Most of the time, innovators don’t move fast and break things

The Otts exemplify everything innovation mythology erases: anonymous contributors, incremental adaptation, necessity-driven problem-solving during the Great Depression, and collaborative family effort rather than lone genius. Bill and daughter Lizzie ‘hacked the automobile and re-invented the washing machine’ by removing a rear tire and adding a drive belt—exactly the kind of innovation ‘thought leaders at Davos or TED’ celebrate rhetorically, yet ‘how come you haven’t heard of the Otts?’ Because the Great White Man narrative systematically ignores ‘the critical role that anonymous, unrecognised people play in the incrementalism that is the real stuff of technological change.’ The Otts weren’t creating novel technologies from scratch but adapting existing ones resourcefully, representing how most innovation actually occurs: people making do with available technologies, solving immediate problems through clever modification rather than disruptive breakthroughs. Their obscurity despite genuine innovation demonstrates how mythology marginalizes the very processes that drive technological change, elevating charismatic entrepreneurs while erasing countless contributors whose aggregate incremental adaptations constitute actual progress.

Standards reveal that technological progress requires creating stability and consensus rather than constant disruption. When you buy a screw confident it matches specifications, that’s because ‘American and European bureaucrats and engineers worked for decades to establish standards’ through ‘national and international meetings’ and ‘input from professional engineering societies’—a profoundly political rather than technical process. The 1924 American Standards Association president called standards ‘the liberator’ that relegated solved problems ‘to the realm of the routine,’ showing progress comes from transforming ‘the novel into the mundane’ and making ‘the local into the global.’ This contradicts innovation ideology celebrating perpetual novelty: standards embody anti-disruption, creating technological stability enabling interchangeable parts and global trade. McCray notes complaints that AT&T’s promoted standards ‘stifled innovation and further centralised corporate power,’ revealing tension between standardization benefiting users (through compatibility) and potentially consolidating market power. Standards as ‘political artefacts’ embodying ideologies like internet openness demonstrate technology isn’t value-neutral objects but infrastructure encoding beliefs, requiring democratic oversight rather than technocratic or market-driven determination alone.

The lumpy/bumpy metaphor challenges linear progress narratives, emphasizing that ‘old and new technologies accumulate on top of and beside each other’ rather than newer technologies simply replacing older ones. McCray uses geological imagery—technologies ‘settle over time, like sediment’ forming ‘layers that a geologist might conjure’—showing how infrastructure stacks: 19th-century railroad lines became microwave tower routes became fiber-optic cable paths, with SPRINT’s wireless network built atop Southern Pacific Railroad’s 1800s geography. This persistence creates uneven technological landscapes: ’19th-century Japan was a world where steam and sail, railroads and rickshaws all shared common space,’ while ‘in the Second World War, the most common transport for the German army wasn’t tanks but horses.’ The flatness myth suggests uniform technological adoption globally, but McCray shows ‘Industrial revolutions were distributed unequally in place and time,’ with cutting-edge and obsolete technologies coexisting based on economic, political, and geographical factors. This matters because ‘our prevailing focus on the shock of the technological new often obscures how we see the old,’ leading to neglect of existing proven technologies in favor of speculative innovations, undermining maintenance while chasing disruption.

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This article is rated Advanced because it requires understanding historiographical debates about technology history, distinguishing between popular mythology and scholarly analysis, and synthesizing arguments across multiple conceptual registers—material infrastructure, political processes, ideological formations, and policy implications. Readers must track how McCray systematically deconstructs Great White Innovator narratives while constructing alternative frameworks emphasizing incrementalism, standards, and layering. The piece assumes familiarity with concepts like synecdoche, techno-libertarianism, Taylorism, and manifest destiny, while requiring ability to follow complex arguments about why efficiency is historically contingent rather than universal, how technologies stack geologically, and why innovation isn’t inherently beneficial. Advanced readers must appreciate sophisticated moves like using Kodak’s creation of amateur photographer communities to demonstrate innovation includes user-creation not just object-invention, or recognizing how numerically controlled machine tools served managerial oversight rather than efficiency. The article rewards understanding how methodological claims (redefining technology beyond things) connect to political stakes (enabling better policy), demanding critical reading skills to evaluate whether McCray’s counter-narratives about the Otts and maintenance workers successfully challenge innovation mythology or risk overcorrection.

“The Cloud” epitomizes how digital boosterism obscures technology’s material reality and labor conditions. McCray calls it ‘the most pernicious’ example of terminology that ‘obscures the undeniable (but not all-encompassing) materiality of technology,’ because ethereal cloud imagery erases that ‘all the stuff that makes the internet and the web work is actually made of something—silicon, plastic, rare-earth minerals mined in Bolivia or China.’ The metaphor also renders invisible ‘the Foxconn workers in Shenzhen who assemble iPhones and other high-tech devices,’ allowing consumers to ignore extraction, manufacturing, and labor exploitation underlying supposedly dematerialized digital services. This connects to McCray’s broader critique of ‘extreme perspective of technology that rejects its “thinginess”‘ prevalent among ‘high-tech intellectuals’—treating technology as pure information or software obscures resource consumption, environmental impact, and human costs. Maps representing internet infrastructure as ‘disembodied nodes and flowcharts’ similarly hide physical geography, making invisible the material constraints and geopolitical factors shaping digital systems. The Cloud terminology isn’t merely imprecise but ideologically functional, enabling techno-libertarian fantasies of frictionless innovation unconstrained by material reality while obscuring extraction economies and labor conditions that would demand political and ethical reckoning.

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