My family’s weekend newspaper wasn’t complete without the Innovations catalogue—a glossy insert advertising magnificently pointless products such as the “Breath Alert” bad-breath detector or a necktie that operated via a concealed zip-fastener.1 Innovations eventually became defunct, to be replaced by Facebook ads for much the same junk. But while the advertising brochure was absurd, the idea behind it has long been a tempting one: innovations are products that you can buy—or cheaper, better versions of things you’ve been buying all along.
It’s not hard to see why this view is more attractive than a zip-up tie. It puts innovation into a box—perhaps even a gift-wrapped box. If innovation is about cool new gadgets to enjoy, then it hardly seems threatening. If you don’t want the cool new gadget, you don’t have to buy it, although there are plenty of advertisers who’d love to try to sell it to you.
As we’ve already seen, inventions in the wild aren’t quite so tame and cuddly. The plow was a better way to grow crops, but it wasn’t just a better way to grow crops. It ushered in an utterly new way of life, even if you personally never used a plow. And it didn’t help everyone in the same way. More recent innovations have the same quality. Collectively they have changed how we eat, how we play, how we care for children, where we live, and with whom we have sex. And these social changes have been intimately bound up with economic changes, too—in particular, who gets paid a serious salary for their work and who gets paid nothing at all.
Real innovations don’t come in a glossy brochure: they shape our world whether we buy them or not.