Wicks to Lightbulbs: Why We Are Ripe for Our Next Technological Transformation

Portugal loves rock music and more specifically 1970s Classic Rock. Bars, clubs gyms put The Who on rotation. Uber drivers tune to “Best Rock FM”, a radio station devoted to The Beatles and Led Zeppelin. A popular vintage-themed barbershop, whose motto is “Only classic, no shit”, excels at the understated art of appreciation of Pink Floyd. There, I usually get a hot towel shave in the span of a full listen to “The Dark Side of the Moon”.

In the Post-War, Portugal was living under a regime of censorship and corporateness, with an economy dominated by few, and continuous surveillance. With the "Carnation Revolution" of 1974, a bloodless left-wing military coup installed the "Third Republic". The country started to open up politically, socially, and culturally to the Western world, which at the time was shedding the establishment’s skin and embracing a counterculture.

There are two prevailing explanations for why an entire culture couldn’t fall out of love with its myths of the past. The first is that some are just monogamous lovers of history: Portuguese, as well as Italians and generally Southern Europeans, encode old memories as successes. The second psycho-analytic account has to do with an irrational fear of progress, and the overlap between forward motion and failures. Recent history has exacerbated this sentiment.

If you come across the collection of economic and social graphs from the website “WTF Happened In 1971?”, it is hard not to conclude that something fundamental broke during that time. The charts seem to narrate a story of stalled science. Portugal, Italy, and vast portions of the West are capitulating to a collective nostalgia that yearns for some sort of ‘Golden Era’. Our perspective on time and the future is tied hand in glove with the evolution of scientific and technological progress.

There is a subconscious collective belief that the Golden Era was somewhere in the past, and it’s not to be found again. At the collective, psychological level, this is one of the fundamental barriers to progress. This condemns entire populations to live with nostalgia, refrain to adopt new technologies, and become hard skeptics of whatever progress brings. In a way, technology has the extraordinary potential to lift people from poverty, but also establish different paradigms of time conception.

The Western idea of progress revolves around the concept of motion. Mankind has advanced in the past, is advancing in the present, and is expected to progress in the future. The grounds of this belief range from mere individual caprice to the assumption of progress as an indisputable law of nature that nothing can resist.

The semantic perimeter of progress engulfs spiritual enlightenment as well as material dynamism. Ever since the Greeks, the most common idea of progress referred to an aesthetic advancement. The Greeks were used to identify the beautiful and the good. They excelled at marble life-like sculptures that glorified the male nude form. To them, beauty instills progress by correcting our sense of scale, proportion, and poise.

Throughout history, the idea of progress also referred to what early Christians called heaven: a state of spiritual exaltation and liberation from all physical torments. Mankind has generally lived with either a dim faith in some "far-off divine event to which the whole creation moves". And this movement has been assumed to be one of progress. This perspective of progress has always been used to characterize the hope of a future of individual freedom, equality, and justice.

Only in Western Civilization, though, did the idea of humanity improving itself established roots. Progress is a step-by-step motion until at some remote, indefinite time in the future a condition of near-perfection is achieved.

It’s safe to assume that the idea of progress is inseparable from modernity and it became possible only after Western thought had finally been able to throw the shackles of the Christian dogma. The Greeks were unable to shake off ideas of fate, degeneration from a Golden Age, cycles, limitations, and endemic pessimism. The Christians turned their minds entirely to the supernatural, believing that the things of this world are of no importance.

In his (hilarious) 2017 special, Louie CK argues that “the Christians won everything”. He then adds: “If you don’t believe me, let me ask you a question: what year is it, according to the entire human race? And why?”. In a way, he hit the nail on the head: Christianity is not a religion, but a social substrate of consciousness. It’s a culture and a system of values—a culture of relentless optimism.

Greeks believed the Golden Age belonged to the past. The Golden Age denotes a period of stability, harmony, and prosperity. Back then, people did not have to work to feed themselves. The Earth provided food in abundance. The Greek Golden Age is like a happy childhood: you are fed, clothed, and washed, and gaze into the eyes of your mother while safe and protected.

Like anything that goes on well for too long, the Golden Age can be unbelievably boring. Eventually, Christianity came up with an alternative, linear subdivision of time into the past (the capital sin), present (redemption), and future (salvation). The linear idea of time is seductive for science too. The Enlightenment buckets the past as ignorance, the presence as research, and the future as progress.

Even Marx, in his own way, was a fervent Christian. He views the past as social justice, the present as class conflict, and the future as social justice. In “The Future of an Illusion”, Freud writes that neurosis and trauma are the past, analysis is the present and healing is the future. This is the optimistic push of Christianity. Look forward!

To Greeks, however, death is a serious business. Socrates committed suicide when his cycle reached completion. Greeks envision pain as an integral part of life. They don’t “make lemonade” when life give them “lemons”. Instead, they “substine and abstine”, soldier through without much fanfare. No citrusy squeezing. Just passive acceptance.

Unlike them, Christians don’t really believe in death. Nietzsche believes that the Christian idea of time has been the stroke of genius that erased the Greek perspective. In Christianity, pain has a deep meaning, because by showing pain you close the tab with your guilt and sins while negotiating access to eternal life. Those who suffer find consolation in the fact that pain is valuable currency for a place in paradise.

But of all the enigmatic aspects of the idea of the future (the infinite number of possibilities, the charm of hope that contrasts reality, its difficult relationship with the truth) perhaps the most baffling one is this: it is not immediately clear why the future should be qualitatively better than the present, as well as a significant improvement from the past.

The Greek answer to this dilemma isn’t particularly mysterious, as they believed in a cyclical vision of time, not a linear one. They nurtured the idea that history repeats itself and looked up to senior citizens’ experience as a well of knowledge for the youths. For them, time progresses, like seasons, from repeated cycles.

Christians instead interpret the flow of time as one-way, not recurrent. In the modern West, youths are gatekeepers of relevant knowledge (think about explaining Bitcoin to your grandpa), and not seniors. And rightly so, you might argue. Because they are in the best moment of their life. Not because invigorated by athletic prowess, but by a creative, intuitive spark.

In “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman separates the youth’s intuitive push (“System 1”) from a slower, more deliberative assessment (“System 2”). I am not sure that account can be tested, but it was System 1 that generated the current technological revolution and, with that, the metamorphosis of the concept of time.

Galileo was the first one to theorize the idea of measurable time with the pendulum at the age of 20. Alexander the Great conquered most of the known world before turning 33. Beethoven was 38 when he composed the Fifth. Einstein introduced E = mc² when only 24. You can enlist the Silicon Valley college drop-outs founders here too, if you wish. All embraced their youth’s power of intuition as a lowercase act of magic to measure, conquer and transform the reality around them.

With Galileo, Christianity and scientific progress shake hands on the concept of linear time, and optimism for the future. In the words of Nietzsche, “God is dead” now. Christianity has passed the baton to science and technology to inject optimism into the idea of the future. Without technological progress, there’s no optimism for the future.

Peter Thiel is convinced that meaningful technological revolutions stopped a good half a century ago. His view is not unique. There are plenty of studies on the velocity of progress (or lack thereof) that highlight a sort of scientific and technological plateau as a defining feature of the 21st century.

Imagine aliens observing the Earth at a great remove. Our artistic, religious, and aesthetic achievements are unlikely to carry any meaning. But the Neolithic revolution would make sense to them. It reshaped landscapes, increased the human population, and leveraged non-human energy sources. It was the first step in knitting all of humanity into a common complex system.

But the Neolithic Revolution took centuries to invent and millennia to spread.

The technical innovations that went to market in the late 19th century were different. They brought about changes equally epochal—but the innovations behind them were invented in the course of one human lifespan. For the first time, our imaginary observers in orbit would see the dark side of Earth twinkle with light.

Because of the technical advances that occurred in the late 1800s, the modes of human travel, the mediums of human communication, the methods by which humans heated, formed, and shaped their environment, and the source of the energy flow that powered all these wonders all changed. This is, by and large, the same civilization we still live in today.

The list of technical inventions that made this new world possible is fairly small: steam turbines, internal combustion engines, electric motors, incandescent light, electromagnetic waves, photographic film, aluminum smelting, steel, reinforced concrete, nitroglycerin, and synthesized ammonia. Most of this stuff saw commercial applications before the First World War.

The transition from an animal-powered, low-mass civilization to an electrified, mechanical, high-mass civilization allowed our species to replace villages of mud with cities of steel. This transition accounts for the boom years of American, European, and Japanese expansion in the 20th century, as well as the growth of China in the 21st.

Interestingly, Thiel seems to locate the turning point with the rise of the anti-nuclear movement and the flowering of the counterculture — an era of material rejection and experiential embracement. Thiel defines Western civilization by its history of discovery, exploration, and progress. If Western culture has turned away from the material, it has truly turned its back on innovation.

Our relationship with technological innovation runs deeper than we think. It encompasses our view of time and our optimism toward the future. It creates a collective sense of motion and an invisible layer that glues us together.

Technology historian Carlota Perez argues that all the five major technological transformations our civilization exhibit the same cyclical pattern. The interplay between financial and production capital generates financial bubbles, which then lead to uneven resource distribution, social unrest, and a sense of urgency for the next breakthrough.

Silicon Valley dreams of an algorithmic revolution. But all information-age technologies participate in the coordinating, organizing, calibrating, centralizing, and decentralizing of existing modes of production. This will not be sufficient. A future boom will not come from improvements in organization and information. Growth is the physical transformation of an entire society. Mud to concrete. Wood to steel. Sweat to dynamos. Shovels to dynamite. Wicks to lightbulbs. Carts to cars to airplanes.

The Internet, telecommunications, and the revolutionary free flow of information started in the 1970s. Since then, very little has been built. If it’s true that great technological transformations follow a forty-year cyclical scheme, we are well ripe for our next transformation.