Innovation, Revolution, Change … and Stasis

Abstract

A new year, a new volume of Engineering Studies. Fittingly, our thirteenth volume arrives at a rather inauspicious time. As my editorials for volume 12 indicate, the past year has been tumultuous – a year of constant upheavals from every direction. Yet one of the frustrations of the past year is that, despite all the tumult, toomuch has stayed the same. Inmanyways, constant change has created a new world that is just like the old one, only more so and in some of the worst ways. The feeling thatwe are stuck on a treadmill where both everything and nothing changes applies to many domains of social life, but since this is a journal of engineering studies I’ll stick to areaswhere engineers andengineeringplay some role. Yet engineers andengineering are so ubiquitous that that hardly limits my scope. To start with, the ‘tech industry’ – i.e. firms that seek to associate themselves with engineering expertise – has had another very goodyear, evenasother firmsandmany individuals haveexperiencedevenmoreeconomic precarity than usual.1 The wealthy people at the head of the tech industry have become far wealthier, exacerbating inequalities that were already problematic before the pandemic began.2 Demand for certain highly-engineered products such as semiconductor chips has surged because of the pandemic, further widening that gap (in political influence, profits, and cultural standing) between old-line manufacturing firms (particularly in the auto industry) and ascendant ‘tech’ companies like Apple.3 Meanwhile, employers’ long campaign to blur any distinction between ‘work’ and ‘life’ has only been accelerated by the pandemic. Those who can’t (or aren’t allowed to) work fromhome risk their lives byperforming their jobs;while for thosewhocanwork fromhome the distinction between work and non-work is increasingly irrelevant. And that switch to working from home is predicated on employees’ use of engineered technologies of both telepresence and surveillance. Indeed, the technologies that monitor whether employees are constantly working and students are continuously paying attention reinforce longstanding modes of surveillance and control.4 In some cases those technologies even latch onto very old ideas from phrenology!5 Indeed, we are in something of a phrenological moment, since that movement was foundational for criminology, eugenics, and the statistics underlyingmachine learning algorithms – i.e. the technical fields concernedwith some of the past year’s most-contested arenas.6 Fittingly, then, this issue of Engineering Studies is about change – and related keywords such as innovation and revolution – but it is also about stasis and the persistence of old wine in new bottles. That makes all of issue 13.1 a small and hardly adequate tribute to the scholar memorialized in Dominique Vinck’s opening obituary, Benoît Godin. For a certain segmentof our readers, Godinwas a trulymassivepresencewhodidmuch to stem the flood of uncritical innovation discourse with a dose of much-needed skepticism. Other readers, though, might not know Godin’s intellectual histories of the concept of innovation and of