For a good period in the middle ages, Europeans totally forgot how to make concrete. The Roman recipe for the tough stuff – opus caementicium – was lost for roughly 600 years after the fall of the empire, and the modern formula we know and love wasn’t invented for another 300 years after that.
I’m telling you this because human progress isn’t linear. It’s fine to go backwards and forwards – to retread old ground and improve old ideas. Yet if someone approached Theo Paphitis with a cinder block tomorrow, he’d rightly tell them to get the hell out of the Dragons’ Den. So why do we keep falling over ourselves to praise Silicon Valley for reinventing concrete – or, if you prefer your analogies more straightforward, the wheel?
Last week, the New York Times ran a piece praising a “radically new” fee plan offered by a Silicon Valley-based university. Instead of charging tuition fees upfront, Lambda School allows students to pay back their debts after graduation – charging them proportionally, based on their salary. Sound familiar? Anyone with experience of the English education system will balk at the New York Times’s insistence that Silicon Valley is “breaking the status quo” – this has, after all, been the tuition fee model in England for 30 years.
It’s not that this is necessarily a bad idea – the average American graduate owes $37,172 (£30,000) in student loans, with studies predicting that inflexible monthly repayments will mean recent grads can’t retire until they’re 75. Yet it is the language we use to praise these allegedly “new” ideas that needs reform. It’s not “radical” if it already exists.
Take, for instance, the ride-hailing app Lyft’s 2017 invention, Lyft Shuttle. For a small fee, passengers share a single car that follows a predesignated route – instead of being picked up and dropped off at their chosen location, they must walk to or from one of the determined stops. It’s convenient! It’s affordable! It’s a bus.
Tweets mocking Lyft Shuttle instantly went viral, but there’s actually very little that’s funny about it. Not only is the whole idea arguably classist (online, people have praised Lyft Shuttle for allowing them to get around without sitting next to common riff-raff), in practice, the service could harm investment in existing public transport. As Salon writer Keith A Spencer pointed out in 2017, by competing with existing infrastructure, Lyft Shuttle could leave poorer people with fewer and worse transit options than they had already. Not only is Silicon Valley wrapping up an old idea in a new bow, they’re threatening much-needed public services.
Then again, some “inventions” are just funny. Last year, the fashion company Atoms promised to “modernise the footwear experience” by offering tennis shoes in quarter sizes (for the bargain price of £140!). In 2017 a team of Swedish inventors released their Pause Pod – a “private pop-up space” where busy employees could relax, which – yes, yes, you’ve guessed it – was just a tent. “We never claimed that it’s not a tent,” the Scandinavian developers offered in their defence.
The examples are in fact endless: in 2017 We Work launched co-living spaces which were essentially just student dorms with added yoga; a startup’s brand new Bodega boxes were just vending machines; and no one will ever forget Juicero (rest in peace), the £300 machine that – investors realised all too late – essentially just poured juice. Most recently, everyone’s favourite Silicon Valley cyborg, Elon Musk, was mocked for his loop system, which provides underground tracks for cars. Australians felt this borrowed heavily from Adelaide’s O-Bahn system, which has existed for buses since 1986.
Again, there’s nothing wrong with attempting to improve old inventions (though I have to politely insist that the relevant parties bring back pre-sugar tax Irn Bru). It’s just egos and the language employed by Silicon Valley are automatically annoying. While products might be marginal improvements on their predecessors, they often come with a host of new problems – such as Lyft’s dystopian insistence that a driver who gave birth on the job was somehow “impressive”, instead of a victim of lax modern labour laws.
Not only are these products nowhere near as revolutionary as they sound, these companies and their inventors often ignore the majority of people to improve lives for a privileged minority. They’re too busy operating in a bubble of their own perceived brilliance to know what might work – old and new – in the wider world.
• Amelia Tait is a freelance features writer
