9 February 2022. Stuff | Technology
Your stuff and where it comes from. The five levels of technology hype.
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1: Your stuff and where it comes from
I was listening to a podcast conversation with the writer Ruth Ozecki at the weekend that referenced Marie Kondo’s de-cluttering work, but in the context of having a greater reverence for things. (Ozecki is also a Buddhist priest). It brought to mind an exercise that’s designed to help you to think about where our things are made and the relationship that we have with them.
Sadly I’m not able to credit it properly—it was done, I recall, by two fellow students on a course at Dartington College—so Birte and Pauline, who shared their script with me afterwards, thank you for this.
(Julius Hubner, Portrait of Pauline, 1829. Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin.)
Speaker A
Close your eyes.
Become aware of your body.
Become aware of the clothes you are wearing.
Of your jewellery – watch, earrings, necklace, wristband.
Of your shoes.
Speaker B
Open your eyes.
Pick one item.
Examine the item.
Did you see something you hadn’t noticed before?
What function does this item fulfil for you?
Does it represent something other than the function?
What memories do you associate with the item?
Speaker A
We will now trace this item back.
At some point you will probably have to use your imagination.
Speaker B
Where did you buy your item?
Did you take certain values into account?
Was is it produced in the city or the country where you bought it?
If not, where was the item made?
Think of the transport that was needed to get it from where it was made to where you bought it.
Speaker A
Think of the factory or the workshop where the item was assembled.
What kinds of machines were used?
What were the conditions like for the workers who assembled your item?
Was there any waste in the production process?
How about water, air, and soil pollution?
Speaker B
Think back further.
What materials is your item made of?
Cotton? Rubber? Synthetics? Leather? Metal? Wood?
Did the materials come from the same country where your item was assembled?
Speaker A
Think of the individual resources.
What were the conditions of the workers producing the materials?
What machines were needed?
How much water, fertiliser, pesticide, was needed?
Did the materials have to be processed or dyed from raw to final material?
Speaker B
Finally, think of the designers of the product.
Where are they located?
Under what conditions do they work?
What are their values?
Speaker A
Now, think of the journey of your item as a whole.
What do you feel?
Speaker B
Next, think of producing this item yourself, in your backyard.
What would you need? What skills tools and or resources?
What conditions would you want for yourself?
What safety measures would you put in place?
Speaker A
Would it feel different if you made the item yourself?
Or if you knew the person who had made it?
Or if your item didn’t have to travel so far before it reached you?
What do you value in the things that you have?
Think of your three or four most important values. And then write them down.
(And in a moment, we’ll share these with everyone).
2: The five levels of technology hype
Everyone’s heard of Gartner’s technology hype cycle, which—despite its familiarity—has very little relationship with actual technology diffusion. But I rather liked this five-point technology hype scale, developed by the German designer Johannes Klingebiel. He’s been working on a project about hype, which he describes like this:
Hype is an interesting thing. It‘s rightfully often spurred as misleading bullshit or ignorant boosterism but it also has its uses. In short: when it comes to creating a new technology you need to sell a vision to attract the resources you need (people, investment, etc.). Hype can also act as glue. At its best, it can create a shared vision pulling the actors in the same direction and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Hype, he says, “moves on a scale from overpromising to overselling, and even irrational exuberance.”
And, of course, the technology industry is riddled with hype:
Today‘s tech industry is obsessed with the big futures. The metaverses, the next internets — you name it. Hype is everywhere, oozing out of the headlines of news articles, growing like mold all over my LinkedIn feed, and blinking at me whenever I open my inbox.
But not all hype is the same. Hence his five point scale.
Level One is basic marketing hype; Level Two is basic financial investment hype; Level Three is utopian futures hype; Level Four is magical thinking—‘silver bullets’, although he doesn’t use the phrase, which are going to solve problems in a miraculous way; and Level Five is ‘othering’ where the technology becomes a group identity for its adopters. His full diagram is below.
Passing by Level One, which is broadly still related to actual performance, Level Two is where overclaiming starts. Tesla, for example:
A good example might be Tesla selling their driving assistance systems as “full self-driving”.
At Level Three, the claims are still grounded in the actual technology, but timescales can be elastic. The technology may still be years away from widescale deployment, if ever:
One example here might be carbon capture technology, though it already exists in the form of prototypes, it‘s still in its infancy. Thus boosters of the technology will emphasize the future potential of its present capabilities to attract further investment and political support.
At Level Four, the claims made for the technology are becoming increasingly detached from its performance:
The problems it is expected to solve simply by existing are growing in number and scale while criticism gets ignored as minor hurdles, to be overcome soon... A particularly good example here might be the blockchain industry, which has been overselling the capabilities of the technology for years — pitching it as a solution to every imaginable societal problem and challenge.
He describes Level Five, ‘othering’, as the “most aggressive and annoying form of hype”. The time of arrival is no longer important:
Claims are exclusively utopian, and critics are painted as defenders of the old, to be left behind... (An) example might also be particularly vocal groups of boosters at the height of the AI hype a couple of years ago. Here the claims were that critics simply didn’t “understand exponential growth”.
(Source: Johannes Klingebiel)
You can follow his overall hype project at his newsletter, here.
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