Last week, a few dozen scholars assembled at Stevens for “The Maintainers, ”a three-day conference on our modern obsession with innovation. Here is a description:
“Many groups and individuals today celebrate ‘innovation.’ The notion is influential not only in engineering and business, but also in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. For example, ‘innovation’ has become a staple of analysis in popular histories–such as Walter Isaacson’s recent book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. This conference takes a different approach, one whose conceptual starting point was a playful proposal for a counter-volume to Isaacson’s that could be titled The Maintainers: How a Group of Bureaucrats, Standards Engineers, and Introverts Made Technologies That Kind of Work Most of the Time.”
The organizers of the conference were Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell, professors of science and technology studies here at Stevens. They spelled out their views on innovation at greater length in an edgy manifesto, “Hail the Maintainers.” The sub-title notes: “Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more.”
Innovation has been linked to inequality and other ills, Vinsel and Russell point out. They cite the finding of historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan (who spoke at the conference) that washing machines and vacuum cleaners, “which promised to save labor, literally created more work for mother as cleanliness standards rose, leaving women perpetually unable to keep up.”
They continue: “Focusing on infrastructure or on old, existing things rather than novel ones reminds us of the absolute centrality of the work that goes into keeping the entire world going. Despite recurring fantasies about the end of work or the automation of everything, the central fact of our industrial civilization is labor, and most of this work falls far outside the realm of innovation.”
Vinsel and Russell conclude: “Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility. Innovation-speak worships at the altar of change, but it rarely asks who benefits, to what end?”
Excellent questions. I’m especially concerned about two kinds of innovation that arguably do more harm than good. The first involves medical technologies such as magnetic-resonance imaging and mammograms, which have boosted the costs but not the quality of health care in the U.S.
Then there is innovation in weapons, such as armed drones and “targeting killing” technologies. As Yale bioethicist Wendell Wallach (a recent speaker at Stevens) warns in his book A Dangerous Master: How to Keep Technology from Slipping Beyond Our Control, the U.S. is “the world’s leading driver of an accelerating and ever-escalating arms race.”
I applaud Vinsel and Russell for drawing attention to a topic with profound political, economic, moral and philosophical implications. In addition to organizing the meeting, they gave great talks, as did several other Stevens folks: nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein (who also designed the meeting’s poster and t-shirts); art and technology professor Nicholas O’Brien; and Hugh Lester, a fellow of the Center for Complex Systems and Enterprises.
May these and other scholars keep challenging our veneration of innovation.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
