Bionic Duckweed: making the future the enemy of the present

This is a short post to try and pin down a tricksy phenomenon you see from time to time in debates on technology and innovation, but which doesn’t have a good name. In homage to Roger Ford, a legendary commentator on railways, I suggest we call it bionic duckweed.

Pretty much everyone agrees that some new technologies are good, some new technologies are mediocre, and some are downright bad. Everyone also agrees that when people are evaluating technologies, they often fall prey to certain biases.

One type of bias is technophobia, the irrational or self-interested fear of new things. It’s what the founders of The Economist called, with wonderful Victorian magniloquence, “an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress”. The flipside to technophobia is that sometimes the future is overhyped — technomania, if you like. Critiques include David Edgerton’s Shock of the Old or Rachel Coldicutt’s Just Enough Internet; it’s The Maintainers; it’s the “Responsible Innovation” movement.

Different people will disagree on whether technophobia or technomania is the bigger problem, and somewhat oddly both sides see themselves as an embattled minority. But almost everyone agrees that both types of errors exist.

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