Rapid technological change and the need for greater granular analysis of “flexible,” “adaptive” and “obsolete”

I

What do we call the stage of knowledge-making between technological incompletion and delaying completion? Might it be something like learning from prototyping, or from repairing and repairing again?

But what if prototyping and repair seem without end these days? That is, obsolescence more and more precedes completion, which in turn leads us right back to unknowledge? What if no one saw the need to record the processes of prototyping or repair because something new or better always comes along early (or so they thought). Such indeed “is why we know the names of every Roman emperor but don’t know how they mixed their concrete, or why we have thousands of pages of Apollo program documents but couldn’t build a Saturn V today” (https://www.scopeofwork.net/ise-jingu-and-the-pyramid-of-enabling-technologies/).

An important, but under-acknowledged, consequence follows from technologies as well as technological processes always being immanently obsolete. This too supports the temporary and flexible over the permanent and institutional when it comes to organizational structures to handle technological policy and management. If wicked social problems by definition withstand institutional solutionism, then why expect permanent opposition to the short-run and adaptive in organizational response to technology?

II

The problem with the preceding paragraphs is that they stop short of the needful. “Short-run,” “adaptable” and “flexible” are not granular enough to catch the place-and-time specific–that is, often improvisational–properties of actually-existing adaptation, flexibility and performance under real-time urgencies. When in the face of complex technological disruption or failure, what you have before you are not distinct and separate probabilities and consequences, but rather the mess of contingencies and aftermaths.

To put the same point positively, we are talking about the requirement to be case-specific in regards to technological change. And just what cases would these be? Let me conclude with one example of what I am trying to describe above:

Like barcodes, QR codes were not originally designed to become components of global information infrastructures: their success as infrastructural gateways was largely unplanned and contingent on unpredictable sociotechnical convergences. Every step of this gradual historical process has been situated in specific national or regional contexts, scaling up “entire infrastructural systems out of situated local needs” (Edwards et al., 2009, p. 370): barcode standardization has shaped the U.S. market economy; the machine-readability of QR codes has enhanced the efficiency of Japanese manufacturing logistics; their uptake as analog portals was made possible by the rapid informatization of East Asian countries; their consolidation as meta-generic gateway was catalyzed by the infrastructuralization of Chinese digital platforms. Lastly, the emergence of QR codes as infrastructural gateways was opportunistic, as they occupied a niche that competing gateways were not flexible enough to cover: through services like Alipay and WeChat Pay, QR codes took on the role of debit and credit cards, which had never achieved the same success as a gateway in China as they did in 20th-century America (Lauer, 2020, p. 11)

(accessed online at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/20594364231183618; highlighted terms by the article’s author)

Also, no one should doubt that obsolescence has been well at work in this domain, e.g., in the transition from barcodes to QR codes (https://www.nrfbigshoweurope.com/en/industry-trends/Barcode-era).