Technology isn't a magic wand, it's a treasure map

I used to love the Innovations catalogue dropping through the door with the weekend paper. For an entertainment-starved tween, it was a mix of ludicrosity and earnestness that made for ideal Sunday browsing.

This was a simpler time for home technology, before Bill Gates’ vision of widespread personal computing became reality. Family PCs were big clunky things that lived in the “computer room”, a room certain family members would loudly make a point of avoiding.

Computers were stand alone curiosities, a device to play Solitaire on or type up notes, something more akin to a woodworking workshop in the basement than to the hyperconnected always-on communication platform it’s become today.

Innovations gave a spotlight to niche ‘inventions’ that aimed to solve mundane problems with over-the-top gadgetry. Palm pilots and calculator watches and clock radio toilet roll holders. These things were often laughable, and that was probably the point. They were just fun sounding things, things that didn’t actually solve any real problems anyone had.

Move on to the present day, and Amazon is the world’s Innovations catalogue. Many sales models used by startup tech businesses are based on this direct mail marketing approach. The methodology is: Find a tiny thing that people might want. Build a product that promises to fill the gap. Price it so that it seems impossible to refuse.

“Do people actually need it? Or does it accelerate our planet further towards destruction” while solving nothing real? The tech sector assumes innovation is “morally neutral, or even by default good.”

Fixing difficult social problems is a journey, not a destination. Hard problems require hard work. Yet policymakers seem to believe they can undo decades of systemic inequality with the right app or dataset.

“Owning a set of spanners doesn’t automatically make you a car mechanic.” Similarly, possessing technology doesn’t solve structural issues. Communities face gnarly problems that are fixable with great teams and solid plans—devices are secondary.

On the ground, we see people arrive wanting to fix things with Design Thinking and Internet of Things gadgets, then lose interest when they realize these approaches can’t design away real constraints. Communities don’t have loose bolts; they lack time and resources.

Imagine planning an archaeological excavation. Nice gadgets help, but you need a team who knows how to use them. The core work of excavation doesn’t change with technology. “You still need a team of people with trowels and brushes who know what they’re doing. And you always will.”