#231: Is Tech Leaving Culture Behind?

Dealing with the impact of accelerating tech on culture, organisations, and demand.

Last week at a panel discussion organised by our partners EngageWorks, I was asked an interesting question. To paraphrase the question: with the accelerated rate of technology change, are we losing culture? There’s more than one way to think about this.

First at a reasonably superficial level, the question is rephrasing the classic argument set up by Venkateswara Rao in his book Breaking Smart, between the Pastorals and the Promethians. Promethians believe the future is universally better, often fuelled by technology improvements. Pastorals believe the present (or even the past) should be held on to - culturally, socially, and more. Neither side is always right, and the world definitely keeps moving forward and getting more complex. So you might hark for CDs, Tapes, or Vinyl, but we’re very much in the era of streaming. The question is, do we label vinyl more as culture than we do streaming online? We shouldn’t, though one has a longer history and more established patterns than the other. The question I was asked was suggesting that with newer and newer things to do, we are ‘leaving culture’ behind. But what is culture? It’s just an amorphous collection of things we do, that get baked into habits, social norms, and our psychological defaults. I suggest that in silicon valley, California, excitement about technology investments is ingrained in the culture, just as discussing music, art and politics is in Kolkata. Culture is constantly evolving. Everything we do regularly becomes a part of our culture fabric as long as it’s a referenceable and recognisable phenomenon.

There is a second way of thinking about the question, though. It always takes a bit of time for any new behaviours to settle into a pattern that we would recognise as culture. You could argue that there is a distinction between any fleeting behaviour and what counts as a cultural norm. Just like fads vs trends. If Google searches found their way into culture (and language given the verbification of Google), and social media created its own layers of culture from Facebook to Tiktok, each of these had time to bed in and become recognisable habits that could be referenced in literature or in films, for example. By the time we’ve gotten used to ChatGPT3.5, we’ve had version 4, and before we’ve quite got our heads around that, we have ChatGPT 4o, and now ChatGPT o1 which can do more complex and mathematical work. By the time films are made about ChatGPT4, it will feel like an ‘old technology’. Is there a chance therefore that culture as we know it becomes completely transient? Nothing truly settles in as a recognisable behaviour that we can feed off. What might that do to a world that seems to be perennially in an an unfolding series of sci-fi scenes? I’m not sure we quite know what that means from a cultural perspective.

Which led me to another thought - what if technology change becomes like hyperinflation? When economies go through hyperinflation - the price of goods changes on a daily basis. People try and convert away from cash as it devalues rapidly with respect to goods. What you can buy with ￡100 could drop from the start of the week to the end, or even within a day! Could we get to a point where technology changes as fast as that? Where your product improves every week? We already know some of the worlds most agile companies such as Amazon release code every few seconds. These are little changes here and there But could the overall experience of Amazon change on a daily basis? It could possibly be delivered by AI which looks at all the data across the site and continuously experiments, evaluates, and improves the site in more significant ways. Would users be able to live with that, even it was actually improving things? Perhaps in a world where that kind of change is common, it would have become an expectation.

And given that culture creates the markets for the vast number of things we acquire and consume, beyond our basic necessities, what will this mean for demand for goods and services in future? Will fast and impermanent culture lead to more, or less demand? Or different demand? Or rather, what kinds of new and infinitely configurable products and services will need to be created, to fill that need?

The role of innovation and innovators in this ever accelerating cycle of change is to play the role of orchestrators. To continuously act as enablers, buffers, conductors, and catalysts, as required, ensuring that organisations and people can change at a pace that matches the speed of technology change, and the associated shifts in demands. To do this, we might have to reshape, rewire, and redesign organisations, processes, cultures, and metrics. Sam Altman spoke about a billion dollar company with one employee. Maybe in future we might not even need that one employee! Perhaps the way joint stock companies redistribute wealth between employees and shareholders itself needs to be rethought.

And so to the gentleman who asked me the question, whose name I unfortunately don’t remember, I think I answered only with my superficial response. Thank you for making me think more deeply about this. It’s not about any one culture that is being left behind by technology, but the very notion of culture as we know it that is becoming more transient with the accelerating rate of change. Welcome to the world of fluid culture.