The economics of creative destruction
and the death of the smartphone
Will it eventually be game over for smartphones?
Photo taken by the author on February 21, 2023.
Looking backward
I come to bury the smartphone, not to praise it.
Consider this a premature and slightly open-ended obituary for that once-futuristic and now ubiquitous and quotidian piece of technology. The thing that was once the future and end result of technological progress will find itself on the trash stratum just above the pager, 8-tracks, and the Kaiserpanorama.
The Kaiserpanorama, popular in western Europe during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was a stereoscopic viewing machine that allowed a sitter to view a 2-D image as if it were 3-D. It gave viewers the chance to not only view a wide array of images, but it let them go back and see them again and again. In a way, it almost functioned like a proto-Instagram.
As Stuart Jeffries explains in Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School, the Kaiserpanorama “presented stereoscopic images of historical events, military victories, fjords, [and] cityscapes, all painted on a circular wall that trundled slowly around the seated audience.” It’s easy to joke about something so seemingly simple now, but when it was completed in the 1870s it was a marvel. It was just the kind of apparatus that primed the viewing public, a few generations later, for the eventual adoption of cinema.
Walter Benjamin, the German philosopher and culture critic, saw the Kaiserpanorama as an “allegory of the delusions of progressive history.” The panorama revolved endlessly, its history being only repetition, precluding anything like real change. As Jeffries explains:
Like the notion of progressive history itself, the panorama was a phantasmagoric tool to keep its spectators subdued, passive and fatuously dreaming, longing (as did Walter when he visited) for new experiences, distant worlds and diverting journeys; for lives of endless distraction rather than confrontation with the realities of social inequality and exploitation under capitalism. Yes, the Kaiserpanorama would be replaced by newer, better technologies, but that was what always happened under capitalism: we were always confronting the new, never turning our gaze to contemplate the fallen, the obsolete, the rejected. It was as if we were the torture victim in A Clockwork Orange or Dantesque denizens in some ring of hell, doomed to keep consuming the newest commodities for eternity.
Jeffries wasn’t just being dramatic. By the time August Fuhrmann, the inventor of the Kaiserpanorama, died in 1925, the technological race that would eventually reach our modern day smartphones had already begun. The Kaiserpanorama was long out of style, having been replaced by silent films not long after the turn of the century. Barely two years after Fuhrmann’s death, silent films were then on their way out, soon to be updated by newfangled “talkies.” It is this same cycle of rapid-fire technological progress that will ultimately doom the smartphone in favor of some other technology – something newer and better.
As Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter explained it, capitalism is a perpetual cycle of “creative destruction.” The old gets blown away and replaced by the new.
In his work Capitalism in America: A History, Alan Greenspan and columnist Adrian Wooldridge trumpeted Schumpeter’s concept of creative destruction. This concept, this idea, is described as a “perennial gale” that constantly roams about the land that “uproots businesses – and lives – but that, in the process, creates a more productive economy.” Technological progress is thus baked into the very bones of our economic system. No matter how much you might love the little box of tricks in your pocket, you can’t stop the cycle.
A mythical interlude
Let’s get weird for a moment.
Imagine, if you will, Technology and Capitalism personified. Let us give them the honor of being Archetypes. Technology looks every bit the cool, forward-thinking entity that he is. Tech is draped in a thick robe of fiber optic cables, a robe that covers a skin made up of microscopic 1s and 0s. His hair is slicked back, like a delicate mass of carbon fiber. Around his head buzz a dozen tiny drones, all humming and moving chaotically – chaotically, that is, until you realize that the drones are programmed to merely seem chaotic. Because chaos, even if it’s just a program, is cool.
Tech’s older brother, (or younger, they can never quite tell who came first and who second), Capitalism, is more focused. Some would say he’s dour, but in truth he is merely controlled. His eyes shine like a pair of Mughal rubies; his cheeks are crimson, still tingling from his morning shave. His hair is ruler-parted, and perfectly coiffed; it appears as black as tar and almost as dangerous. His suit is woven of dark, heavy golden thread. It shimmers, from dark to light, depending on how he moves, on where he is, on what the sun is doing. Each button is a shiny, polished coin but, much like his suit, they change depending on where he is. Sometimes the coins are Silver Dollars, other times they are Euros, or Yen, or Pesos. They change frequently; blink and you’ll miss it. He is a gilded, golden pyramid and, like his brother Tech, he has the ability to be anywhere and to do anything that he wants, whenever he wants.
Tech wraps an arm around his brother’s shoulders. Capitalism echoes the motion, and they stand like a pair of immortal siblings peering out over the vast continuum of history. War or peace, it doesn’t really matter. To them, one view is as good as the other.
“So for me, so for you?” Technology asks.
Capitalism cannot help but reply, cunningly and cryptically, “As above, so below.”
They watch the world unfold above, below, and all around them. They do everything while doing nothing. They are real, but unreal. They are the truth, but also a lie. They own the good just as much as they own the bad – they have stockpiled both in equal measure and only a final accounting will tell on which side of the ledger they fall. But, really, whether it be black or red, at the end of time it won’t matter to either one of them. They are not about the end, only about the present. If it’s always the present, the end can never come.
Looking Forward
For good and for ill, technology and capitalism thrive on constant, creative destruction. The implication of this is that as soon as something better (or as good or at least better marketed) comes around, that this new technology will sit astride the throne. We have already seen Google Glass and the Metaverse fall in defeat, failures in deposing the smartphone as the gadget. Both pressed their cases very, very hard. Perhaps, without going too deep into the idea, that was why they failed – you can’t force popularity and coolness, you can only try and achieve it through being, well, cool.
But, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. When the smartphone falls, it will fall to something that will seem painfully obvious in retrospect, as if this new, cooler tech was the smartphone’s natural successor. We have only to look to our own popular culture to catch glimpses of what that thing might be. As Star Trek’s communicator presaged the entire concept of a mobile or smartphone, no doubt the new thing will be something we have already seen, something that exists already in the fictional world. Odds are that it only needs a little push – a statement of cool – to overthrow the rule of the smartphone.
Perhaps the next wearer of the twin crown of Technology and Capitalism will be a different version of the Google Glass, or something like the eyePhone from Futurama (complete with a quick and painful installation directly behind the eye). More realistically, it may be something like the holographic data readout in Iron Man’s suit, an information display that only a user can see and that is coded to a person-specific biomarker.
It might sound a little too far-fetched, but is it? Our thumbprints and faces are already used to control access to our smartphones and you can even use FaceID to unlock individual apps on your iPhone. Holographic technology, once something that only existed in fiction, is now just a thing that exists. Not only that, but it’s a technology that is constantly improving, bringing dead singers and movie stars back to life. Whatever new technology comes along it will find a way to escape the prison of the phone case.
And when this (or some other) combination does come into its fifteen minutes of fame, the smartphone, like the Kaiserpanorama, will be relegated to the scrap heap of history. Eventually, no matter how good or bad, useful or useless, the smartphone’s successor is, it too will fall to the wayside and be discarded in the end.
This is the cycle of creative destruction, and there is nothing you can do to stop it.
[This essay first appeared on Desert Dispatch on January 2, 2024.]
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