

I am inclined to believe the issue is with the incentives, mainly because innovation has creative aspects that are worth espousing — aspects such as intelligence and imagination that we can also witness elsewhere in nature. Yet, innovation is often described as a quality of companies or other organisations, i.e. they are anthropomorphised into the ones having agency to innovate, rather than individuals. Innovation is expected to scale in the markets — it’s not an innovation otherwise — and therefore it gets incorporated to gain the momentum it needs.

But very possibly this is where we got it wrong. Instead of local innovations for local communities in locally specific contexts and needs, for modernity, innovation is only innovation with a capital I when it has reached a national or even global scale.

The scholars Pansera and Frossoli cite innovation critics who talk about how innovation is a vector of activity, guided by “the values and motivations that dominate the context in which it emerges”. Conditioned by modernity, we take it that such vectors need to target economic growth, but the scholars argue that there are examples of past societies which did not live by such a vector:

in cultural settings in which economic growth does not represent the ultimate goal, innovation might be underpinned by very diverse aspirations and pursuing disparate goals … Science and technical change already existed in societies that virtually did not show exponential growth and they will most probably still exist in future non-growing societies. — Pansera & Frossoli (2019), pp. 4-5.

OK, what would that look like? It would require a culture change, something that arises from individuals coming together in small communities. As Paul Kingsnorth recently wrote in the context of Christian culture — and that is relevant here, by minimum in the sense of the values that original Christianity espoused: “A culture is not the same as a civilisation. The latter is built from the top-down, by the use of coercive power. The former emerges from the bottom-up, from a combination of what I call the Four Ps: people, place, prayer and the past.” How can we reconcile this with the current culture of innovation?

The creative energy surplus

Given the capitalist machine we live in, there is no shortage of passionate entrepreneurs and creatives striving to not just invent but to innovate, i.e. to articulate a ‘value proposition’ and find a ‘product-market fit’, and so on. I’ve done that myself and helped others with such aspirations.

But, I keep thinking of the massive creative energy that is spent on these efforts. The vast majority of products, start-ups, and other machinations of invention fail. They never become innovations. Energy dissipates into despair.

One option, as implied above, is to abandon the invention-to-large-scale-innovation logic altogether. Then, the energy surplus can be channelled to alternative, regenerative ways of innovating; the types of innovation a declining civilisation needs. For example, in crisis resolution and management and local food and medicine production.

In the creative industries, the creative energy surplus is frequent, but often channelled back to routine labour which might produce pretty pictures and cool but meaningless frivolities. It is naive to think that all of a sudden a considerable number of people working in a branch of the entertainment industry, such as mobile games or social media content, would flip their attention away from producing what they produce: highly addictive and lucrative but ultimately meaningless and forgettable distractions. Having worked in such industries, I can say that, even if that might lose me a few ex-colleagues’ respect. There are more important things at stake.

Today, most of us are unable to the heights of Iain McGilchrist’s call for “attention as moral act” — at least not yet. Acknowledging the state of our civilisation might be the wake-up call.

Because, if only 10% of the creative professionals would reflect on how they use their creative energy; would consider how they pay attention to the world in ways that might benefit dealing with the current predicaments, our civilisation just might have a more dignified end. With the creative energy surplus amassed towards regenerative interests, we might be able to harness the types of post-growth innovation that are needed at the end of this civilisation to build the next, for generations to come.

I’m not talking about sustainability initiatives at the intersection of creativity and technology as we know them. What I have seen of such initiatives is that ultimately they still end up upholding the industry and its ways of innovation — and in doing so, they end up generating profits for the data centre and AI magnates.

Let’s meet at the islands of sanity

Something more fundamental is at play. We have screwed up nature, therefore should we innovate to deal with it? Will that risk, as Ophuls & co have observed, producing more uninformed and unforeseen consequences? Yes, but they might also be regenerative and benefit the workers in the ruins: bloom into pockets of habitability where innovation is community-sized. At best, working at figuring out such ways of innovation would provide us with islands of sanity, as Margaret Wheatley writes in Restoring Sanity:

An Island of Sanity is a gift of possibility and refuge. It sets itself apart from the destructive dynamics, policies, and behaviors that are afflicting people on the mainland. It needs to be an island because there is no other way to preserve and protect our best human qualities. We are not seeking sanctuary—we are seeking contribution. We are magnetized by the island’s offerings—the possibility of working together in harmonious relationships to accomplish meaningful work. Refugia (reh-FYU-jee-ah) is a biological term describing places of shelter where life endures in times of crisis, such as a volcanic eruption, fire, or stressed climate. Ideally, these refugia endure, expand, and connect so that new life emerges.

I hope to meet you there, one day. Thanks for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki