Blog: New isn’t always better

This is an automatic English translation of the Dutch original.

The other day I found something new in the Albert Heijn. Plastic cups. With ice cubes in them. It said 528 on the label. Ready-made frozen water, packaged, chilled, transported, and on sale for less than a euro.

This is a cracker of a product innovation. If there were an innovation prize with novelty and fat revenue as its only criteria, this ice-cube cup would stand a serious chance.

But is it progress? Freezing water was already something you could do at home. Practically for free. So what is new here is not the ice, but the business model. An entrepreneur spotted something people want. Put it in a package, arranged the production, logistics and marketing, and takes a margin. The profit goes to the manufacturer and the supermarket. The costs, energy, plastic, waste, and so on, are for all of us. Or for the generation after us.

Innovation is not always progress

Look, I was trained as an engineer at TU Delft. So I do love new, clever things. I have spent quite a lot of time in laboratories, because designing, tinkering and inventing is the most fun there is, as far as I am concerned.

So I am not anti-innovation. I am, however, against innovation simplism: the idea that new is automatically better, and that more technology automatically delivers a better society, so that all we have to do is speed that development up.

The only problem is that this idea of innovation simplism is deeply rooted in our culture. It is in funding schemes (come on, do deeptech!), in election manifestos (innovation is going to save our country!), and in the language of almost every policy document (new trend = new opportunities!). Innovation has become a goal instead of a means. And as soon as that happens, the thinking often stops too. No one asks any more: innovation for what? For whom, exactly?

Take, for example, all those daft AI plans being poured out over us. The National AI Delta Plan wants us to invest our pension funds and tax money in more computing power, more data centres, and preferably also to scrap annoying rules and rights, loosen dismissal law, and so on. The absurd tech-bro fever dream Europe2031 even sketches a scenario in which Europe falls apart if we do not invest en masse in chips, power plants and AI models.

Both documents do, by the way, contain legitimate concerns, because I too worry about our digital dependence on American and Chinese companies. But I disagree diametrically with the “solution” they put forward. Running harder in the same race. Yeah, right.

Because that narrative hides an assumption. That Europe is “falling behind” because of regulation, and that we therefore have to deregulate in order to be able to innovate. Sometimes I can barely stand that fallacy any more. Legal scholar Anu Bradford looked into it and calls it a textbook example of a false dichotomy. That Americans pour large sums into AI is not down to looser laws, but to bigger capital markets and a large market. Scrapping rules therefore does not make us more innovative. Mainly, it leaves us with fewer rights to protect ourselves.

What is more, a Europe that copies the American strategy, with more data centres, more energy use, and more concentration of power, has gained no sovereignty. All it changes is which small group will profit from the hype.

So always look critically at power

In fact, there is one question that ought to be central the moment another tech hype rears its head. Whether that is immersive, blockchain or AI: who wins, and who loses?

Who makes money from ice-cube cups? Not the person buying the ice. Who wins from deregulation? Not the person those rules were once devised for. Who wins from an AI race with no purpose? Precisely, the people selling the infrastructure.

And those people have deep pockets. The tech industry now spends 151 million euros a year on lobbying in Brussels, as calculated by Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl. Already a third more than two years ago. The largest tech companies sit at the table with the European leadership an average of three times a day. So the story that rules protecting us stand in the way of innovation does not come out of thin air. It is being whispered in our ears constantly.

Technology is never neutral. It is that simple. Technology distributes power. Sometimes citizens benefit. Think of the introduction of the printing press, or the open, free internet in its early years. But far more often it is those who already had power who benefit.

That does not happen by itself. It is a choice. Anyone who says technology cannot be governed gives that choice away a priori. Anyone who says every problem in our society can be solved with technology is trying to dodge the political questions bound up with those problems.

How it can be done instead

And yet I am optimistic and I remain hopeful, because justice always wins. Look at the undercurrent, as Jan Rotmans calls it. All sorts of things are happening there. Everywhere, people are working with technology and putting it to meaningful use. Look at public digital infrastructure, open AI models in the commons, energy cooperatives, and so on. Our Vrije Cloud could not exist without them. That is innovation too. It just does not rake in piles of money in investment rounds. Because the profit does not leak away to shareholders. But what it delivers is genuinely valuable to its users. That is what I call progress.

Incidentally, that undercurrent is increasingly starting to reach the mainstream. Late last year, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands together set up a European consortium for digital commons. They agreed to develop software together and to share standards freely and openly. It is from developments like these that I draw hope. Because they make a tipping point tangible. Namely the transition from developing and driving an alternative to institutionalising it.

With Post-X Society we want that kind of progress. And yes, we deploy innovation and technology to get it. But in such a way that it contributes to a fair future.

You can do that too, by asking yourself, with every new initiative, product, service, and above all with every delta plan, or really with every promise: who wins? Who loses? Who decides?

Ask those questions. At work, at the kitchen table, of your local council, of parliament, and also in the supermarket by that cup of ice cubes.

You do not measure progress by computing power or investment. Progress is a direction. And that direction is up to us together, not to the tech bros.

“Out of the way, out of the way, out of the way”, sang Herman van Veen, “we are in unbelievable haste.” That song is almost fifty years old, but do not let yourself be pushed aside.

Photo by Srattha Nualsate