shock therapy for the hype hustle: how David Edgerton de-centered innovation in C20th history

Right from the first lines of his introduction to this important work of revisionist history, David Edgerton makes it clear where he stands:

“Much of what is written on the history of technology is for boys of all ages. This book is a history for grown-ups of all genders.”

First published before the financial crisis of 2008, The Shock of the Old significantly predates our current and well-earned reflex association of technological hype with a particular type of puerile machismo. However, the revelation that someone was doing “techlash” before anyone coined that term is only the first of many surprises that this book has to offer.

David Edgerton’s project here is not anti-technology—a position which would be absurd on its face, as will be discussed below—but it is savagely, gloriously anti-hype. As such, it is a vital corrective to the prevalence of futurological tech-boosterism, which—as the book points out—is of far greater vintage than its peddlers would prefer to admit, and has been wrong far more often than it has been right:

“In order to be at all convincing these arguments had to deny their own history, and they did so to a remarkable extent […] A history of how things were done in the past, and of the way past futurology has worked, will undermine most contemporary claims to novelty.” (xxvi-xxvii)

If it were within my power to lock every tech-focussed futurist, pundit and policymaker in a room that would only release them after reading one book in its entirety, this would be the book I’d make them read.

Of course, I lack any such power—and besides, it likely wouldn’t make much difference; few people were ever cured of their religion by martyrdom, after all. So the next best option would be to get everyone else to read it, which is my aim with this essay.

First, an admission: even setting aside the preface to the second edition of 2019, in which Edgerton enjoys a well-earned moment of “see, I told you so” (and from which all quotes in this essay are drawn), your tolerance for The Shock of the Old as a reading experience will correlate closely to your tolerance for a nigh-forensic level of pedantry.

In Edgerton’s defence, exactitude is just how historians should operate; indeed, he might not have felt the need to be so exhaustive in his efforts to correct the record, if only more cavalier writers of history had been less careless (or creative) with the facts. But the outcome is a book entirely structured around saying “actually, I think you’ll find you’re wrong about that”, and for all its bracingly pugilistic air, it doesn’t propose a new history to replace the one it knocks down—an absence which some colleagues and correspondents have found to be a significant flaw.

I think it worth conceding that shortcoming, as well as a rhetorical approach which, in combination with Edgerton’s somewhat lumpy prose style, is not exactly pitched so as to win over the undecided. But the absence of an alternative, hype-free history of technology in the C20th is actually an advantage, because (as Edgerton intended) it leaves that space clear for others to tell better stories less focussed on invention and innovation—which, not at all coincidentally, will almost always be stories less focussed on the wealthy West.

A similar benefit accrues, I would argue, to those of us who work with futures. By tearing down the time-worn tales of tech triumphalism, we are better placed to spot the re-runs, and thus to think more clearly about how we might actually live differently in times yet to come.

So, what exactly is Edgerton’s beef? To quote the man himself, “we have an astonishingly poor understanding of the material constitution of society, of the past and of the present”, thanks to an account of sociotechnical change that focusses on the ill-defined and largely exceptional category of “innovation”. To be clear, it’s not that innovation (or its precursor, invention) are bad, or don’t happen, or don’t matter. Rather, it’s that they’re only a small part of the overall story—a small part which is nonetheless made to stand for the whole thing:

“… the characteristic feature of our age has not been innovation but imitation. [This book] argues for imitation and variation as being a fundamentally important mode of change, one more important in most places, and for most people, than innovation.” (ix)

Innovation is usually taken to imply the displacement (or “disruption”, to use the more fashionable term) of incumbents by newcomers—and there are of course occasions when exactly that happens. But they are very rare, and almost never as universal as they are implied to be in accounts of “technological transition”: it can take a long time for inventions to garner their first reliable application, and longer still for them to diffuse out into other contexts of use.

(Early drafts of my PhD thesis featured a couple of dozen pages of ranting against disruptive succession narratives in the so-called “transitions” literature, as typified by the work of Frank Geels, which is regrettably still the dominant source of theories of sociotechnical change as used in policymaking circles. I dearly wish I’d known of Edgerton’s book at the time, as it would have saved me a lot of writing, and my poor supervisors a lot of reading.)

Outside of “smart home” showrooms and ad reels from Big Tech, the real landscape of what Edgerton refers to as “things-in-use” is never a collection of the very latest “solutions”, but rather a palimpsest of things, each of which—while perhaps somewhat improved in more recent years—may well have been available in its essential form for decades, or even centuries.

It is this account of sociotechnical change—an account which, even for the presumed audience of well-off Western types reading this essay, far more accurately explains the devices and products and services that your home, workplace and city actually contain—that Edgerton wants to bring forward:

“We […] need to move from accounts which stress supersession of the past to those which appreciate the importance of superimposition and cumulation.” (xii)

The tendency of the innovation imaginary to conceive of a society reimagined from the ground up through the deployment of some new device or system is totally reliant on the starting move of assuming a blank slate on which to build. That this is the foundational move of all utopian narrative forms is not at all incidental—though that’s a story for another essay. In the meantime, Edgerton wants us to remember that the new almost never supersedes (I.e. displaces) the old, but far more frequently works alongside it—if indeed it works at all.

In his preface to the second edition, Edgerton actually takes himself to task for having used the term “technology” throughout the book without qualification or caveat. He notes its origins in early C20th English as a label for an academic discipline devoted to the study of the use of things (as in e.g. “department of technology”), rather than for the things themselves, just as “sociology” denotes the study of society rather than denoting society itself. Numerous other authors, particularly in the field of Science & Technology Studies (STS) have pointed out technology’s root in the ancient Greek word techne, which is also the root of the word technique. In other words, until fairly recently (Edgerton suggests the immediate post-ww2 years in the US), “technology” meant people using things to do stuff, before slowly being reshaped into the notion of things that just do stuff on their own.

If people using things to do stuff sounds frustratingly all-encompassing, it’s nonetheless an improvement on the malleable vagueness of the term as currently used:

“Technology, like ‘science’, is a master concept of modernity with extraordinarily slippery meanings. One minute technology is the latest technical gizmo, and the next it is the very infrastructure of human existence.” (x)

Regular readers of this website (or any of my others) will recognise here something very close to my own reasons for trying wherever possible to avoid the use of “the T word”, or to use it only in scare quotes. That long habit—along with my role as a writer and lover of language—qualifies me to acknowledge, with great regret, what the reader has surely already surmised: we’re trying to bolt the door on an empty stable, and we’d probably have better luck coining new terms than stuffing the old ones back in their box.

(That said, I think it worth noting that this process of semantic evacuation is a commonplace not just of “technology” in general, but in particular of the phenomena to be found at its notional leading edge. It has long been understood, for instance, that the notion of “artificial intelligence” is very purposely both grandiose and meaningless: it is a suitcase word, which funders and investors might be encouraged to imagine contains whatever it is that they most dearly wish to obtain. And lest you think I’m giving an unfair and biased kicking to that particular field of endeavour, I would point out thatthe concept of the suitcase word was invented by none other than Marvin Minsky—though it took Rodney Brooks to turn it around on him and show it to be a crucial tool of the hype-man’s hustle.)

Edgerton’s way of tilting at this linguistic windmill is to talk instead about “things”, or “things-in-use”. This is admirably literal, and very much in keeping with the overall project of the book, which is to move from an innovation-centered account to a use-centered account (though notably not a user-focussed account, which is a shibboleth of “design thinking” that serves mostly to rebadge innovation for a slightly more sophisticated audience). But words, too, are things-in-use—and it’s all but impossible to reclaim them once they’ve escaped a specialist dictionary definition. We will have to content ourselves with intervening in the question of “technology” at the level not of words, but of the stories told with them.

As we get into the actual chapters of the book, the most useful material for the more general reader is (in my estimation) to be found near the front. The first chapter bears the heading Significance, and sets itself the task of unsettling those oh-so-authoritative lists of the “most significant” invention or innovation in any given period. Edgerton’s argument here is that there is no obvious measure of significance, nor even a universally accepted one; by asking questions and defining our terms, we will find ourselves able to overturn established assumptions.

Mentioned in passing here is a term which has had some currency in recent discourse, though it seems to have lost it again in the semantic churn: you may perhaps recall a period not too long ago when it was very much a la mode to talk of LLMs as a “general-purpose technology”, which is to put them on the same level of significance as, say, steam power and electricity. But periodisations of this type—along with breathless nonsenses about a fourth, fifth, or even sixth industrial revolution, to which academia has been particularly prone in recent times—are “innovation-centric in their chronology, implying that the impact of the technologies comes with innovation and early use” (3). If electricity represents a break point in history, when should its impact be presumed to have completely expressed? Are we not currently undergoing a step-change in the way we harness electricity, much more than a century after its initial roll-out? And given that data centers are famously hungry for electricity, should we therefore judge the supposed LLM revolution to be separate from the electricity revolution, or even from the more recent ICT revolution, or is it merely a continuation of one (or both) of them?

These are simple questions, but to answer them seriously is no simple matter. Significance is not simply a function of pervasiveness, Edgerton explains, and sometimes what seems to be the ultimate solution to a given problem will be dethroned by an improvement on a much older one: an example would be the displacement of the long-distance telecomms satellite with undersea fibre-optic cables. One might argue that services such as StarLink represent a gotcha to this aspect of the argument, but that is not the case at all: StarLink’s utility is precisely its ability to provide broadband coverage where, for whatever reason, the far more reliable, affordable and popular option of fibre is not available. As such, it is not an innovation so much as an iterative improvement on the well-established idea of satellite telecoms, and it is not superseding fibre so much as supplementing it.

The narrative of inevitable supersession, most often expressed as the claim that there is no alternative to the innovation in question, is what gives rise to dark mutterings about “resistance” to new technology; indeed, it’s the unspoken thesis underneath most mainstream discussion of “techlash”, and in particular the ongoing struggle of communities in the US and elsewhere against the building of new data centers. But as Edgerton points out, to talk of “resistance” is absurd, because it would be impossible for anyone to simply accept the entire barrage of new devices and services that they are presented with. What is labelled “resistance” is simply the process of selecting devices and/or services which meet the particular needs of any given circumstance. (Edgerton doesn’t put it this way, but I would note that there is a particularly piquant irony in hearing the most ardent of card-carrying capitalists getting angry at consumers exercising their right to choose in the marketplace.)

This chapter also addresses another well-known shibboleth of innovation discourse, namely the “spin-off” technology: the product or service that gets wheeled out to justify some earlier product or programme which, with hindsight, has come to look rather less impressive than it was first made out to be. Edgerton lists some classic (and spurious) examples from the space race, as well as the supposed benefits of civilian energy generation from the nuclear reactors that were built to provide fissile material for weapons—another old argument that has been dusted off in recent years, and is just as mendacious now as it was then. We are also reminded of Concorde, the supersonic airliner so costly to operate and maintain that the airlines refused to fly unless they could have the planes themselves for free. Edgerton closes the chapter by looking at the contraceptive pill—which actually helped to make other, earlier forms of contraception more respectable and widespread, and whose role in driving the so-called sexual revolution is not so clear-cut as claimed—and at various failed attempts at the eradication of malaria.

The breadth of the first chapter should go some way to demonstrating what Edgerton is trying to do—and, I hope, to explaining why I’m not going to summarise the whole book at the same level of detail! After the chapter on Significance, there follow chapters on Time (which looks broadly at the coexistence of very old technologies alongside the latest and most advanced examples), Production (the measurement of sociotechnical transition by recourse to spurious arguments about GDP and/or about domestic consumption of the latest devices), and Maintenance, the latter of which went some way to kick-starting a minor academic movement devoted to the study of how things are kept in service over long period of time.

For my money, these first four chapters represent the best value to the reader in a hurry. Further on, Nation speaks to the role of innovation in C20th narratives of national potency, while War and Killing are presumably self-explanatory (though their being treated separately might come as a surprise); finally, with Invention, Edgerton wraps things up with a look at the role of institutions (academic or otherwise) in sociotechnical change, and the use of R&D spend as a proxy for “inventiveness”.

There is a lot of detail in this book, for those who need it—and I’d argue that, if you work in futures and foresight, or in the “innovation ecosystem”, you really do need it. Those futurological paeans to innovation and novelty that Edgerton calls out at the start of the book are even more prevalent today, and they’re also as old as the hills: the innovation story is to Silicon Valley as the hero’s journey is to Hollywood, a comforting and reliable way to push our buttons and open our wallets. Learning how such stories work, and what shapes they tend to take, is the first step to being fooled by them less often.

In asking the questions that open up those simple stories, Edgerton is not only clearing the decks of the C20th for new, more truthful histories of things-in-use; he’s also providing us with the tools to tell better stories about times yet to come. Change is constant, and innovation is real—but it’s much less important than we’re given to think.

The homes and workplaces of the mid-C21st will surely contain some things that do not yet exist, but they will also contain many, many more things that are already old today. If your future contains nothing but novelty, you’re doing marketing, not foresight.