A well-researched term to describe how a technology dominate the globe, e.g. QWERTY keyboards and network protocols driving a “convergence” towards their standard, is “monopoly”. But that dosn’t sound like something that would increase the speed of technological progress, does it?

Interesting post, Kevin!

One emerging trend I’m seeing at the bleeding edge of the green building and planning movement is design that responds to the “genius loci”, the special qualities of a particular site.

The new generation of “Living Buildings” are now attempting to reduce their ecological footprint to zero, and even to return more than they use. They are designed to take advantage of existing flows of energy, air and water unique to their locations. Typical energy-conserving strategies include passive solar heating, natural ventilation and cooling, forms that take advantage of daylight, and active solar or wind technologies. However, Living Building strategies extend beyond energy, to rainwater collection, stormwater treatment with constructed wetlands, and use of locally-sourced, sustainably-harvested materials. (For more, < http://www.cascadiagbc.org/lbc > is a good starting point.)

These strategies respond to local microclimate; to regional energy, water and materials supply chains; and to ecological/social/legal/economic drivrs specific to the site. A living building in Phoenix is very different from one in Vancouver or Kapuskasing, just as living species are adapted to their local ecological niche.

However, many of the strategies used by living, vital buildings are universal in the sense that they respond to climatic conditions that may be similar in very distant locations. For example, Southern California coastal passive designs are very similar to coastal Mediterranean designs, since they respond to similar climatic drivers. They can apply design strategies first articulated by Vitruvius 2000+ years ago.

I and many others are convinced that in future, building and community design must reduce the ecological impacts of the built environment in “advanced” nations by a factor of ten or more. A large and rapidly growing body of experience shows that 30-60% energy consumption reductions are economically possible with thoughtful application of currently available technologies. However, key to long-term sustainability are form & building envelope design to passively heat, cool,light and ventilate buildings; and careful selection of renewable local materials that consciously minimize impacts throughout their life-cycles.

Since these approaches are place-based, they run upstream to the convergence trend you’ve noted. We’re relearning design principles largely forgotten with the availability of cheap fossil-fuels & global supply chains; and these principles are universal, since they’re based on universal physical laws (including the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). However, their application must respond & differentiate to place.

Kevin, I think what you’re getting at here is that place is becoming less and less a determinant of culture (technology being one aspect of that). But that doesn’t mean we don’t still have a multi-cultural (global) society. The different cultures are defined by the relationships individuals have to one another - based on language, religion, occupation, education, race. The importance of relative location on our globe to those relationships decreases, but the cultural realities are still very much there.

You wrote ” For the most part, technology will converge to uniform usage around the globe, but occasionally some group, or subgroup, will devise and perfect a type of technology or technique that has limited appeal.”

I immediately thought of Japanese toilets. New toilet technology is a big deal in Japan, but it seems to have limited appeal elsewhere.

Interesting post. What actually popped into my head while reading it was the concept of “forking” projects in the open source community.

See: Mambo > Joomla > ?

Being able to latch onto the collective, and then breed your own hybrid species has a certain appeal.

It strikes me that your idea on the total convergence of technology leading to innovation being treated as heresy could be countered by two factors: 1. The desire for novelty. Not necessarily better, but different. I see how a standard ‘so good we needn’t use anything else’ philososphy could come into play with, say, solar cells, but a desktop or house is much more individual or customizable. 2. The desire for non-conformity. PCs vs. Macs. Need I say more? I will anyway - this ‘competing tribes of variants’ assumes that things like cars or computers or what-have-you will always have differences in performance, somehow. Since technology always involves trade-offs, I’d say this is likely in at least some fields.

I’m not so sure.

To me, it looks like technology is just the substrate on which culture forms. While manufacturing and marketing technique cause a broad dispersion of the substrate, local flavor really dominates the subtleties of usage.

I’m not sure that it’s reasonable to say that the cell phone, for example, means the same thing in different cultures. Both meaning and usage vary by locality.

I’ve invested a good deal of energy exploring the differences between individual American cities and find vast differences based on local norms, vocational infrastructure, demographic distribution, industry, weather, ethnic composition and so on. There is less American culture and more local culture.

On a recent trip to India (where 1/4 of technology users live), I saw radical distribution of little communications gadgets to people who had little else. The usage of that technology straddles generations of Western functionality from network development to commercial acceleration. The technology is playing a related but different role.

The tools may standardize but local culture seems to be strengthened, not weakened by it.

Kevin, if you haven’t read it you might take a look at David Egerton’s v good history of technology called The Shock of the Old. Egerton’s story is that technological shifts often take longer than people think, old technologies stay around for much longer, and that new technologies can often revive older ones (viz the continued growth of radio.) He also broadens the scope of technology and innovation to look at - amongst other things - the tin roof and barbed wire. His story provides a more nuanced, complicated story about trajectories of technologies than just old vs new, out of which more interesting combinations come. For example the First World War is known as the war which introduced mechanised combat in the form of the tank but the Western Front also used more than 1m horses.

@Charlie: I was unaware of Egertons’ work. I’ll track it down. Thanks.

@John Sumser: John, I think you are highlighting something I agree with but did not illuminate very well. The convergence I am speaking about is similar to the convergence that happens with a language like English. While Anglo-ish was in formation, rules were few, standards of spelling for instance rare. But once it got solidified with a dictionary etc, the “technology” of the language converged. That convergence did not thwart the immense variation and creativity possible with English. It may have unleashed it in fact. A thousand books and masterpieces have flowed out of that standard language. I see the technology of urbanity similarly. It becomes a language in which to breed a thousand various cultures, such as you see in modern India or the US. Likewise the standards of TCP/IP and Unix permit a billion websites to bloom. Does that make sense?

@Kent: Right! I should add Japanese toilets as another isolate.

Oh, I see. By standardizing the technological medium, local petri dishes are able to vary more fully. That makes a ton of sense. I think we might be farther along than you think.

If technology includes roads, McDonalds, Holiday Inns, Starbucks and the myriad of things that are sometimes seen as Western Cultural Imperialism, I’ll give you a high five.

Infrastructure is different today than it was even 50 years ago. It looks like the distribution channels for information, education and goods. The thing you are describing is terrifying to many people. Standardization of tools looks like harsh constraint at first glance.

Then, it unleashes a powerful storm of productive creativity. You’re describing the creation of a technology platform.

It seems like you’re trying to step back from “technology” as a force, and gathering up your experience in this world, you are saying it will become ever more monolithic, and you leave very little room for cultural variation, or pockets of rapid divergent innovation that remain isolated from the increasingly homogeneous and ever-thickening main branch. You are also saying that technology is like a single gestating organism, and must live out a certain genetic sequence to remain whole at any given moment.

I’d just disagree with a bunch of your starting assumptions. In my experience, I can tell where I am in the world, based specifically on infrastructure (and terrain). We don’t have high-speed trains in Pittsburgh. We have vast rings of decaying houses in Detroit. We have a highly concentrated concrete-covered megalopolis in the Bay Area, with rings and patches of hills, a fifteen-minute drive between city and mountain ridge. In fact its the cities where the “technology” is you can tell apart: the countyside, not so much — the differences between two forests may only be noticed by a botanist sensitive to the subtlety of the local scenery.

You really tip your hand when you say: “So a specimen of this development can be ahead of the norm, or behind the norm, like a child’s height.” A child’s height may conform to a broad average. But being very short or very tall does not automatically mean you are developmentally stunted, and unable to progress to later stages of morphological articulation. The reverse is much more true: within an organism, many developments are occurring simultaneously, laterally, in loose horizontal interaction — especially once critical periods of condensed youthful growth are out of the way — transition zones between orders of magnitude.

You make it seem like everyone in the world is adopting and upgrading from the most basic to ever-more advanced technologies. But we know that whole populations are largely skipping the age of PCs and beginning instead with cell phones. That is partly because whole regions skipped the age of land-lines and went straight to satellites and cell towers. Many cultures will never adopt the refrigerator, and we Americans may find that fridges were an unhealthy obsession and quite overused, not a necessary step in the growth of a tool-user.

Unless we all join in an oceanic state of instantaneous connectedness, commonly-linked across all substantial communication barriers — a near-singularity — I think then you are ignoring all the obstacles to any ever-homogenizing force of this shape: bio-regional (genetic, chemical, ecological), cultural (aesthetics, ethics, local knowledge), political (law, patent, copyright), and especially linguistic.

You may be pointing to a genetic capacity within technology: that we are accruing a handbook of patterns for how to develop to a certain measurable richness and order of magnitude for technological sophistication. And we are spreading these patterns, this tried-and-true set of instructions, to all corners of the world. But you are really missing one aspect of a pattern: there are no points in space or time that are exactly the same, and any pattern that comes into existence in a particular place is contingent on unique circumstances and will give rise to and express highly variable and unpredictable new characteristics that will in turn provide a foothold for a new species of physical reality to take up residence, and begin evolving.

You are really downplaying localized differences simply as aesthetic clutter — be it color, symbol, shape — but these things provide a home for indeterminate meaning, and function, and the eventual unforeseen discovery of a wider world than was once assumed to exist.

Present everywhere, infinitely variable. It’s important to honor both parts of the equation. (All a riff on the old axioms “As above, so below” and “All parts are wholes”, via Christopher Alexander’s design philosophy.)