The rise/fall/whatever-you-call-it of civilisation
I read a couple of articles this week that, without being specifically directed at technological optimists, seemed at odds with the technology-is-advancing-faster-than-ever-before narrative that I've become accustomed to in publications like IEEE Spectrum. The Australian (18 September 2013, p. 29) had Peter Murphy contending that "big ideas in art and science seem like a thing of the past", while Radio National had Ed Finn lamenting that current science fiction typically portrays a pretty grim future.
Peter Murphy sounds like the kind of person who contributes to a narrative that I once saw described (I forget where) as "civilisation has been declining since it started". For him, the good old days were left behind somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, and we no longer have anything interesting to say. Ed Finn is not such a curmudgeon himself, but draws attention to the trend from the largely utopian science fiction of the mid-twentieth century to the dystopian sort now enjoying popularity. Finn himself proposes to encourage more inspirational science fiction through a programme known as Project Hieroglyph. I presume that neither of them have been reading IEEE publications, Ray Kurzweil, Kevin Kelly, or any of their ilk, for whom things are (mostly) quite the opposite.
I was struck by the degree to which Murphy's article used the same technique as that used by more euphoric views of technology, however much their conclusions might differ: make a set of assertions about the importance of certain artworks or technologies that are at best subjective and at worst arbitrary, then conclude with whether you liked the older ones or newer ones better. Whether things are getting better or worse thus seems to depend largely on whether you prefer Daniel Defoe or Stephen King, or whether you happen to see more ploughs or iPhones.
The most convincing analysis of this sort that I've encountered is the one in Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget (2010). Writing about music, he argues that no new genres of music have appeared since hip hop in the 1980's, and that no one could tell whether a pop song that came out in the past twenty years was released in the 1990s or the 2000s. In another section, he argues that open source software consists largely of clones of prior commercial software. I'm sure there are plenty of musicians and open source software developers who might argue otherwise, but Lanier's points are at least testable hypotheses.
Given that the importance of any particular technology or piece of art is so subjective I'm not sure it's really very meaningful at all to make sweeping statements about whether art or technology is getting better or worse, or faster or slower. The Lord of the Rings, for example, has been immensely influential for generations of fantasy writers and readers, but I don't imagine it means much to writers and readers of, say, romantic comedies. There might nonetheless be more specific statements that could be made, but they need much more robust than merely making a list of what one individual likes and doesn't like.
