We often see technological development as a silver bullet that can change everything, but that bullet still has to be sized to fit a gun, even if it’s a 3D-printed gun. Structural changes are usually incremental and new technologies have to accommodate that pace. It’s evolution, not revolution. It can’t impose perfection and order upon the world. The telephone, for instance, started conversations but did not end wars. 

In his final BBC column, Tom Chatfield addresses revolution as it relates to technology. The opening:

“Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that ‘if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.’ Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a ‘world that has whatever organisation it already has.’

As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded ‘nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…’

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much ‘a new organization of society’ as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.”