Innovation is a distraction

The headline is of course a bit of a provocation. Not all Innovation is a distraction, there are many areas in which meaningful work happens any day to generate some form of relevant new product or process or technology.

But there are also so many areas in our lives, so many problems that affect us individually or collectively where Innovation is a distraction from actually solving them.

Take the climate crisis that does absolutely affect us all and will affect us all even more in the future (unless you are one of the billionaires who are one of the main causes of it). We hear a lot about how we need to innovate to address climate related issues, build new somethings and …

Let me stop you right there. That is bullshit.

We do absolutely know what we need to to to fight the climate crisis: Reduce carbon emissions radically. Which we have known for decades (I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde). We know that we need to stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating as much meat, invest in cleaner energy sources and insulate houses, etc. We know.

But it’s inconvenient. The solutions we know, we have researched, we have tested, are annoying. They force us to change our lives, force us to rethink our social and economic structures (Oh who would have thought: An economic system based on limitless growth and consumption would lead to bad outcomes. Let’s start a research project!). And who wants to do all that?

The demand for more Innovation (and sometimes even the request for more research) has become a way to legitimize not doing anything. A way to say “the unpleasant solutions we have are not perfect but in the future there might be a magic solution that doesn’t bother us and everyone gets a fucking unicorn”.

Nuclear fusion has had a bit of a narrative renaissance: With AI bros trying to boil our planet they need more power and because admitting that this will lead to more carbon emissions it’s great to claim that fusion will totally solve that in a clean and abundant way. It’s just that this clean working fusion doesn’t exist. Don’t get me wrong: There is one meaningfully useful kind of fusion that we can harness to generate energy and it is happening remotely on the sun. But fusion power plants? They do not exist. And arguing that we should invest a whole lot into developing them because they would be amazing to have stops us from doing the required work.

I’m not against someone coming up with clean nuclear fusion. Be my guest. But we do not have that yet and the climate crisis is raging. We need to harness solar, wind, geothermal and other renewables to change our energy production and we need to stop doing certain things that are a waste of energy. Reduce consumption and change production of energy. And if while we are doing that you find an even better method of energy production in a fusion reactor or fucking Narnia, cool.

But talking about nonexisting things as if they existed is not just a waste of time and money and brainpower. It is increasingly harmful. My talk on Empty Innovation at last year’s re:publica talked about we get sold a lot of stuff as innovation that’s nothing and how that is a method for powerful people to stay in power, to not change the system or have it changed.

I think this aspect is slightly different. Because this one also is us all buying in: We are so happy to “do more research” or “bring forward innovation” if it means that we can just keep doing what we’ve always done. If it means that we don’t need to change.

Innovation often is the promise that the things that affect us, that might destroy us, will magically not affect us. If we just believe enough. Calling it juvenile would be unfair to teens who do go out into the cold to demonstrate, who do reduce their consumption. It’s ignorant. And it will get many people killed. Unless we stop being distracted by the promises of shiny things and get our heads in the game.

I am making up a number now but my gut feeling is that we need 0 innovation to tackle at least 90% of the problems that challenge our societies, us as individuals and humankind as a whole. We just need to grow up and start doing the actual work. The German writer Bertolt Brecht called it “die Mühen der Ebenen” (loosely translated as “the troubles of the plains”): We are no longer climbing up the hill to reach higher and higher grounds – strenuous activities made possible by the hope of wonder and enlightenment – we have to start trudging through the plains in the hope of reaching our future.

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