Technological Conservatism

What Siracusa describes as Technological Conservatism is probably more of a status-quo preference. I think this is because there are two opposing forces are work.<p>1. Innovation is often little more than a sequence of small incremental improvements. Improvements that -- when viewed individually -- don't really seem to matter much but when they accumulate you get a completely superior product.<p>2. Keeping up to date on the newest developments can be a chore. Things change, but for no apparent reason. APIs get refactored and break. Your favorite buttons in your favorite OS get removed. What was idomatic code last year is considered crummy today. This can be frustrating, because you just want to get your work done and not worry about all this stuff on the margins. Every hour you spend reading release notes and upgrading to the newest version of jQuery, Node or Go is time that would otherwise go into your product. And yet, by standing still you go backwards.<p>So this is where the comparison to politics breaks down a bit. In the short term being "conservative" and just sticking to whatever tools you know is optimal. It will get your product out the door the quickest and it can still be high quality and mostly bug free. From a short term business perspective it's often the right choice. In the medium term you run into bugs of frameworks that have already been fixed 6 months ago and the quality of your code base is slowly going to degrade as hacks pile on top of one another. The more out of date your technology stack is the more you lose out on great libraries and best practices. So for t → ∞ sticking to whatever you know today is clearly a poor strategy.

We are so far gone, it is depressing: <a href="http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg" rel="nofollow">http://youtu.be/KbAPtGYiRvg</a><p>Never mind opening the discourse on broader implications and consequences of technology to the 'real' world.<p>Article gives first world problem examples of interfaces, hardware performance, iphone 5 heft, WebKit growth (Blink Blink), and Netflix discs.<p>To be sure, many will be squealing like giddy schoolgirls when iOS7 UI gets deskeuomorphed, but how does any of this contribute to, uh, say... uh energy discovery, cancer cures, controlling world population, feeding the masses, stabilizing peace, et al<p>Trapped in a bubble, a narrow prison of perspective, so far gone, this article is what amounts for technological criticism.<p>Siracusa, lemme know when the world moves away from qwerty or get out of the way.

The author seems to basically be describing a lack of vision as "technological conservatism". What's ideological about that? Why inject political language into that phenomenon?<p>There are ideological battles in technology, of course. But it doesn't have much to do with a lack of vision. If someone lacks vision, and then you make something amazing, they will generally acknowledge it (though perhaps slowly) and everyone moves on. Sure, there are a few people still using DOS, but not very many.

He doesn't touch on the arguments that technological progress is a bad thing, in and of itself. Two extreme examples of that would be that agriculture has led to a massive rise in population density (compared to hunter-gatherer societies), and that advances in military technology have created a world where we live on the brink of Mutually-Assured Destruction.<p>While that's not my personal view, it is an argument that gets raised at times...

Personally, I have always found myself shockingly distant from the rest of the tech community on technology issues like transhumanism. I would never support consumer mind computer interfaces for casual applications like video games or communication or intelligence augmentation. I even think our current smart phones go too far and have a net negative impact on society in their current form; don't even get me started on Google glasses.<p>Honestly, I am fairly sure that the society of the future will look back on current technological use and trends much in the same way we look back on the industrial revolution; a time of great progress which eventually led to a better society, but while first being implemented it had zero regard for investigating social, human, and environmental impact.

Siracusa taking a broad view is new to me! I'm sure he has before but what I like about him is his laser-like focus on some detail that has previously never been noticed by me. And he knows the 17 iterations of the feature that went before and likely place its going.

An interesting contrast to this: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219866" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5219866</a>