US innovation is dying
But AI, you say…
This is not an AI bashing post, and I don’t want to take away from the real work being done on the next generation of AI technologies, even if I do think it foolhardy to try to create intelligence when we understand so little of our own. But, any hope of it being real innovation is already and will increasingly be dashed by its applications. The promise and excitement of possibilities will crystallize into something far more disappointing for most people. Most people don’t want AI, so it’s certainly not being created to improve our quality of life. In fact, the current iteration objectively sucks at what it does, and is a step backward in whatever we use it for, so why are we using it?
Like many of the technologies of the 21st century, AI is not making anyone’s life better because that is not the goal. Quick transfer of other people’s money that parasites can take a large percentage of is the goal. Period.
That, in a nutshell, is why American innovation is dying. We innovate the process of siphoning wealth and only the process of siphoning wealth. The products themselves and the users/consumers are just components in that system. You see, we don’t have many more good ideas. Look at the movies and shows you watch or see advertised. Remakes of remakes and reboots of remakes. Even “new” entertainment is just the same old story with different packaging.
That system for siphoning becomes ever more sophisticated with improvements in 3 key techniques intended to remove free market effects of supply and demand:
- Creating dependency and addiction
- Covertly removing choice
- Leasing back what you already had
Two supporting points for the death of American Innovation
#1 — Coke Oreos
Lots of probably well paid people worked to give us a disgusting sounding thing that nobody wants: Oreo flavored Coke and Coke flavored Oreos. Instead of creating new things, we used brain power and other resources in an attempt to rehash the brand recognition into fake innovation. Smart, I guess. It’s hard to grow a commoditized product like soda or sandwich cookies, but growth targets don’t give a damn about that plight. So the fast money comes from combining brand recognition, then telling some food scientists to not make it taste too bad. Fast money, is 100% what America is. In order for CEO income to increase, new tales of fast money must be spun every quarter for analysts and institutional investors. You might think that the people eating those abominations are the customers, but they’re not. Investors are.
And this is not an isolated event. Look at all the swag you can buy for Sour Patch Kids Oreos. Is there anything in this world less necessary than Sour Patch Kids Oreos sweat pants?
#2 Boston Consulting Group research, i.e. we’re not even trying to innovate, and we’re lying about it
In a recent Boston Consulting Group report on innovation, the results were pretty damning. 83% of companies in the study listed innovation as a top 3 priority, but only 3% were actively innovating. Not sure about you, but I would just call that lying. And why would that number be so low? Only 12% of executives said there was a link between their business strategy and innovation. In other words, we’re not even trying, but we say we are.
What is the job of a CEO anyway?
Many people think the job of a CEO is to run a business. Maybe it once was. The entirety of the job description of a modern CEO is to maximize investor short term value. Quarter to quarter, take as much value out of a company as possible and put it in stock price and dividends. Preferably stock price. That’s harder to tax. If some beneficial change must happen to a product for that to happen, so be it, but we’re certainly not trying for that. Storytelling trumps execution anyway, usually something about replacing people with machines, with the story du jour being AI. And if people can’t afford to buy stuff anymore, we’ll have the government print money to give them universal income so we can take that.
And this is not limited to public companies. The cadence is different, but with VC funded companies or private equity, the goal is the same. Not to produce value, but to extract it. As a company grows, so does its value extraction focus. Many of us get to see that play out on a daily basis, as product decisions are made for investors rather than customers, layoffs or hirings occur regardless of the impact to the products, but for whatever is the current popular story to tell investors. We have all been through the dance of pressure from execs to manufacture numbers that they can use to spin investors. We’ve also seen how quickly they switch to believing the falsifications they’ve just asked to be created. The blank looks on their faces the next quarter are really quite remarkable when they are reminded that we did grow 5% quarter over quarter, but on the real number, not the fake one. Makes for better lies if you believe them yourself, first, I guess.
The products themselves and the customers who use them are a very distant second, or third. When customer data is gathered, it is only to figure out how to spin it so that it justifies forging ahead with that story created for investors. The more monopolistic the sector, the less chance there is for this tactic to backfire, too, as customers have no real choice. They often don’t even know if they’re customers because the tangle of business models and partnerships is such that you don’t know who will be delivering the food you order or which dollar you spent went to which company. Investors are customers now. And soon (if not already), they will also suffer from lack of choice, but they won’t realize it because the shiny packaging looks different, just like “brands” on Amazon. But that’s not a CEO’s concern. Her concern is only that her securities have suitably shiny packaging, even if most of what is inside is inflated plastic packing material.
Manufacturing addiction and dependency
Well, how about the internet, you say, that’s an innovation. It wasn’t invented here. But we certainly hyped it and used it to create a fairly large recession. Or blockchain? Maybe, no one actually knows where it was invented. But we, again, used something that was supposed to secure financial transactions to steal money instead. And yes, US innovation developed social media. You’re welcome, world, for the huge leap forward for humanity. But any real American contribution to innovation behind these things (even AI), happened long before this century. We seem adept only at taking innovations and using them for the largest amount of harm possible to achieve shortest term gain. And we don’t need to stop at computation based technologies. The pharmaceutical industry is mostly made up of non-innovating companies that buy smaller companies to sell their products and thereby stop their innovation. And these products are not designed to help, but to create dependency. The food industry makes people sick so drug companies can profit from the drugs needed to keep them sick, but alive and able to pay. We have traded innovation for the manufacture of addiction and dependency. And don’t get me started on private health insurance as the best way to pay for healthcare. That will get a whole rant of its own. We literally lease people back their own lives in every conceivable way. Entertainment, socialization, staving off death, housing, transportation, knowledge, critical thought. All of it is owned by someone else and leased back. Even these words on this screen. I guess if we’ve innovated anything, it’s ingenious ways to get people to pay for what they already had.
Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil”. Name a company that has attained stronger morals, the larger it grew, I dare you. Google search results have become a list of things you can buy with a small blurb at the top written by AI. It may not be correct, often isn’t, and is most certainly missing crucial details — but you won’t know if it’s right or not unless you, you know, read the rest of the related results. Here’s your stupid summary of the stupid information you might have been looking for, now get back to looking at these ads and buy something. The DOJ just brought and won its first antitrust case since the 90s against Google. Think about that. For nearly 30 years, there has been no federal challenge to monopolistic practices in the US. 30 years ago, it was Microsoft (an antitrust suit whose teeth were removed by the Bush administration, btw), and now, Microsoft is the primary backer of the suit against Google. It was a tussle between schoolyard bullies rather than an honest attempt to curb monopolistic practices. Google paid Apple billions to be the default search engine for mobile devices (i.e., why you can Google from the Safari URL bar without setting a default search engine), thereby collecting mobile data from millions of people for a decade. To be honest, I think this is the least of their offenses, but it really pissed off Microsoft because now Google can use that data to train machines to pretend to be humans instead of them. The end result for consumers will not be a net positive because the objective for this data is the same, whichever titan ends up with it. Google already has all of our emails, documents, site analytics and a stranglehold on ads, along with who knows what else they got through the back door from Apple, but at least poor old Microsoft will finally get a break. I guess I can be happy that ads might become a little cheaper. That won’t make anything cheaper for me, but the dollars I spend will be split a little differently amongst the jackals.
What are we going to do? Not Google things? Bing things? The choice is still superficial. The irony is that the pace of life has been accelerated by these very tools, such that we couldn’t, like, go to the library and do research. Big tech has been shortening the context window over the past 20 years, and now takes advantage of the fact that we need information immediately, otherwise the context will have evaporated. It controls the paths through a chaotic glut of ads, social media and other “content” directly to what it wants you to see and buy. You can’t navigate the garbage created by big tech without big tech. Dependency achieved.
It’s better to be wrong fast than to be right slow, it seems.
The removal of choice
I’ve wanted to move away from the two big food delivery services, Uber Eats and Doordash because of missing items, getting other people’s orders and the impossibility of getting made whole through their fraudulant “support” practices, so I ordered directly on a restaurant’s website. They use ChowNow as an ordering platform. Postmates delivered my food. ChowNow partnered with Uber and Postmates to expand delivery. Uber bought Postmates a while back. So I thought, ok, I’ll try Toast. My food was delivered by DoorDash, which itself owns Caviar, Wolt, Just Eat and tons of other local delivery services. Grubhub has done the same sort of consolidation. How do I not use Uber Eats or DoorDash in my area? The only answer is to not get food delivered. My “choice” has been reduced to a choice of not using an entire industry segment because the tangle of partnerships coupled with lax regulation of monopolistic behavior has created misdirection in who I am actually giving my money to. Not to mention how much choice the restaurant owner had. These companies were going to offer delivery from their restaurant whether they wanted to participate or not.
This is everywhere. Back to Google, do you know how much of every dollar you spend goes to Goolge? Do you know how many of the dollars you spent ended up in the hands of Goldman Sachs or J.P. Morgan for brokering the monopolistic deals? Could you make an informed choice about which businesses and services you use? But sure, free market exists.
Lease back
You can’t buy a house. That statement is true for a good portion of the US. Housing in being purchased in huge chunks by private equity to be leased back to you. Net effect is, the control of the price of properties and rents are both coalescing in the hands of fewer and fewer owners. Same with healthcare providers, vets, and tons of other businesses. You already pay insurance companies rent to have healthcare at all, even if you think you don’t because your employer “pays” for it.
We rent crappy TV from streaming services. We rent life from drug companies after our rented healthcare service tells us to because big food ruined our health. We rent banking services, cars (and then we rent the ability for the car to function after we rent the physical vehicle, thanks Tesla). There are plots being hatched right now to charge you more for the few things you do actually own. We can already rent furniture and clothes, but have been for a long time anyway because the classic credit card grift has been charging hefty rents on everything we buy for some time.
We aren’t innovating because we’re so focused on figuring out how take more of what other people have.
Individual accountability to the rescue?
But individual accountability, you may argue, is the solution. Don’t get the food delivered. Don’t spend so much time on social media. Host your own email and documents on a private server. Use a VPN (well, you should, actually), Duck Duck Go and a Tor browser. Go to the local market instead of Amazon. No, the other one that Amazon doesn’t own. Don’t eat packaged foods. Don’t eat farm raised foods. Don’t spend 8 hours a day in front of a screen (but you’ll be laid off unless you spend at least 10 hours, so start reading solopreneur porn so your entire life can be a side hustle). Don’t use sunscreen, or do, I can’t remember. In effect, spend a colossal amount of your own resources in the form of money, time and mental energy to go counter to everything we’ve “innovated”, and you’ll be fine. That sounds like a great solution. In fact, it’s just the solution introduced by the food industry to absolve themselves of any accountability for ruining public health. And, once they said it, people magically got thinner and healthier, right? Doesn’t matter. If they didn’t, it’s their fault.
Academic innovation to the rescue?
Even academia is not safe from the condensed context window of being fast and wrong instead of slow and right, with the currency being to publish fast and often. Fast and often doesn’t work well for particularly difficult problems that take a long time to solve. Who has that kind of time? Just publish the one that says intermittent fasting is linked to heart disease, tweet it and call it a day. It’s true enough. We need the story to spin to donors to get money we won’t use to provide better or more broadly available education. We won’t need education. AI will do these dumb kids’ jobs anyway. We are in the business of maintaining a class system, after all.
Are you seeing a trend? The story is the path to wealth, not anything tangible. It’s not even a path to money, as wealth is just numbers in a database, as divorced from money as it is from gold. All three are made up methods for determining who controls who with minimal direct violence. Quite civilized indeed.
The slow-motion tumble down the other side of the curve
In the 21st century, we have used every ounce of innovation to march backwards in quality of life rather than forwards. Before that actually, but it’s been just about absolute this century. Jack Welch, yadda, yadda, Reagan, Super PACs, Clinton, yadda, yadda. We’ve been working on our own decline for some time, now. This 60 billion pound (or more these days, we’re pretty fat) beast is already tumbling down the other side of the curve. It’s a little late to try to salvage it now. But the stock market is growing and there are a surplus of indentured servitude jobs, so we’re doing great. That’s the economy, right? We’ve nailed it.
We could certainly come up with a theory that could be logically shown to change the decline, but we will never admit that it’s happening let alone execute that theory. We won’t be able to generate the amount of force required to reverse the momentum. The intricacy with which the decisions leading to decline have been woven into our society, and the power of those who control all of the resources and can’t see beyond a myopic zero sum game will prove too much. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I’m not sure it even qualifies as pessimism, now. Just the proclamations of Captain Obvious. Maybe the next innovative society will make some use of the theory, but that society has learned most if not all it will learn from us, and is already fully engaged in charging up the hill toward its own decline. After all, we happily ignored historical nuggets in our mad dash for the bottom. We’re at 14:30 of our 15 minutes.
Just for fun, what might slow the decline? Well, maybe getting rid of legalized bribery in the form of PACs that have ground our legislation to a halt. Or a court system with some — any — accountability. Or a legal system that didn’t allow buying your way out of accountability. Or a tax system that doesn’t have a bunch of holes punched in the top of the bucket. Or monopolistic protections that aren’t woefully out-matched and under-enforced, amounting to a small cost of doing business line item checked off next huge revenue (all the big fines are in the EU, not here). Educating the population (expensive and makes them harder to control, I know). Anything but a winner take all voting system so maybe there are more choices than government good, government bad. Maybe not taking the bait on sleight of hand issues like immigrants or abortion or guns or LGBTQ rights or any of the many other boogeymen elevated to misdirect attention would be helpful.
One wonders, if we looked at past societies, if we might not see this as a cycle that humanity repeats. Regardless of the political or economic systems at the starting point, if a society grows, it will concentrate resources in the hands of a few until it slowly chokes itself out. Or quickly, depending on the time scale you use. Maybe that is the only way humans evolve, and we just all get to see our little slice of the curve before history is rewritten so that most of the beneficial learnings are removed and fanciful streaming shows are made about it. But some nuggets must remain, after being rewritten by the victors, right?
A final plea
I have resisted posting a reductive, unhelpful, all too obvious rant like this for awhile, but my restraint broke down. I hope it can be proven wrong. I hope I am in an echo chamber. I hope it is nothing more than run of the mill mid-life discontent, as I gear up to become a grumpy old man. I hope someone will be offended and proclaim how innovation is thriving in their company or sector. I hope someone can fill in the blanks in history that tell a different story or otherwise dismantle the assertions. I think, most of all, I hope someone cares to do it. In that way, this might be a plea more than a rant.
