History's Real "Killer Apps" Are Analog

Can we think about Western civilization starting from invention rather than from the epic? This unusual pair of thinkers, Steven Johnson and Niall Ferguson, read glass, cold, time and work as milestones that tell a story very different from the one told by screens.

Here's a simple exercise for any professional or academic setting: ask about "killer apps" and listen to the answers. They'll almost certainly point to some chatbot or the next update of some model, maybe a robotics integration. But few will point to anything more analog. The question is a trap, because these days the word "app" is always tied to software, yet we need to be able to turn that thinking around to understand which technologies, or applications of them, have changed our lives, which ones we take for granted, and how, as part of the landscape, they have also shaped us.

Steven Johnson and Niall Ferguson read glass, cold, time and work as milestones that tell a story very different from the one told by screens.

The thing is, when we think about innovation, we think about the screen, without exception. What's new has to shine, get updated every year and fit in your pocket. There is, however, a tradition of thinkers who challenge that premise at the root, and among them I'd single out Steven Johnson and Niall Ferguson, who frame a history of civilization told through the objects and institutions that made it possible. Their paths differ, but they speak to each other in a way worth piecing together.

The birth control pill, mother of invention

Before we get into the catalog these authors propose, let's make a convenient stop at an earlier concept, less well known but sharper: the evolutionary gateway, proposed in 1972 by futurologist John McHale. The idea is simple and uncomfortable at the same time. Every significant invention might, strictly speaking, never have happened (it was contingent, it depended on specific people crossing paths in specific cities at specific moments), but once it happens, history splits into a before and an after with no way back. Sooner or later every successful technology starts to look inevitable, even if it never was.

A good example, one McHale didn't live to see but which perfectly illustrates his idea, is the birth control pill. Sanger and Pincus might never have crossed paths in New York, McCormick might have spent her fortune on something else, and yet once the compound was synthesized in pill form it proved impossible to go back: it fundamentally changed who controlled reproduction, long before society had finished debating it.

Now then, which of all human inventions deserves the top spot on that list? The question is a trap, because the order depends on who's doing the ordering. Richard Saul Wurman explained years ago that all information can be organized in five possible ways (by location, alphabet, time, category or hierarchy), and the hierarchical is the most deceptive of all because it hides the criteria of whoever decides what goes on top and what goes on the bottom. Stanislaw Lem warned of something similar when he insisted that all futurology says more about the person writing it than about the future itself. The same goes for anyone putting together a ranking of inventions that changed the world.

The robot that tells another story

Steven Johnson solves that problem elegantly in How We Got to Now (2015), picking up an idea from philosopher Manuel DeLanda: imagine how a robot, or some kind of non-human intelligence indifferent to our vanities, would tell human history. That narrator wouldn't dwell on empires or battles, but on the mechanisms that reorganized how we perceive, move and think: glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light.

Of the six, glass is the one that best lends itself to thinking about "analog killer apps." It first appears as a curiosity in Tutankhamun's tomb, shaped like a scarab, and takes centuries to become useful: first as reading stones that monks laid over manuscripts, later as discs cut on the island of Murano that corrected eyesight. For a long time almost nobody knew they were farsighted or nearsighted, quite simply because there was no name for the ailment and no object to fix it. The mass trigger, predictable but rarely remembered, was Gutenberg's printing press.

For a long time almost nobody knew they were farsighted or nearsighted, quite simply because there was no name for the ailment and no object to fix it.

Steven Johnson calls this the hummingbird effect, as opposed to the familiar butterfly effect: it's easier to imagine a world without hummingbirds than a world without flowers, because the hummingbird is an evolutionary adaptation derived from the prior existence of the flower. Something similar happens with eyeglasses. From then on glass never stopped zigzagging: microscopes and telescopes that opened up worlds for Galileo and Pasteur, cathode ray tubes that switched on the society of the image, fiber optics that today literally hold up the infrastructure of the Internet. I wrote about that same faith in tools as an engine of change before, in connection with the Whole Earth Catalog, the publication Stewart Brand imagined as a toolbox for rethinking life as a whole.

Six applications with two faces

Let's agree that up to this point Johnson's path is purely material: objects that unlock other objects. Niall Ferguson looks at the same problem from another angle, more institutional than technical, in Civilization (2018): instead of objects, six institutions that function as applications (he himself uses the phrase killer apps) and that explain, in his view, how the West ended up dominating much of the planet over the last five centuries. The object of study changes, but the underlying logic is the same.

Each institution Ferguson identifies (competition, science, private property, medicine, consumption and work) functions, according to him, as an application of Western civilization, although we'd rather not call them that so as not to confuse them with software. They all share a two-faced structure that Ferguson illustrates with the figure of Janus, the two-faced Roman god: competition can degenerate into monopoly, science into superstition, property into slavery, medicine into a power as capable of killing as of curing, work into unproductive leisure. Only then, looking at both faces at once, does the list begin to make historical sense.

It's worth pausing on a few of these pairs. Competition, for Ferguson, is not a cultural trait but the concrete result of European political and economic decentralization, which for centuries kept any single empire from controlling the whole continent and forced states to innovate in order not to fall behind. Something similar happens with private property, which he reads as the true foundation of representative democracy: a simple rule that made it possible to settle disputes without systematically resorting to violence. Even the West's most praised system of government is born, in this reading, out of something as prosaic as who owns what.

Each institution Ferguson identifies (competition, science, private property, medicine, consumption and work) functions, according to him, as an application of Western civilization.

All of this could easily be read as a triumphalist fable about the West, and that's precisely the reading Ferguson himself asks us to avoid. He insists that every rise coexists with simultaneous declines elsewhere in the world, and that the study of collapse deserves as much attention as that of emergence: the Ming dynasty fell in 1644 through a combination of fiscal crisis, climate change and epidemic; the Ottoman Empire was weakened more by internal failures than by external pressure; Simón Bolívar never managed to federate a United States of Latin America equivalent to the one up north. Those three cases alone are enough to make you distrust any story of permanent superiority.

From bit to atom

It's also interesting to follow the thread forward, because both Johnson and Ferguson write looking at the past in order to illuminate present decisions, and here it's worth adding a third author neither of them cites much: MIT's Neil Gershenfeld and his idea of a third digital revolution. After bits transformed communications and after they transformed computing, Gershenfeld argues, they are now beginning to transform the manufacturing of objects directly: we're going from programming virtual worlds to programming the physical world. 3D printing, personal digital fabrication, the possibility that anyone can design and produce what they need instead of buying it.

It's already happening, though still at a small scale or in near-artisanal projects. In Argentina a clear example is Gino Tubaro, with his experience manufacturing functional hand prostheses for kids with amputated limbs using 3D printers, or the case of the engineering students who proposed to the head of transplants at the Favaloro Foundation that they print three-dimensional models of organs to rehearse surgeries before operating, and thereby managed to remove a tumor without compromising the organ. Objects that twenty years ago would have sounded like science fiction now come out of a desktop printer.

Nobody invents alone

What Johnson underscores, and what both Ferguson and Gershenfeld take for granted without dwelling on it, is that none of this happens in isolation. The myth of the lone inventor (the garage Steve Jobs, the genius who one day has the idea) collapses as soon as you look closely: the major scientific prizes of recent decades are rarely awarded to a single person, and real innovation processes are made of anonymous collaborators, borrowed ideas and shared trial and error. As at Black Mountain College, where artists and scientists lived together on purpose so the disciplines would contaminate one another. Collaboration, there as here, isn't an added value: it's the condition of possibility.

Granting that innovation is collective and slow, we still have to explain why some technologies take generations to catch on and others seem to install themselves overnight. Everett Rogers proposed a curve decades ago that remains useful: first the enthusiasts and innovators, then the early adopters, then the pragmatic majority and finally the skeptics, each group with its own threshold of risk tolerance. That accounts for much of the difference between a technology that genuinely changes everyday life and one that stays in a trade-show display case.

The myth of the lone inventor (the garage Steve Jobs, the genius who one day has the idea) collapses as soon as you look closely.

Just as useful is Clayton Christensen's take on why established industries tend to show up late to their own revolutions: they fear the new technology will cannibalize the business that already works, and while they hesitate, users end up finding uses for it that the original manufacturer never even anticipated. Over time, with basic needs met, the product simply becomes good enough and its technical performance stops mattering much.

So when someone asks how to design organizations, cities or leadership with a genuinely innovative logic, Johnson and Ferguson's answer doesn't run through the next screen update but through paying attention to the evolutionary gateways we've already crossed without noticing: the glass that let us keep reading after forty, the cold that reorganized the food trade, the clock that synchronized entire factories, work understood as an ethic before an obligation. None of those inventions promised to change the world when it appeared; none asked permission or announced its own importance in a keynote, and yet there they are, silently holding up everything else while we wait for the next notification as if it were going to save us from something. How many of the analog killer apps that hold up your day would you recognize if they stopped working tomorrow, and how many of the apps you carry in your pocket would you notice if they simply vanished?