Posts Tagged ‘invention’
“If you could choose only one of the following two inventions, indoor plumbing or the Internet, which would you choose?”*…
For years, people have bemoaned the sorry state of innovation. Compared with the great inventions of the industrial era, the inventions of our own time seem pathetic. In a short essay reprised from 2012, the estimable Nicholas Carr offers a different take: We’re as innovative as ever, but the focus of innovation has shifted…
… The original inspiration for such grousing… came from Robert J. Gordon, a Northwestern University economist. His influential 2000 paper “Does the ‘New Economy’ Measure Up to the Great Inventions of the Past?” included a damning comparison of the flood of inventions of a century ago with the seeming trickle we see today. Consider the products invented in just the ten years between 1876 and 1886: the internal combustion engine, the electric lightbulb, the electric transformer, the steam turbine, the electric railroad, the automobile, the telephone, the movie camera, the phonograph, the linotype machine, the film roll for cameras, the dictaphone, the cash register, vaccines, reinforced concrete, the flush toilet. The typewriter had arrived a few years earlier, and the punch-card tabulator, the computer’s precursor, would appear a few years later. And then, in short order, came the airplane, the radio, air conditioning, the vacuum tube, jet aircraft, the television, the refrigerator, and a raft of other home appliances, as well as revolutionary advances in manufacturing processes. (And let’s not forget The Bomb.)
The conditions of life changed utterly between 1890 and 1950, observed Gordon. Between 1950 and today? Not so much.
So why is innovation less impressive today?… maybe it’s crappy education. Or a lack of corporate investment in research. Or short-sighted venture capitalists. Or monopolistic business practices. Or overaggressive lawyers. Or imagination-challenged entrepreneurs. Or maybe it’s a catastrophic loss of mojo. None of these explanations makes much sense. The aperture of science grows ever wider, after all, even as the commercial and reputational rewards for innovation grow ever larger and the ability to share ideas grows ever stronger. Any barrier to innovation should be swept away by such forces.
Let me float an alternative explanation: There has been no decline in innovation; there has just been a shift in its focus. We’re as creative as ever, but we’ve funneled our creativity into areas that produce smaller-scale, less far-reaching, less visible breakthroughs. And we’ve done that for entirely rational reasons. We’re getting precisely the kind of innovation we desire — and deserve.
My idea is that there’s a hierarchy of innovation that runs in parallel with Abraham Maslow’s famous hierarchy of needs. Maslow argued that human needs progress through five stages, with each new stage requiring the fulfillment of lower-level, or more basic, needs. So first we have to meet our most primitive Physiological needs, and that frees us to focus on our needs for Safety, and once our needs for Safety are met, we can attend to our needs for Belongingness, and then on to our needs for personal Esteem, and finally, at the peak of Maslow’s pyramid, to our needs for Self-Actualization.
If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy as an inflexible structure, with clear boundaries between its levels, it falls apart. Our needs are messy, and the boundaries between them are porous. A caveman probably pursued esteem and self-actualization, to some degree, just as we today spend time and effort fulfilling our physical needs. But if you look at the hierarchy as a map of human focus, then it makes sense — and seems to be borne out by history.
In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.
If technological progress is shaped by human needs, as it surely is, then general shifts in needs would also bring shifts in the nature of innovation. The tools we invent would move through the hierarchy of needs, from tools that help safeguard our bodies or coordinate social groups on up to tools that allow us to modify our moods or express our individuality — from tools of survival to tools of the self. Here’s my crack at what the hierarchy of innovation looks like:
Innovation’s focus moves up through five stages, propelled by shifts in the needs we seek to fulfill. In the beginning come Technologies of Survival (think bow-and-arrow), then Technologies of Social Organization (think cathedral), then Technologies of Prosperity (think assembly line), then technologies of leisure (think TV), and finally Technologies of the Self (think Facebook, or Prozac).
As with Maslow’s hierarchy, you shouldn’t look at my hierarchy as a rigid one. Innovation today continues at all five levels. But the rewards, both monetary and reputational, are greatest at the top level (Technologies of the Self), which has the effect of shunting investment, attention, and activity in that direction. We’re already physically comfortable, so getting a little more physically comfortable doesn’t seem particularly pressing. We’ve become inward looking, and what we crave are more powerful tools for modifying our internal states or projecting those states outward to an audience. An entrepreneur today has a greater prospect of fame and riches if he or she creates a popular social-networking app than a faster, more efficient system for mass transit. Innovation, to put a dark spin on it, arcs toward decadence…
One might wonder why Carr doesn’t focus more (and more affirmatively) on information technologies– the emergence of personal computing in all of its form factors, the knitting together of the web and the advent of turbocharged connectivity, and on its back, the emergence of social media– all of which have been hugely impactful, perhaps especially in the 12 years since this essay was written: a “TikTok/YouTube/influencer election,” a social media fueled mental health concern, the proliferation of meme investing and online gambling, etc., etc… But then, one might conclude that they simply underline his point.
Why our innovations seem so small: “The Arc of Innovation Bends toward Decadence.”
Pair with Ted Gioia‘s painfully apposite “The State of the Culture, 2024.”
* Robert J. Gordon
###
As we ponder progress, we might recall that it was on this date that an acute observer of this phenomenon, The Simpsons, made its debut as a full-length show. Originally a part of The Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons got their own Christmas special, which aired on FOX on this day in 1989. “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire” (AKA “The Simpsons Christmas Special”– the first of an annual tradition) was created by Matt Groening and written by Mimi Pond (who only wrote the one episode). It was viewed by 13.4 million viewers, was nominated for two Emmy Awards, and hasn’t left the airwaves since.
“Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts”*…
In (what seems to your correspondent) a techno/progress-studies “update” of the Annales school of historiography) historian Stephen Davies argues that technology and ideas change our lives much more than politics do– and that history should reflect that…
Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066.
But I imagine most readers will fail to identify what’s special about this second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. Or indeed this third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960.
Why are these first dates so recognizable and memorable? It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived.
Undoubtedly there is truth in this but what was the nature of the impact that these events had? What, if anything, did they have in common? The clear answer is that these are all political events. As such they are also thought of as being connected, as being key points or landmarks in a particular story that structures the past into a meaningful pattern and makes sense of it. It thus tells us what was important in bringing about both past worlds and the contemporary world and so, by extension, what we should see as important here and now.
This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities, such as France, England/Britain, and the USA. Making these dates important and central to our understanding of the past implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.
In this political story the important, memorable events are wars, revolutions, elections, the rise of certain kinds of governance and political institutions, and the doings of rulers – kings, emperors, popes, prime ministers, and revolutionaries. The fact that these kinds of dates are memorable and widely known shows us that this is the dominant way of thinking about history and of understanding the past…
… This predominant understanding of history is incorrect for three reasons:
- It places emphasis on the wrong events.
- It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
- It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.
The political understanding of history leads us to view our situation in a distorted and inaccurate way. It implies that if you want to address social problems or challenges, then politics (whether electoral or revolutionary) is the only way to do it. It implies that the news and events we should pay attention to are political ones, because those are what will have the greatest impact.
But there may be other, better ways of looking at the past.
Let us return to our second list of dates: 5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.
The first of these, 5th July 1687, has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world…
[Davies explains the other key dates…]
… These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world…
… However, there are other, even more important dates, if we think of the impact the events associated with them have had on everyday life and the nature of society, that are even less known and considered. Here we have yet another story or way of thinking about history, one that is almost completely ignored.
Consider our third list of dates and years: 22nd January 1970, 26th April 1956, 1st October 1908, and 1960. Even fewer people would recognize these. However, if you want to understand our world, these are more important than those on the first or second list.
What were they, and why so important? They are when the way we lived changed.
The first, 22nd January 1970, was the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747, the first jumbo jet. This was the outcome of an amazing project, led by figures such as the inspirational head of Pan American Airways, Juan Trippe, and Boeing’s coordinating engineer, Joe Sutter. The project involved the creation of several new technologies and came close to bankrupting Boeing. The jumbo jet transformed air travel from a luxury good to a mass-consumer one. In doing so, tourism, migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas have all been transformed. The world we live in is now far more interconnected and integrated because of this breakthrough. The modern global city is a product of the 747 and the aircraft that followed it. Trippe called the 747 ‘a great weapon for peace, competing with ballistic missiles for the future of humanity.’…
[Davies explicates the other dates]
… Why should we count these events as more important and significant than the iconic events in the political understanding? One reason is that politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.
The forms that events such as wars and revolutions or peaceful politics took were both made possible by the kinds of events we are looking at here but were also limited by them. Certain possibilities were not possible or no longer possible because of the changes brought by these events and the way that they also created systems with limits or unavoidable requirements. For example, after the jumbo jet, containing pandemics with quarantines, as was common in the nineteenth century, has become difficult or impossible.
In this materialist way of thinking, it is material lived experience that determines consciousness and shapes things like culture and politics, and so things that influence or shape that material lived experience are what we should give more weight and attention to…
[Davies offers other examples– the telegraph, the telephone, and radio broadcasting, observing that “almost every aspect of our lives today is shaped in some way by these three events and what followed from them.”]
… If the shared element of the first set of dates was the part played by power in human affairs, what unites the latter ones? These are the dates when technological shifts changed our lives. Human beings, through cooperation, exchange, exploration, experiment, and inquiry, can create novel solutions to challenges and problems, with enormous effects. These are cases when those solutions worked, with predominantly good, but also bad, effects.
Certainly, on an initial comparison the fruits of technology seem to have created more good than the battles of history. This would be even clearer if we thought about other events that could be added to this kind of list, such as the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis, the synthesizing of antibiotics by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, the fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of infectious disease that were brought by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, or the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air to create artificial fertilizer, which reduced the threat of famine and starvation to a historical low.
An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of place would be very different from the political one that dominates now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline of states and empires being the focus, the central story would rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical) of those with power…
If it is the case that human ingenuity solving problems is the most potent force in history, why do so many still fixate upon politics, wars, and revolutions?
Part of the reason is obvious: Those events are dramatic, as unpleasant things often are. A more cynical explanation is that this flatters the self-importance of the most immediately powerful people in society, and also causes the rest of society to see them as more important than they are. It also legitimizes and justifies the actually existing systems and institutions of political power by making it seem that these are the keys to human well-being and advancement.
If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems…
… John F Kennedy memorably captured this sentiment in the peroration to his ‘Moon Speech’ delivered at Rice University in Texas in 1961. As he said:
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
The vision of history and the optimism for the future that he expressed that day is something we should recover…
Do we misperceive politics to be at the center of history? “History is in the making,” from @SteveDavies365 in @WorksInProgMag.
(Image above: source)
* “Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader… History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks.” – Will Durant
###
As we parse the past, we might recall that it was on this date in 1865 that the 27th (and conclusive) state (Georgia) ratified the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Proclaimed on December 18, it was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
The Emancipation Proclamation (made in September 1862; effective January 1, 1863) had freed all current slaves in the U.S. (though as a practical matter freedom took years longer). The Thirteenth Amendment assured that it would never be reinstated.
“Government is an art, not a science, and an adventure, not a planned itinerary”*…
And sometimes, suggests Brian Potter, that adventure is more adventurous than others…
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th century, and (to a lesser extent) China today. I’ve been struck by how many parallels there are between modern China (roughly the period from the late 1970s till today) and the Gilded Age/Progressive era U.S. (roughly the period from the late 1860s to the 1920s).
During these periods, unprecedented levels of economic growth combined with large populations were making both the U.S. and China wealthy and powerful. Both countries were urbanizing, building enormous amounts of infrastructure, and becoming by far the largest manufacturers in the world, with industrial operations of unprecedented size. Both were undergoing wrenching social and cultural change as old institutions were replaced by new ones, and the countries began to become “modern.” Both were nations of ambitious strivers, where it seemed like anyone with talent could make themselves into a success by catching the tide of rising opportunity. Despite the many differences between the two countries, the forces of development pulled them along very similar paths…
[Potter reviews the histories of development in the U.S. and in China…]
… Yuen Yuen Ang [here] likewise notes the similarities between modern China and the Gilded Age U.S., stating that “both countries underwent a wrenching structural conversion from rural to urban and closed to global markets, producing once-in-a-generation opportunities for the politically connected and enterprising…to acquire fabulous wealth.”
The most interesting thing about these parallels, to me, is that the U.S. and China in many ways were starting from very different places. Prior to its opening up, China’s economy was entirely state-owned and state-planned, and its economic expansion was coupled with unwinding much of the state enterprise machinery, letting small businesses form and markets bloom.
The U.S., on the other hand, was on the other end of the spectrum. Prior to its economic expansion it had an incredibly weak state, and economy driven by very small enterprises. Its development was accompanied by the creation of large, powerful companies and institutions, and moving away from the “invisible hand” of the market and towards the “visible hand” of exchanges of goods and services mediated within very large organizations.
China’s success came from finding ways to mobilize its huge number of people and hasn’t necessarily been focused on operating at the frontier of efficiency. The U.S., on the other hand, despite its comparatively large population, had a chronic shortage of labor, and much of its development was focused on developing less labor-intensive manufacturing technologies like the American System. China built its success on the back of inexpensive labor, and it remains a middle-income country. In the U.S., labor has never been cheap; the U.S. had nearly the GDP per capita of Britain as early as the 1820s, and it had the highest GDP per capita in the world by the 1880s. But despite these differences, the logic of development pulled the U.S. and China along very similar paths. Both countries could exploit very large markets (both at home and abroad) and operated their industries at very large scales in order to do so. In both countries, this required a novel set of institutions that was radically different from what came before, and the transformation that created those institutions spawned cultures with many similarities…
“How China Is Like the 19th Century U.S.,” from @_brianpotter (via @ByrneHobart).
One notes that any solution brings its own crop of new problems… another way in which China’s recent history recalls the Gilded Age– and its aftermath.
See also: “The 2024 Nobel Laureates Are Not Only Wrong About China, But Also About the West” from Yuen Yuen Ang, cited above.
Apposite: “The Surprising Resilience of Globalization: An Examination of Claims of Economic Fragmentation” by Brad Setser.
###
As we ponder parallels (lest we wonder if progress accrues during these developmental periods), we might recall that it was on this date in 1904 that Harvey Hubbell received a patent for an invention that changed life in the U.S. and beyond.
In 1888, at the age of 31, Hubbell had quit his job as a manager of a manufacturing company and founded Hubbell Incorporated in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a company which is still in business today, still headquartered near Bridgeport. Hubbell began manufacturing consumer products and, by necessity, inventing manufacturing equipment for his factory. Some of the equipment he designed included automatic tapping machines and progressive dies for blanking and stamping. One of his most important industrial inventions, still in use today, is the thread rolling machine. He quickly began selling his newly devised manufacturing equipment alongside his commercial products.
Hubbell received at least 45 patents, most of which were for electric products. For example, he patented the pull-chain electrical light socket in 1896. But his most famous– and impactful patent was the one he received on this date: the U.S. electrical power plug, which allowed the adoption in the U.S. of convenient, portable electrical devices (which Great Britain had enjoyed since the early 1880s). In 1916, Hubbell was also granted a patent for a three-bladed power plug, including a ground prong.
“Wealth does not consist in money or in gold and silver, but in what money purchases”*…
For millennia, simple forms of record-keeping have been used as ways to keep track of debt, to substitute for the contemporaneous conveyance of specie, or to accommodate the future settlement and netting of debts. In England, tally sticks were regularly used. From Paolo Zannoni, an excerpt from his book, Money and Promises, via Richard Vague and his invaluable Delancey Place…
A tally is usually a stick, or a bone, or a piece of ivory — some kind of artefact — that is used to record information. Palaeolithic tallies include the Lembombo bone, found in the Lembombo Mountains in southern Africa, reported to date from around 44,000 BC; the Ishango bone, which consists of the fibula of a baboon, from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the former Belgian Congo), thought to be 20,000 years old; and the so-called Wolf bone, discovered in Czechoslovakia during excavations at Vestonice, Moravia, in the 1930s, and estimated to be around 30,000 years old. Marked with notches and symbols, these tallies are ancient recording devices, means of data storage and communication. Not merely artefacts, they are important historical documents.
In England, from around the twelfth century, and for over 600 years, tallies became important financial instruments, a key part of public finance and an answer to a perennial problem for money-lenders, merchants and those involved in commerce and trade: how to both facilitate and record the exchange of goods, services and commodities. Reading these English tallies, understanding their history and their changing use, provides us with an understanding not only of the nature of individual financial transactions during the late medieval and early modern period, but also of the development of banking practices in England and its relationship to the English state.
Usually made of willow or hazelwood, tallies were used to record the key information of a financial exchange. The name of the parties involved, the specific trade and the date were written on each side of a stick. Notches of different sizes — which stood for pounds, shillings, and pence — were also cut on both sides. Then the stick was split in two along its length, creating a unique jagged edge; only those two pieces could ever fit perfectly together again. When someone presented one side as proof of a transaction, the parties could check for the right fit.
The potential uses for such a simple tool are obvious.
To begin with: an example of the early use of tallies as a record of debt repayment. John D’Abernon was the Sheriff of Surrey. His portrait in brass, in Stoke D’Abernon Church, Cobham, shows him as a knight in full armour, wielding a broadsword.
When he died, D’Abernon left his title, possessions and debts to his son, also named John. In 1293, we know that John D’Abernon gave two pounds and ten shillings to the Exchequer to pay a fine on behalf of his father. How do we know? Because at the time of payment, the official tally cutter made a series of notches on a stick: two cuts for the two pounds and one smaller notch for the ten shillings. The stick was then split, with the longer end going to John, and the shorter end staying with the Exchequer. The following words were inscribed on both sides: ‘From John D’Abernon for his father’s fine’ and ‘XXI year of the King Edward’.
John could thus prove to anyone that he had paid the fine of his father — simple and convenient.
Tallies also enabled the functioning of the tax system in medieval England, which was a rather more complex affair. The process took months to complete. It worked roughly like this. Tax receivers collected
revenues from the King’s subjects at Easter. They then passed them on to the Exchequer, which completed an audit in late September or early October. At the time, the Exchequer had two branches: the Lower and the Higher. The Lower Exchequer received and disbursed the revenues. The Higher Exchequer audited the process. They used tallies to track who had paid whom. As soon as the Lower Exchequer received the revenues, the tally cutter recorded the payment on the tally and split the stick. The tax receiver — the debtor — got the longer part, called the ‘stock’. The Exchequer — the creditor — kept the short end of the stick, called the ‘foil’. And once a year, at Michaelmas, the Higher Exchequer audited the whole process by matching stocks and foils. The stock was the proof that the collector had not merely pocketed the tax revenues.Over time, both the use and appearance of the tallies began to change: in the early years, tallies were 3 to 5 inches long; later, they grew to be 1 to 2 feet long, and sometimes much longer. More money meant more notches; more notches, in turn, required longer sticks. One of the last issues of tallies made by the English Exchequer was in 1729, for £50,000: the tally is a whopping 8 feet, 5 inches long, visible proof of the growth of public spending, taxation and inflation.
As the appearance of the tallies changed, so too did their uses. Inside the Exchequer, they served as receipts for money paid by taxpayers. Outside the Exchequer, they began to be put to entirely different purposes.
The business of the Exchequer simply could not work without the tally sticks. They were essential for auditing and controlling public finances, which obviously made them excellent collateral for a loan.
The tally was not a mere generic promise to pay, but a strong, unique claim on the proceeds of the Exchequer’s revenue stream. It identified the cashflow and the individual in charge of paying; the creditor gave the stock to the indicated tax receiver to get coins from a specific revenue stream, and a lender was sure to get his coins sooner or later. The humble English tally stick was therefore ripe to become a veritable public debt security, not merely a receipt. They functioned just like paper public debt securities, except instead of being written on paper, the transactions were instantiated and inscribed on sticks.
To take an early example: Richard de la Pole was a merchant who traded wool, wine and corn with France and central Europe in the early 1300s. He had a reputation for using debts aggressively to grow his business, which appealed to King Edward III and his advisors, who thought they might be able to make use of his skills. So, they appointed him Royal Butler. The job of butler was to supply all sorts of goods — food, wine and arms — to the royal household and to the army. We know that in 1328 Richard bought some wine from the French. As a good businessman, as Royal Butler, did he pay for the wine in coins? He did not. Rather, in order to pay the bill, the Lower Exchequer cut eight tallies, which were addressed to the collectors of taxes for West Riding in Yorkshire, listing the tax revenues earmarked to settle the debt. The Lower Exchequer gave the foils — one half of all the eight tallies — to Richard, who handed them to the merchants who sold him the wine. The merchants then exchanged the tallies with coins from the taxes paid in West Riding, and finally, a few months later, the Higher Exchequer called upon the tax receivers to account for the shortfall of cash, whereupon they presented the eight foils, which had been first given to Richard, as proof of the payments made.
To be clear: unlike coins, tallies did not actually settle debt. By accepting a foil, a vendor was effectively agreeing to a delayed payment from the Exchequer; the tally was a kind of guarantee that they would get coins. For the state, meanwhile, the tally was a convenient way to borrow from its suppliers, or a form of what we would now call vendor financing — the citizens and merchants who sold goods and services for tallies were effectively financing the state, in much the same way as those who lent actual coins to the Exchequer…
How record-keeping became finance: “Tally Sticks for Money,” via @delanceyplace.
Having looked back, we’d do well to heed Jack Weatherford‘s admonition (in his 1997 book The History of Money):
As money grows in importance, a new struggle is beginning for the control of it in the coming century. We are likely to see a prolonged era of competition during which many kinds of money will appear, proliferate, and disappear in rapidly crashing waves. In the quest to control the new money, many contenders are struggling to become the primary money institution of the new era…
* Adam Smith
###
As we contemplate currency, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that William Seward Burroughs of St. Louis, Missouri, received patents on four adding machine applications (No. 388,116-388,119), the first U.S. patents for a “Calculating-Machine” that the inventor would continue to improve and successfully market– largely to businesses and financial institutions. The American Arithmometer Corporation of St. Louis, later renamed The Burroughs Corporation, became– with IBM, Sperry, NCR, Honeywell, and others– a major force in the development of computers. Burroughs also gifted the world his grandson, Beat icon William S. Burroughs.
“Some dreams matter. Most don’t. Often it can be hard to know which might be which.”*…
… So it is with trends and the drivers of fundamental change. One of the canniest spotters of emerging dynamics, Matt Klein, wrestles with some raw material…
I’ve always wanted to play with “conference talk tracks” as a data source, and finally found a moment to do a little analysis.
I took all of the 2025 submitted (not yet accepted) talk titles for SXSW’s “2050” & “Culture” tracks, to identify what patterns exist. I did this via Perplexity AI Pro, an advanced prompt, and detailed profile context.
Note: I don’t necessarily think these talk patterns are “cultural trends,” (although we can debate this). Rather, I see these submitted talk patterns as a pulse on what an industry is finding provocative, discussion-worthy and worth peacocking as thought leadership. That’s a different, valuable sort of insight.
I was particularly interested in surfacing not just the largest common denominators of talks (ex. AI, psychedelics, video games), but instead more specific, smaller and unexpected themes.
What makes SXSW unique (and this data worth analyzing) is that these talk submissions are crowdsourced or “bottoms-up” via industry leaders vs. (biased) invited, brand-focused, or sponsored talks, which many other conferences prioritize. Therefore, I find these SXSW-submissions quite organic and a valuable “pulse” on executive, senior leader, and public thinkers’ minds.
With that, 10 themes from hundreds of talk submissions…
01. Commodification of Authenticity
Can authenticity exist online, let alone from a business? Or is “authenticity” a paradox? This cluster explores how the pursuit of genuine experiences and identities is being packaged, sold, and (likely) diluted in the process, raising questions around the nature of authenticity in a hyper-commercial world.
Ex:
- “Authenticity: The New Social Currency for Brands”
- “Honor Your Root: Building Authentic Brands that Connect”
- “Authenticity + Impact: Native Voices in Film, Food & Beyond”
The other nine at: “10 Patterns from 400+ SXSW ’25 Talk Submissions,” from @KleinKleinKlein.
* Dean Koontz, Saint Odd
###
As we sift for significance, we might send lasting birthday greetings to Hazel Bishop; she was born on this date in 1906. An aspiring doctor, she was forced to drop out of medical school during the Great depression, and instead put her undergraduate degree in chemistry to work. As a senior organic chemist with Standard Oil during World War II, she discovered the cause of deposits affecting superchargers of aircraft engines. Later, in 1949, after a long series of home experiments building on that earlier discovery, in a kitchen fitted out as a laboratory, she perfected a “kiss-proof” “No-Smear Lipstick” that stayed on the lips longer than any other product then available, and began its manufacture. Marketed as the lipstick that “stays on you not on him,” it changed the cosmetic industry, spurring a raft on imitators.
You must be logged in to post a comment.