why technology is failing us [and how we can fix it]

August 30, 2001 7:54 AM

why technology is failing us [and how we can fix it] (at Shift Magazine) is a call to arms for bored geeks. We made it through the Internet Revolution and realised that it really didn't change a whole lot about the way we actually live. Chris Turner suggests that the Next Big Thing could very well be environmentally friendly technology. Think about it: We had reams of venture captial money to make the world at large aware of the new medium, and we got to play the entire time. We can do it again, and this time we can literally change the world.
posted by cCranium (28 comments total)

The last environmentally friendly technology for the masses, nuclear energy, was completely trashed by the public. The next environmentally friendly technology will probably be just as baffling to the public, and thus it will be a victim of its own scare stories.
posted by mischief at 8:13 AM on August 30, 2001

First of all, the Internet definitely did change a lot about how I live... It's a huge part of my everyday life, and the life I can imagine living without it really isn't so great. This is just me, personally, but I don't think I'm the only one.

Secondly, part of me has to ask, "Who's going to pay for this?" Is "green" profitable?
posted by whatnotever at 8:14 AM on August 30, 2001

Agreed, whatnotever. Since the internet, I have disposed of my TV and I have stopped buying many publications of the "dead-wood media" type. Thanks to imdb, I have wasted much less money on bad movies and in doing so, managed to conserve the gasoline that I would have otherwise burned.
posted by mischief at 8:21 AM on August 30, 2001

here're a couple recent related op-eds in the nytimes and the wash post:
How My Electric Car Saves the World
The Composite Solution

the second article was written by a guy at the rocky mountain institute, they've been trying to promote the idea of a smart car for awhile now as an example of how to get "factor 4" productivity increases by design. they also have a free book available online called natural capitalism, about how it doesn't have to be like this. what's missing though i think is a "next-generation" monetary system to accommodate such change. as it is the fiat, fractional reserve system i think is outdated, it's just that the powers that be (of course) prefer it that way.

and yeah, that wind farm being built in the columbia river gorge is going to be pretty rockin.
posted by kliuless at 8:21 AM on August 30, 2001

Since the internet, I have disposed of my TV and I have stopped buying many publications of the "dead-wood media" type. Thanks to imdb, I have wasted much less money on bad movies and in doing so, managed to conserve the gasoline that I would have otherwise burned.

But you still go to the grocery store or market or local organic to buy food. You still interface with computers by sitting in front of a monitor and pounding away on the keyboard.

I was admittedly overblowing things when I said "it's changed nothing" but my every day life, outside of my hobbies and my work, isn't a great deal different than my father's.

Secondly, part of me has to ask, "Who's going to pay for this?" Is "green" profitable?

Well that's probably the real question, and that's part of what this article is encouraging; making green products profitable.

To make consumer products profitable you pretty much have to mass produce them, but to mass produce something you need a massive influx of money. Like the article says, you can't make it across a chasm in two jumps.
posted by cCranium at 8:30 AM on August 30, 2001

The last environmentally friendly technology for the masses, nuclear energy, was completely trashed by the public.

While nuclear power plants do not have smokestacks nor toxic runoff, I think that it is misleading to call it environmentally friendly in the same vein with fuel cells or solar arrays.


Secondly, part of me has to ask, "Who's going to pay for this?" Is "green" profitable?

This is precisely the hurdle that green technologies must negotiate in order to gain wide acceptance. However, when you look at the early history of computers or even the internet, which had government shouldering some of the financial and knowledge burden, perhaps green technologies should receive the self-same benefits.

*just read the comments after the preview*

they've been trying to promote the idea of a smart car for awhile now as an example of how to get "factor 4" productivity increases by design.

Oftentimes, the most effective means of achieving efficiency have little to do with new technology, and more to do with using existing methods effectively.

Take a typical climate-controlled suburban house; at the beginning of the last century, it would have been madness to build a home that did not take advantage of the sun by being surrounded by deciduous trees (that shade the home in the summer and allow sunlight in during the winter), employing ample, and facing the building so that the effects of the late afternoon sun were mitigated, and natural breezes could be employed.

What I am getting at is that not only will bored geeks have an opportunity to play with new toys, but they will also be able to use their brains in elegant ways that aren't necessarily technology dependent.
posted by Avogadro at 8:32 AM on August 30, 2001

Why, then, is there such a rush -- and such vast reserves of cash, talent, time and wherewithal -- to bring web-enabled cellphones to market?

Perhaps it's because in many less-developed countries (i.e. not Western), web-enabled cellphones are possibly the only way many people are ever going to be able to communicate with the outside world, let alone access the internet and exchange information, because a) their countries don't have the money or inclination to improve telecommunications infrastructure in rural areas and b) they can't afford to buy computers for themselves.

As snarkout mentioned, the author totally missed the raison d'etre of Japanese cellphone/mobile internet usage (missed it on purpose? any half-baked research on the topic would have turned it up), which is that your ordinary Japanese person has resistance to "getting on the Internet" even if they could afford a computer (although landline calls are prohibitively expensive in Japan). Mari Matsunaga's breakthrough with iMode was realizing that, and marketing the services (email, scheduling, ticket ordering, maps, etc) and not highlighting the fact that it was all actually being done on the Internet. It's not some kawaii Japanese fad, like Pokemon -- it's the Japanese internet revolution, accomplished in a different way than it happened in the U.S.
posted by lia at 8:35 AM on August 30, 2001

I wish that I could be more optimistic about the development of green technologies in the near future. Recent events, however, discourage me. If you look at the Cheney energy plan and the general willingness of people to look the other way about global warming, etc., it's difficult not to conclude that the public is not sufficiently aware of current environmental crises to make some tough choices.

And it's often a crisis that is necessary to provoke radical technological improvements. The second World War was necessary to focus attention on atomic research. A perceived Russian space threat was necessary to prompt serious investment in space exploration.

There are powerful monetary interests aligned against radical green technologies. At some point the environment will deteriorate to the point where these interests will lose their hold on power. If we want that time to arrive sooner, several arguments need to be made to the public:

1. It really is worse than they want you to think.
2. We can solve these problems.
3. If there's pain involved in solving these problems, the pain will be greater, and the chance of success lower, the longer we wait.
posted by anapestic at 8:58 AM on August 30, 2001

Right, this time we're going to make a difference. Not like all those other times.

Also, "green" is profitable; at least, it's bound to be more profitable than the waste we saw the last nine years, isn't it?
posted by Mo Nickels at 9:09 AM on August 30, 2001

I wish that I could be more optimistic about the development of green technologies in the near future. Recent events, however, discourage me.

My indicator is always going to be: how do people respond to the word "environmentalist?" As long as it's met with derisive chuckles or shaking heads, green technologies aren't getting anywhere -- at least not when they're labeled as "green" or promoted as such.

And it's often a crisis that is necessary to provoke radical technological improvements. The second World War was necessary to focus attention on atomic research. A perceived Russian space threat was necessary to prompt serious investment in space exploration.

In other words, people need to feel immediate danger to themselves in order to care -- it's how people who happily denude forests don't give a shit about the costs of deforestation until people they know are killed by landslides or flooding. Environmentalism for your average person only becomes possible when they can make clear calculations as to how much not acting now is going to cost them.
posted by lia at 9:22 AM on August 30, 2001

In other words, people need to feel immediate danger to themselves in order to care

I don't think that's necessarily the case. How exactly do Japanese people feel immediate danger that causes them to buy web-enabled cell phones?

They don't, of course. But the level of convenience for them, and the level of status symbols a WAP phone gives North Americans, means that it's worth their while to purchase them.

While I agree that a great way to make people do something is to make a threat to their way of life the only alternative, packing on some Gee Whiz Isn't This Neat! attributes is probably an even better way.

Don't make it a necessity, make it a luxury available to everyone.
posted by cCranium at 9:30 AM on August 30, 2001

cC, I don't think you're really responding to my point. My point was that to make people take an action that they perceive will make their lives more difficult in some way, they need to be convinced that there's a greater threat. Selling web-enabled cell phones is fundamentally different from imposing mileage standards or limits on electricity usage, or making people invest in more efficient technology.

The gee whiz argument is a good one, but it's a lot easier to pack a gee whiz factor into web technology than into energy-efficient lightbulbs. Most of what needs to be done is likely not very glamorous.

The other problem I have with the initial post is that it seems to rest on the assumption that the same people who poured en masse into web development, e-commerce, whatever, can suddenly turn on their heels and develop terrific green technologies. Perhaps a lot of people without much formal training worked as foot soldiers in the information revolution, but to take a person who learned html or something similar and put him into r&d for environmental engineering seems disingenuous.

Not that I think it's a bad approach, just that I think it'll have to be a different generation of college grads who gets cracking on the problem.
posted by anapestic at 10:54 AM on August 30, 2001

Argh. I'm going all over the map here, because I've got so much crap in my head and I'm trying to make it make sense, but I don't know if I'm doing a very good job. I strongly suspect I'm not.

cC, I don't think you're really responding to my point.

Well, technically I pulled the quote from Lia's comment, so no, I didn't respond to your point. :-)

Most of what needs to be done is likely not very glamorous.

True enough. Energy efficient lightbulbs aren't all that great, but what about entire green friendly housing developments?

There's lots of new housing going up in the Toronto area that include many Internet-aware appliances, for example, and are being marketed as the homes of the future. Why not take it a step further and populate the house with energy-efficient lightbulbs that aren't going to burn out for 20 years?

I'm not looking for a way to have everyone wake up tomorrow and suddenly be super environmentally concious, I'm looking for a way to popularize environmentally concious activities so that money gets pumped into consumer products that at least don't add to the already existing environmental problem.

My point was that to make people take an action that they perceive will make their lives more difficult in some way, they need to be convinced that there's a greater threat.

See, the article's point (which I share and am arguing, but it's not fair for me to say this is my concept) is that environmentally friendly technology isn't going to make their lives significantly more difficult.

it seems to rest on the assumption that the same people who poured en masse into web development, e-commerce, whatever, can suddenly turn on their heels and develop terrific green technologies.

I think you don't geeks, Pesty. Shifting gears, suddenly turning on our heels to play with new technologies, that's what we do. That's what we are. Computers change at a tremendously frantic pace. We like that pace. When that pace slows down we get bored and start getting itchy for the next new thing.

I've been scratching for months now.

The whole reason we've been playing with the Internet is because it's new and it's just plain old fashioned fucking cool.

But lately it's started to get a bit stale. I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, but who's doing new shit out there? It happens in pockets, but the excitement that existed two years ago has almost totally burnt out.

Envirotech is where the Internet was in 1992, that's the whole thrust of the article. It's this solid foundation that's prooved useful academically and now it needs to be brought to the masses.

Scratch that. It doesn't need to be brought to the masses, it's going to be brought to the masses. It's just about at the exploding point, and more importantly, it's new and it's very fucking cool.
posted by cCranium at 11:47 AM on August 30, 2001

Blargh. That post was way too rambling, I think I lost coherency very early on.
posted by cCranium at 11:49 AM on August 30, 2001

The gee whiz argument is a good one, but it's a lot easier to pack a gee whiz factor into web technology than into energy-efficient lightbulbs.

I don't know if that's always the case, Pesty -- Sylvania and the Parks Service just redid the lighting at the Jefferson Memorial using metal halide lamps and LEDs to highlight the quote, and they got mentioned on NPR. The trick is that designs have to provide improvements other than simply environmental ones; that's one of the reasons Plug Power, another fuel cell outfit, is targeting the hospital and factory backup generator market, because those markets don't need to be sold on the wisdom of owning their own source of power.
posted by snarkout at 11:51 AM on August 30, 2001

Let me back up a bit.

My response to Lia, which was indirectly a response to Pesty, was fundamentally trying to suggest that there are alternatives to ramming a greater danger down peoples' throats, and some of those alternatives may be a significantly easier route.
posted by cCranium at 11:56 AM on August 30, 2001

"I think you don't geeks, Pesty"

Crap. Toss an "understand" in there. Preferably after "don't" and before "geeks", but anywhere else isn't going to make that post any more obtuse.
posted by cCranium at 11:58 AM on August 30, 2001

Hee hee, cCranium is going insane right here on Metafilter.
posted by aramaic at 12:14 PM on August 30, 2001

Forget going green! Let's talk about how technology is contributing to obesity!!! Yeah!
posted by gloege at 12:40 PM on August 30, 2001

I think that relying on big corporations and VCs isn't going to get it done, and I think talking an excellent talk isn't going to get it done. What we need is people out there--some of whom are highlighted in the article--doing it, because at some point, if this technology is working, people are going to flock to it. We need, I dunno, a sort of Netscape-Gaviotas combo, where people are just doing the innovation on their own. That's what (and I'm throwing in Netscape here because I'm not that familiar with how the inTARnet explosion happened, so hopefully you know what I mean) Netscape did, and that's what Gaviotas did: starting doing something, got it working, and then it exploded. For Netscape it was the web browser thingy, for Gaviotas it was solar power that worked with low levels of light (and after they did it, Colombia boomed with 'em).
posted by claxton6 at 1:12 PM on August 30, 2001

There's another factor cC - the attention span of the general populace. It seems to get shorter by the day.

This means that any attempt at scare tactics, whether they're true or not, is pretty much wasted. Screaming "global warming" now does no good because generally people just go, "Yeah, so what, heard it already."

In my view, the breakthroughs will come when:

a) Some companies do come up with (highly) profitable safe technology. (I try and avoid using "green", "environment...", "conservation" - they've almost become perjoratives!)

b) Some of the mult-nationals start encountering problems that affect their bottom line. Things like energy costs, raw material production costs. And I'm not talking about the supposed "costs" due to restrictive laws (e.g. laws prohibiting logging in areas due to landslides), but actual production costs (e.g. having to shore up against landslides so they can even transport logs out).

Unfortunately, until then things will get worse before they get better.
posted by Option1 at 1:19 PM on August 30, 2001

One major difference between internet technologies and the kinds of green technologies this article paraded before us is that creating a cool, new internet toy takes very little capital. With a few smart friends and less than a million dollars anyone can create a new program or internet service, with a couple of million more you can build some simple hardware solutions. Green technologies that end up making a substantial difference in the world are going to take a significantly larger group of engineers and money to have an impact.


While nuclear power plants do not have smokestacks nor toxic runoff, I think that it is misleading to call it environmentally friendly in the same vein with fuel cells or solar arrays.

I also have to point out that the fiction of the so-called hydrogen economy is beginning to annoy me. There are no hydrogen mines, fuel cells are not power generators (they are energy converters), and all of those electric cars are being powered by dirty, coal-fired power plants. They only seem clean because the negative externalities of electricity are being dumped into someone else's backyard.

Solar panels (photovoltaic) can barely recoup the original energy investment it takes to create them over their lifetime and they are not nearly as "clean" as you suggest. Start looking into the nasty chemicals used in their manufacture and what happens to those chemicals; I'll give you a hint though, it is basically the same process used to make microchips. Hydroelectric kills fish and messes up watershed so it is not much better.

Tidal energy (producing energy by slowly pulling the moon into the earth :) and solar-thermal (either direct-effect systems that use photons to heat a working fluid or indirect systems like wind power) seem to be the only truly green energy sources out there, but they are not really getting much attention.
posted by mccoy at 1:30 PM on August 30, 2001

an opinion: before we can even begin to speculate on the potential of green tech, we need to find some tangible point of entry for it in today's society; some small rip in our WAP-obsessed fabric with which we can latch our greener ideals onto; some real sense of motion that will take hydrogen cars out of the periphery and thrust them into popular consciousness; a SELLING point.

the sad reality of the fact is that the implicit elegance of the concepts on which these innovations are founded on simply isn't enough for your everyday consumer. on paper, markedly improving the design and upping the bells-and-whistles factor so as to trick people into going green looks like a good idea. unfortunately, i don't think it's that easy.

because, like everything, the market is basically dictated by the whimsies of big business. we have to remember that boo.com was allowed to exist because the VCs let it exist first. the unbridled hopefulness and the dizzying gen-y exuberance came afterwards...

i would love to believe that a mainstream hydrogen car COULD be in our near future, but do i really? no. turner notes in his piece that the big automakers seem to be controlling the slow delivery of this innovation - and there's an obvious reason for that. to put it quite simply: they are not done wringing the diesel sponge yet. to step off the line of any business trajectory before you absolutely NEED to do is bad business.

i can't help but feeling that we'll have gas-powered cars right up until the moment where we ABSOLUTELY cannot. the kicker is: do we trust ford/dupont et al to figure out where that line is?

seeing as how it's already passed... no.
posted by Aphex Kid at 1:33 PM on August 30, 2001

I also have to point out that the fiction of the so-called hydrogen economy is beginning to annoy me.

This is an excellent point mcoy. However, depending on the future efficacy of extracting hydrogen from water, fuel cells may become both clean and cost-effective.

Regarding clean sources, do not forget geothermal systems; there are a number of schools that presently use geothermal loops in conjuction with heat pumps to heat and cool classrooms.
posted by Avogadro at 1:34 PM on August 30, 2001

But... what about Ginger? (kidding)
posted by daver at 6:32 PM on August 30, 2001

One major difference between internet technologies and the kinds of green technologies this article paraded before us is that creating a cool, new internet toy takes very little capital.

Something that I was thinking of as I drove past some old steel mills (I live in Cleveland): It is very true that green technologies require infrastructure on a larger scale than the internet. Perhaps this is something else that appeals to me regarding new technologies that require manufactuing might. For cities and regions (Cleveland, Detroit, and Manchester come to mind) that have in the past relied on manufacturing, but have lost market share to factories overseas (once the technology is established and it is possible to create products without a large pool of skilled labor or professional staff), this is an opportunity to retool factories, utilize the skilled blue-collar sector that knows how to build complicated stuff, and employ professional geeks (engineers, computer geeks, etc.) in a way that makes use of what is otherwise wasted capital and personnel.
posted by Avogadro at 8:59 PM on August 30, 2001

I`m sure there are other ways to add some splash and "GEEWHIZ" to green technology, but the first things that spring to my mind are cash and convenience.

People like to save money, corporations love to save money. Show them how green technology (or whatever you want to call it to avoid nasty associations) will save on their electricity, gas and heating bills, and they may well take an interest if the upfront cost isn`t too great.

Show people that, for example, new longer-lasting batteries will allow them to play power sucking Tetris games while messaging their friends longer on their WAP cell phones and maybe you`ve got an ear.

Or show them that their own fuel cell will remove them from the effects of rolling blackouts, and will (somehow or other) do it in a way that is better than whatever they`re using now.

I think that standard marketing (the kind that makes you think that Acura is different then Honda or that Coke is really a good thirst quencher), could be brought to bear on this problem with great results, including a fair amount of "good will" for the first companies to do this.
posted by chiheisen at 12:38 AM on August 31, 2001