Superstars or Black Holes: Are Tech Clusters Causing Stagnation? - American Affairs Journal
americanaffairsjournal.org
In 2011, the economist Tyler Cowen published The Great Stagnation, a short treatise with a provocative hypothesis. Cowen challenged his audience to look beyond the gleam of the internet and personal compu­ting, arguing that these innovations masked a more troubling reality. Cowen contended that, since the 1970s, there has been a marked stagna­tion in critical…

The article argues that some federal government intervention earlier during WWII jump-started the tech innovations we saw from the 1950s to 1970s.

It also talks about how the Internet seems to be the only really new game-changing innovation since the 80s and seeks to explain why this is the case.

Among other things, of course, such as the nature of "tech clusters" such as Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas.

  • ChaosMaterialist [he/him]
    ·
    9 months ago

    crapware randomly blocks certain requests on port 8080 and no one in IT knows how to fix it because it is just a default set of security "best practice" rules

    I distinctly remember reading the Foundation novels and thinking that people, a whole civilization, couldn't just forget technology that quickly. No way! But reality is that it erodes constantly at the edges where the required knowledge only exists in one person's head. Combined with a corporate love affair with layoffs, there isn't a built-up institutional knowledge that is recorded and passed on. You can get away with ritual and a prayer, but eventually something breaks and nobody knows why.

    the software we use is slow and barely works

    I always laugh at what companies skimp on, compared to the labor costs lost to slow tech.