Technology Lacks a Cultural Hinterland - by Dale Lovell

The Soup Is Getting Cold

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Technology Lacks a Cultural Hinterland<br>Why the industry is ill-prepared for the cultural and human complexity it now shapes.

Dale Lovell<br>Mar 19, 2026

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Tech claims to be a logical industry. Rational. Built on the process of mapping engineering problems; develop, deploy, scale, debug, update. Repeat.<br>This is why STEM backgrounds were so essential for the pioneers of the industry in the early years of digital tech.

My background is not in STEM. I’m a history graduate. But I worked in advertising technology for many years.<br>Nowadays the tech industry has become an enviable career destination - and when you look at the salaries, particularly in the US, you can see why. But when I graduated 25+ years ago few people beyond ‘computer geeks’ wanted to work in tech.<br>A decade or so ago most people working in the industry had some experience, or at least a cursory understanding of other industries, other markets. But as the technology field has grown, today that experience can be increasingly rare.<br>This narrowing is a challenge for Big Tech that will be super-charged by AI.<br>The highly educated, ambitious and intelligent career driven-people who have coalesced around technology leadership in more recent years often have a more insular view of work. Their only experience is in the tech industry.<br>Tech as an Industry Has No Tradition

From a tradition perspective we’re still in the infancy period for the tech industry.<br>Unlike law, or politics, or the military, or even manufacturing and wider retail activity, there is no ‘past’ to look back on as an example of how to act. We are in the ‘heritage-building stage,’ of tech, now.<br>As a result there really are no roots; there is a lack of a shared heritage to the industry beyond a Silicon Valley stereotype. People just copy what seems to work, what gets rewarded, with little time to ‘wait and see’.<br>Behaviour, tone, ambition flows downward from a small number of visible figures. Musk, Gates, Zuckerberg, Altman, et al have and will continue to set the template on how the industry acts, for future generations.<br>Share

These pillars of the industry may very well be looked upon by future generations in the same way we approach Medieval kings, Georgian slave-traders, or Victorian cotton-mill owners today, but for now, if you are joining the tech industry, you will, to some small extent, mirror them. Or at the very least you are aware of them as some sort of industry north star; a barometer of how you should and can act.<br>So as an industry tech sees human complexity as an engineering challenge to be compressed in favour of speed and scale over lived consequence; hesitation is seen as a character flaw and reflection a waste of time.<br>A Lack of a Cultural Hinterland

On Instagram recently I was served a clip from Richard Osman and Marina Hyde’s The Rest is Entertainment podcast. On it Hyde talked about the ‘lack of a cultural hinterland’ for many of today’s public figures. The phrase, used to describe someone who has limited knowledge of or interest in subjects outside their professional life, particularly a grounding in history, literature, art, philosophy, and lived experience, jumped out at me.<br>The phrase encapsulates this narrowing, an insular way of thinking and of operating that has become insidious in technology. There is a cavernous gap in tech’s ‘cultural hinterland’.<br>Is it deliberate? By design? Or is it just the end result we should expect when an industry prioritises technical optimisation and builds a collective mindset of ‘move fast and break things’?<br>“In Silicon Valley’s rigidly utilitarian conception of the human condition, there’s no room for imagination or aesthetics, metaphysics or faith,” writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows and Superbloom on Unherd.<br>“As for beauty, we’ll have to content ourselves with discovering it in an app interface. It [Silicon Valley] elevates technology to the position that art, literature, and even religion used to hold.”<br>Instead we have tech podcasts, tech-X, Linkedin posts and tech thinkpieces from tech founders quoting other tech founders. It can feel like a constant adulatory feedback loop.

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Share The Soup Is Getting Cold<br>A Lack of Understanding About the World

What worries me is not that technologists lack intelligence or good intentions, but that the industry increasingly lacks a rich understanding of the human world it is reshaping. Or in the language of technology and data; are we building the future on assumptions and analysis based on too small a pool of corrupted inputs and data?<br>There are too many cliches about ‘tech-bros’ already, and of course there are people working in tech deeply interested in literature, history, philosophy, and art, but as tech-culture doesn’t reward it, their interests remain invisible.<br>Tech is not the only industry to be like this, but due to the disproportionate influence...