While I agree with your sentiment, I think it can be worthwhile to think about innovation in different ways. Innovation is often used to mean invention, especially when it comes to technology, but invention is only a small part of innovation. Building new business models, or adapting technology and business models to new situations, is the main part of innovation.

Inventing new tech to solve the climate crisis is of course bullshit, but using existing tech in novel ways to solve the climate crisis is also innovation. We probably need to think outside of the narrow business sense as well, but changing society still requires innovation.

We need disruptive innovations, not in the sense of a new app, but as something that disrupts the fossil fuel economy.

Technology is a longer synonym for tools.

You can invent wheels, put them on a cart, and haul your crops to market, or you can jump in the cart and roll off the edge of the nearest cliff. Your choice. The wheels don't care.

The problem is capitalism.

"Innovation" is just "something new that we can sell you". "Doing the work" generally means buying less. Nobody is ever gonna spend millions to blanket society in that message. Nobody's going to become a billionaire off that message.

Our entire society is designed around selling you stuff, and designed to give all power to the best salespeople. Until that changes you will never see society at large adopt any solution that is not fundamentally a sales pitch.

Bill Nye's speech in Last Week Tonight was brilliant in that regard. I'm sure everyone has seen this a number of times, but this one, really, can't be watched too often.

youtube.com/watch?v=V-KmkWSKrm…

Innovation is figuring out what CAN be done
Standardization is figuring out how ANYONE can do it

They serve different communities and different functions. They're adjacent, but easily separated.

I own a 3D printer. Little, simple thing. Sometimes I use CAD software to make my own models to then print - lowest tier innovation.

I use an app to choose models that other people have uploaded with predetermined settings for the printer to use for each model - lowest tier standardization.

Yes!

Though I'd say what we need is social/political innovation, not technological innovation.

@jplebreton

#quote | «The demand for more Innovation (and sometimes even the request for more research) has become a way to legitimize not doing anything».

this!

tante.cc/2025/02/03/innovation…

Innovation is a distraction

The headline is of course a bit of a provocation. Not all Innovation is a distraction, there are many areas in which meaningful work happens any day to generate some form of relevant new product or process or technology.

^{tante (Smashing Frames)}

Most of the big problems, such as the climate crisis and the rise of the extreme right, are caused by human action and don’t require technology to solve.

Sure, technology can help, eg., PV cells, climate-neutral concrete, but ultimately it’s a matter of politics.

“I was taught about the “greenhouse effect” in motherfucking school 30 years ago and my schools never have been especially avant-garde”

yes yes yes. i say that so often. we were taught this stuff, including fckw and ozone and waste in oceans and melting glaciers 35 years ago. in schools in <1K ppl villages in the alps! (aka Peter’s school, not Heidi’s). they even addressed that there might be no more skiing when we grow up. in areas that live off ski tourism!