[apsophus]

> Maintaining and conserving things is the job of conservatives, not entrepreneurs, and conservatives resist change.

I'm mystified by this. Why does maintenance have to be a 'conservative' thing? Probably 70% of software engineering work is maintenance of one kind of or another. Are those engineers conservatives? Do they 'resist change'? Unless you mean 'conversative' in a very restricted sense of that word.

> so well-thought-out, so vivid and so blatantly superior to the incumbent alternatives that they become inevitable. That is, society cannot help but enact them.

This is a version of 'technological determinism' (Google it if you need to). If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.

[sooheon]

> This is a version of 'technological determinism' [...] If there's any single takeaway from the last 50 years of scholarship on the history of technnology, it's that technological determism is false.

This kind of thinking is astonishing to me. "Technological determinism" is a historical term--i.e. reified in its era. The arguments ("stirrups enabled feudalism") are dated and simplistic and easily torn down. But to reduce a thought (discovery of technology influences human behavior, and can bring about its own creation) to a label ("technological determinism") and then dismiss it for historical reasons (older versions of that label were insufficient, therefore it is wrong), is sloppy thinking, imo.

[BaronSamedi]

I agree. It would be inaccurate to say that the invention of the electric guitar was the sufficient cause of rock'n'roll. On the other hand, the electric guitar is clearly a necessary cause. I think the best model for this interaction is a feedback loop (in the systems sense) where technology influence culture which influences technology.

[erasemus]

Conservative in the sense of conserving existing knowledge and technology; not to try out new ideas.

>This is a version of 'technological determinism'

True, the growth of technology can't be predicted. There's no guarantee any particular idea will work. Many ideas will fail due to unforeseen problems, including in apparently unrelated areas like financing and social media and so on. Entrepreneurs may take up an idea and then change it beyond recognition (PG points out that start-ups usually change their product ideas). Each attempt to enact an idea is just that, an attempt.

Whereas in the past we built things before we understood why they worked (steam engines), or whether people would like them, more and more we'll be trying out stuff in theory (richly animated and exciting fiction) before trying in practice.

[nanomoose]

Conservator.