The past decade included the longest bull run in the history of the stock market, due in part to the fastest and most transformative rollout of new technologies ever. In 2014, one in four people on earth had a smartphone; today, it’s nearly three in four. Think about that for a second, and all it represents: roughly four billion people gaining access to a computer and the internet.
And now, here we are: It’s the 10-year anniversary of this column. Anniversaries are typically a time for people to get misty-eyed and recount their successes. But after almost 500 articles in The Wall Street Journal, one thing I’ve learned from covering the tech industry is that failures are far more instructive. Especially when they’re the kind of errors made by many people.
Here’s what I’ve learned from a decade of embarrassing myself in public—and having the privilege of getting an earful about it from readers.
1. Disruption is overrated
Why are three of the most valuable companies of 2014—Microsoft, Apple, and Google—bigger than ever? How is Meta doing so well even as people have for years been abandoning Facebook, its core product? Why is Twitter still chugging along, no matter what its new owner gets up to?
The short answer is that disruption is overrated. The most-worshiped idol in all of tech—the notion that any sufficiently nimble upstart can defeat bigger, slower, sclerotic competitors—has proved to be a false one.
It’s not that disruption never happens. It just doesn’t happen nearly as often as we’ve been led to believe. There are many reasons for this. One is that many tech leaders have internalized a hypercompetitive paranoia—what Amazon founder Jeff Bezos called “Day 1” thinking—that inspires them to either acquire or copy and kill every possible upstart.
Economic historians have been picking apart the notion of business-model disruption for a long time, and yet hardly a day goes by when a startup, investor, or journalist—including yours truly—doesn’t trumpet the power of a new technology to completely upend even the biggest and most hidebound of industries.
Don’t believe it. In a world in which companies learn from one another faster than ever, incumbents have an ability to reinvent themselves at a pace that simply wasn’t possible in the past.
2. Human factors are everything
Pop quiz: What’s the number one factor governing the pace of technological change?
If you said R&D spending, a country’s net brain power, or any of the other factors experts typically cite, you’ve made the all-too-common error of technological determinism—the fallacy that all it takes for the next big thing to transform our lives is for it to be invented.
I’ve made this error again and again, predicting that we were all about to abandon our laptops, that car ownership was not long for this world, and that, I kid you not, the end of food was imminent. And it’s by far the most common one I see others making, whether they’re C-suite executives, the world’s most powerful investors, or early adopters of gadgets. When something shiny and new debuts, otherwise sober thinkers leap to the conclusion that this almost-there technology is on the cusp of ubiquity. (Elon Musk is possibly the all-time world champion of this particular cognitive bias.)
But what’s most often holding back mass adoption of a technology is our humanity. A new technology has to fit with the quirky, unpredictable, and far-from-rational set of predilections, needs and biases resident in all of us. People who study how humans interact with technology call their field “human factors,” and one of their primary insights is that we are all hot messes.
The challenge of getting people to change their ways is the reason that adoption of new tech is always much slower than it would be if we were all coldly rational utilitarians bent solely on maximizing our productivity or pleasure.
Our tendency to be creatures of habit is why electric-vehicle adoption has slowed, and in a broader sense why we’re still so hooked on cars in general. It’s why the Mac is still here—despite my declaration that Apple should kill it off. And it’s why we’re still eating food.
3. We’re all susceptible to this one kind of tech B.S.
Kara Swisher, whose Boomtown column at the Journal was in many ways the precursor of this one, once said on a podcast that when she interviews a person in tech who is hyping their company or product, rather than asking herself how they’re lying to her, she asks “how are they lying to themselves?”
Tech is, to put it bluntly, full of people lying to themselves. As countless cult leaders, multilevel marketing recruits, and CrossFit coaches know, one powerful way to convince people that following you will change their life is to first convince yourself.
It’s usually not malicious. Given the rate at which startups fail, to be a founder of one is to engage in a level of magical thinking that in another age would qualify a person for the sanatorium. Today’s venture-capital backed founders need to have a vision, articulate it clearly, and convince everyone around them that joining up is the equivalent of finding a winning lottery ticket, even if they would have better luck buying an actual lottery ticket.
It’s not just startups, though—tech CEOs have to go through this same ritual every time they launch some big new venture or pivot their company, even though most of those efforts will come to naught.
Early in my tenure at the Journal, I also made the error of buying into someone else’s belief system about how their company is going to change the world. When inventor James Dyson explained why he had faith in a new battery company, I duly wrote it up, and years later realized just how unlikely that company had been to succeed. Ditto when Elon Musk and his cousin Lyndon Rive expounded on the synergy between Tesla and SolarCity, a vision that hasn’t panned out. Equally cringeworthy: my foray into writing about prefab construction unicorn Katerra, which later collapsed under the weight of its attempts to reinvent every part of a complicated industry.
4. Tech bubbles are useful even when they’re wasteful
The amounts of money thrown at startups at the height of the tech investment bubble of the past decade can seem like the kind of folly that only a people who have given up on solving their real problems—war, childhood poverty, climate change—could countenance.
It’s easy, and fun, to mock the most absurd of these investments. In one of my earliest columns, I asked, bluntly, if Silicon Valley was investing in the wrong things. (At the time, this included a startup that delivers quarters to you, and the infamous app Yo, which did nothing but ping your friends with an alert that said “yo.”)
But pointing out that most new ideas aren’t going anywhere should not be confused with moralizing about innovation in general. Something Bill Gates told Rolling Stone in 2014 has stuck with me. He said that most startups were “silly” and would go bankrupt, but that the handful of ideas—he specifically said ideas, and not companies—that persist would later prove to be “really important.”
A decade on, it appears he was correct. The last tech bubble gave us some deeply unserious “innovations” like Web3 and the metaverse. But it also gave us a fourth industrial revolution, powered by the mobile internet, automation and artificial intelligence, the impacts of which will be playing out for decades to come.
5. We’ve got more power than we think
Having all the wealth and technology in the world doesn’t matter if we don’t have the wisdom to use it in the right manner. Early in my career, I bought into the notion, espoused by science-fiction author William Gibson, that all cultural change is driven by technology.
I’ve now witnessed enough of both technological and social change to understand that the reverse is also—and perhaps more often—true. Collectively, we have agency over how new tech is developed, released, and used, and we’d be foolish not to use it. Creating and rolling out new tech without guardrails is a recipe for a world in which tech is as likely to supercharge our worst impulses, as it is to enhance our lives.
When the self-appointed superheroes of tech try to sell us their vision, it’s often in millenarian terms, and they speak as if innovation were a force independent of the people making it happen. If we believed them, we would conclude that superhuman AI is inevitable, deepfakes and misinformation are unavoidable, and that the erosion of the American middle class is the predetermined endpoint of all automation.
But this simply isn’t the case. For example, China-style mass surveillance and behavior modification may be uniquely enabled by technology, but it isn’t inevitable—it’s a decision by the Chinese Communist Party. And while America still has no far-reaching federal privacy law, years of violations of our trust by tech companies have led to a growing patchwork of laws, regulations, and voluntary changes that have curbed many of the worst offenders.
By paying attention to what’s just over the horizon, my hope is that in our collective, imperfect, democratic way, we can figure out how to use new technologies, rather than being used by them.
At least until the AI takes over.
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Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com
