Meta's Super Bowl Ad via YouTube
We think about innovation a lot here at Harbinger. It’s one of our core values, and it’s something we’re constantly challenging ourselves on. Of course, to strive for innovation, one must define innovation, a task made difficult because it’s such a useful buzzword that everyone uses it to describe anything. Our innovative bristle design and advanced polymer molding process provide best-in-class mouth cleanliness and an unparalleled toothbrushing solution for our end-users.
Innovation most often associated with the tech industry (not coincidentally, tech is where the most egregious acts of violence against the English language take place). This conception needs to be revised. Describing why the number of ‘innovative tech startups’ are dwindling, MIT Technology Review notes:
Surprisingly, a major culprit is technology—specifically, proprietary information technology in the hands of large firms that dominate their industries. We’re accustomed to thinking of technology as creating disruption, in which innovations introduced by smaller, newer companies enable them to grow and ultimately replace older, less productive ones. But these proprietary technologies are now suppressing industrial turnover, which has declined sharply over the last two decades. This loss of dynamism has broad negative implications for the US economy. It has slowed the growth of innovative firms. And researchers have tied that slower growth to substantially slackened productivity growth, which affects the entire economy, all the way down to personal incomes.
Recent buzz about the metaverse shows this trend in action. The unbelievably accidentally dystopian Super Bowl ad from Meta (née Facebook) captures the failure of imagination. Defector's David Roth describes the utter bleakness of this new 'innovation':
The ambitions of our reigning tech lords tend to be ridiculous and tacky—imagine, if you dare, a reality roughly as cheesy and brutal as ours, laid haphazardly over the top of this one, with the same people in charge—but there is also something ominous about the specific ways and places in which their powerful imaginations fail. The hyped-up rhetoric about Saving The World with the wonder-working power of cryptocurrency or other web3 gimcrackery is in some ways just familiar Silicon Valley noise, the lorem ipsum text swapped in for “to profit” under the Why heading on everything these people do. But while it is clear what these interests want, which is to continue to control a large and growing amount of money and power and impunity, it is also clear that they have moved on from the systems in which the rest of humanity is left to grind it out. That all is dying, and will be left to die. The new system will have a virtual nightclub in it, where you can buy drinks that you cannot in point of fact actually drink.
Contrast Meta’s metaverse (novel technology developed for a solution no one asked for) with Disney’s new Storyliving by Disney, a series of Disney-themed master-planned residential communities with resort amenities seeped in Disney-storytelling. In other words, a novel solution developed that people very much asked for ("can I have more Disney, please"). No proprietary tech or VR headset required.
This gets us back to innovation, defined succinctly as ‘the use of a new idea or method.’ It’s taking a novel approach to problem solving. How do we apply that? Well, to start, tell us a little about your problem.
Credit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
A new photobook Movie Theaters documents the gorgeous remains of hundreds of old theaters across the US (some cool old neon signs in there, too). It also contains an element of hope, highlighting some of the great adaptive reuse projects that reimagined these old palaces.
Credit: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre
