The Fatal — Or Is it Fateful? — Conceit

Since the mid-’80s, a long progression of doomsayers have warned that our declining market share in the patents-and-Ph.D.s business augurs dark times for American innovation. The specific threats have changed. It was the Japanese who would destroy us in the ’80s; now it’s China and India. But what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn’t build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years. — “How Twitter Will Change the Way We Live,” Time Magazine

So let me get this straight. We aim to stay atop the heap, on an of-the-moment-to-moment basis, by getting the world to adopt our latest structures of thought by constantly inventing new ones? What light at the end of this mental tunnel vision? If we can only win the innovation game by changing only our ‘lifestyles’, one day we will awake to discover someone else has changed our lives.

(thru PEG )