I’m currently devouring Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time (as much as it’s possible to plow through such a dense book.) In the first section, he spends some time on the distinction between two terms, invention and innovation. Invention, scientific research and the creation of specific technical objects, is contrasted with “innovation”, which, as he quotes from Bertrand Gille, “is mainly of an economic order.” Innovation is the work of socialization needed to integrate an invention into a mode of production; essentially, the work of the entrepreneur, or in the terminology of Big Tech,【ｄｉｓｒｕｐｔｉｏｎ】. Though it’s worth noting that he has a much broader definition of what constitutes innovation: “Carrying certain hypothesis of the above viewpoint to their extreme limits, one might surmise that the French Revolution was perhaps less a realization of the exigency that the rights of the human be guaranteed, less a capture of power by the bourgeois, than an adaption of the society to a new technical system through the full development of what Weber calls free work.”

You can see already that implicit in Stiegler’s framing is that culture is subordinated to technical systems, is primarily a way of adapting to a particular mode of production, though he takes his materialism much farther as the book progresses. He notes that the gap between invention and innovation has grown shorter as development, his term for the whole cycle of production-innovation-adaptation, has been rapidly accelerating since the industrial revolution. “From the very beginning of modern technics, the transfer time of scientific discovery to technical invention and then to technical innovation has considerably shortened: ‘One hundred and two years elapsed between the discovery of the physical phenomenon applied to the photograph and photography itself (1727—1829)’ whereas the transfer time was reduced to ‘fifty-six years for the telephone, thirty-five for radio, twelve for television, fourteen for radar, six for the uranium bomb, five for the transistor’ (Gille 1978, 39).” As a result of the pressures of capital, investment, and profit, invention becomes subordinated to the innovation, resulting in ever-faster cycles of disruption and adaptation that constitute late capitalism. “The concept of technoscience derives from this established meaning, in which technics and sciences become inseparable, in which rationality is confined to usefulness—for Habermas, the usefulness of capital as ‘purposive-rational action’ (1987, 106). This is an inversion, even a perversion, of the initial epistemological model of philosophy by which theory, the essence of science, is defined by its independence from useful finalities, that is, anthropocentric ones.”

This got me thinking about the further development of this dynamic in Big Tech, and how the pressure of innovation even leads to a reversal of the order of events, scientific discovery–technical invention–technical innovation. Many of the recent high-profile tech IPOs, companies like Uber and Doordash, have been companies who’s value proposition rests on an invention which does not yet exist, namely practical, scalable and safe self driving cars. Yet the force of disruption is so great that it is possible to acquire massive investment trusting that the invention will come later, as long as sufficient capital is available. You can also see this with the massive over-valuation of Tesla, a company which, while producing plenty of specific technical inventions, has not produced anything which could justify the investment of capital they have amassed.

Does this mean that the pace of scientific discovery and invention is dragging further and further behind the ever increasing speed of disruption? Is capital speculating into the wind, unaware of a gap that cannot be closed without a massive reorganization? Or does technocapital know something we don’t? Obviously the markets can be fooled, as with Theranos, but as economists are always eager to point out, such mistakes are “quickly” corrected (though never without human cost.) Is it possible capital can reverse the order of events, conjuring breakthroughs out of thin air to justify its massive investment? Or will we see ever-larger upheavals and gluts as science and engineering fail to make good on the promises of the market?

If markets cannot teleologically summon the invention necessary to actually displace existing modes of production which are supposedly outdated, what force or policy can correct the growing gap between basic research and markets? Do we need a massive state investment in research institutions? Can capital itself close the gap from within in this dynamic in which research is always already subordinated to innovation, a dynamic which seems to have created the problem in the first place?