In The Great Stagnation, Tyler Cowen argues that certain types of progress have slowed because the low-hanging fruit is gone. For example, the flush toilet led to substantial improvements in quality of life for the first generation to use it, but subsequent generations have gained comparatively less. Toilets that flush faster and use less water don’t measure up to the original leap from the outhouse.
What should we call innovation that feels substantial? According to Peter Thiel:
Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things — going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
Vertical progress is what happens when a problem is transcended rather than solved — that is, when an entire solution context is made irrelevant by a form of “superfit.” Stagnation is what happens when this stops happening. In Cowen’s words:
It would make my life a lot better to have a teleportation machine. It makes my life only slightly better to have a larger refrigerator that makes ice in cubed or crushed form.
If it existed, teleportation would revolutionize transportation by unbundling time and distance from travel. Suddenly, concerns about fuel, roads, and collision safety would be optional, freeing millions of man-hours for more important tasks. In comparison, ice choices seem pretty weak.
Admittedly, this shift in perspective feels inappropriate. Whether cubed or crushed, ice that is conveniently dispensed is preferable to ice that must be pried out of trays (which must then be refilled). Comparing dispensed ice to teleportation may seem unrealistically demanding or even ungrateful. Nevertheless, such comparisons are sometimes the best way to express what feels wrong.
If we choose to see it, the same comparative unambitiousness is easy to find in aesthetic experience. Over the next two posts, I will attempt to make it apparent.
L I P O S U C T I O N 