Technological Involution | rohan ganapavarapu

Technological Involution

28 Jun, 2026

Very few people have deep conviction in technology, or really even understand technology in vivo.

stagnation

In 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” was released to theaters. It was a microcosm of a cultural infatuation we had with the future. Technology had reinvented our lives many times over, and there was this cosmic hunger for what would come next.

We had split the atom, gone to space, and it felt like some MIT professor was on the cusp of traveling through time. The CIA was putting microphones into cats, making dragonfly-shaped drones, and building claws the size of a football field to pick Soviet subs off the sea floor.

In the coming years, after the Cambrian explosion of sci-fi, we began implementing these ideas. Critically, we forgot how to have them.

What would “2001: A Space Odyssey” look like if it were made in the present day? We have no imagined frontiers past space. We have no imagined endangering technologies past AI. It would simply be more space, more AI. When envisioning the future, our awestruck curiosity has soured into “Black Mirror”-style fetishization about the End of The World. In fact, the public doesn’t just disregard technology; it holds it in contempt, viewing it as a tool of subjugation in the hands of a capitalist technocracy.

Increasingly, it seems we are approaching the upper bound of what’s possible under human conception. As if we have mined the space of possible ideas; all that’s left is the drudgery of engineering which spawns wanton pessimism. We found all the cool, useful technology, and those who own the institutions which pervade this cycle will forever own us (i.e. permanent underclass). The engine of progress itself has stalled.

degradation

When not captivated by the future, we turn to the present. The present proves worse than it once was. The president won on this thesis: Make America Great Again. The mayor of New York, with polar-opposite politics, won on this thesis: Make New York Affordable.

In capitalist society, the latent sign of degradation is affordability. Literally signifying a lack of abundance. People have no hope for the future; technology won’t save us, but it’s what makes our lives worse. Society is a closed, zero-sum system to be rebalanced.

The dirty secret is that society is directionally correct. Technology has stagnated. Things are worse, “enshittification”. Capitalism’s competitive pressure towards innovation is no longer.

What you see is all there is. Humans reflexively generalize the visible unto universal truth, when perhaps there are more principled explanations. Is this enshittification only a regime local to the cheap-money era?

The PC revolution is at its tail, and we are slavishly bombarded by a flavor-of-the-week orthodoxy about what to build–one which Silicon Valley inculcated and capitalized and founders took for their own conviction.

Trivially, the normative behavior of Silicon Valley is acting as selection pressure for what exists. Taken to its end, power/knowledge becomes capital/conviction. Who publishes the blog posts? Who kingmakes the merchants of narrative? Everyone wants to be like their heroes… who chose them? It is in fact the institutions of the valley’s job to commoditize culture, repackage it as bridge loans of credibility.[0]

The milieu the founder is seeded from is only seemingly random–pervaded by narratives peddled and capitalized by people no more cognizant than him. A looped, self-assuring game of telephone constructively interfering into truth. If a group of KOLs deem something The Next Big Thing, for fear of missing it, or desire for acceptance, more people will attach themselves to it. Popularity begets itself. Conviction is incepted in the founder, which he mistakes for his own; he unconsciously assumes the folklore to be true simply because it appears everyone else does.

To have conviction in technology is to believe the stagnation is contingent, a contracted horizon of expectation, rather than endemic, a ceiling on what’s possible. Good technology will ride the rails of capitalism as intended, our stagnation is downstream society’s conventions and affectations–the mirage of a false horizon.

We have been focused on software and the personal computing revolution. But all of our attempts (e.g. the Metaverse) have failed to bring our lives online. The mundane, everyday reality of the vast majority of people has not gotten better at the same rate it once did. Or they simply have stopped believing it will.

Companies have begun treating the populace as something to be mined. To be exploited, like feudalists. There is finite value, and we must extract all of it. We have huge corpo-slop incumbent media. A flanderization of franchise. How much more impossible can the mission get?

bits, atoms, and hard...