I think we need to stop inventing technology.

Not forever.
But for a moment.

Because look around.

Every year we launch thousands of new apps, platforms, and digital tools that promise to make life easier.

But somehow life keeps feeling faster, noisier, and more complicated.

So what if the future of innovation isn’t digital at all?

What if the smartest people in the world stopped building software…
and started building better cities, better communities, better culture, and better ways of living?

I started noticing a specific kind of fatigue in my own practice: not the tiredness of making, but the tiredness of managing making. The tools around me kept multiplying—new platforms, new features, new workflows, new “smart” automations yet the felt experience of the day got narrower. More decisions. More toggles. More interfaces asking to be acknowledged. Over time it became hard to tell whether I was using tools to support life, or using life to justify the tools.

A tool is supposed to be an instrument. It extends capacity. It reduces friction. It gives you leverage. That’s the promise. But there’s a threshold where the instrument becomes an environment. It stops being something you pick up and put down, and starts behaving like a climate you live inside. At that point it doesn’t just help you do the work. It shapes the conditions under which work is allowed to exist.

A tool stops improving life when it begins to compete for the same scarce resource that life requires. Attention. Time. Presence. Emotional bandwidth. A tool is “helpful” as long as it remains subordinate to intention. It becomes competitive when it starts generating its own intentions through prompts, nudges, notifications, streaks, feeds, and the subtle pressure of “keeping up.” Ivan Illich called certain systems “counterproductive” once they pass a scale where they start undermining the very purpose they were designed to serve. That idea maps cleanly onto modern digital tooling. The calendar app that makes planning easier until you spend your best hours rearranging your week. The design software that expands possibility until the work becomes a permanent state of revision. The distribution platform that gives you reach until you’re building everything around what the platform rewards.

Jacques Tati’s Playtime is still one of the clearest cultural documents of this shift. Not because it predicts smartphones, but because it shows modern systems becoming so total that humans start performing for them moving through glass architectures and standardized interactions, adjusting themselves to the logic of the environment. The comedy is structural. The built world doesn’t just host life; it choreographs it. When I think about “tools competing with life,” I think less about a single app being addictive and more about a whole ecology of systems quietly requesting that I live in a way that keeps them active.

If every new app promises efficiency, the average person feels more rushed because efficiency often creates new obligations. This is the part people tend to avoid naming. Efficiency does not simply free time. It increases throughput. It raises expectations. It expands what counts as “reasonable” to do in a day. When email got faster, the volume of email did not shrink. When communication became instant, the implied response time collapsed. When publishing became frictionless, the pressure to publish became ambient. There’s a pattern here: the tool reduces the cost of an action, and the culture responds by increasing the frequency of the action until the original relief disappears.

In design terms, you could call this an inflation of baseline. The “minimum viable participation” keeps rising. The average person feels rushed because the number of micro-tasks required to maintain social and professional legibility has exploded: reply, react, update, track, post, optimize, comment, archive, schedule, reschedule, clean up, reformat, export, re-upload. None of these tasks is heavy on its own. Together they become a second job. David Graeber’s writing on “bullshit jobs” is relevant here, not because creative work is inherently meaningless, but because many of the surrounding actions are administrative performance maintenance of systems rather than construction of substance.

It’s also why the promise of “saving time” so often feels like a lie. The system doesn’t return time to you. It reinvests time into its own expansion. I notice this most when I try to do deep work and find my attention already fragmented by default—because the surrounding infrastructure has trained me to treat every spare moment as a slot for input. We call it multitasking. It’s closer to constant context switching.

When innovation becomes easier than reflection, a civilization starts producing novelty faster than it can produce judgment. This is where technological saturation stops being a personal wellness topic and becomes a cultural one. If new tools arrive weekly, but cultural digestion happens slowly, the gap fills with imitation, noise, and shallow consensus. People become fluent in adopting new systems but less practiced at evaluating what those systems do to them. Reflection is slower than iteration. It requires distance. It requires silence. It requires the ability to hold a question without immediately converting it into a product.

Marshall McLuhan’s old line “we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” gets repeated so much it turns into décor, but it’s still operational. What changes in a high-innovation environment is the tempo of shaping. The shaping happens faster than our ability to consciously notice it. That’s why so much of modern life feels like adaptation rather than authorship. We’re always adjusting to updated interfaces, updated norms, updated incentives. And because adaptation is cognitively expensive, we default to the simplest available interpretation: whatever is new must be progress, whatever is popular must be correct, whatever saves time must be good.

You can see a counter-example in slow cinema, where the form forces the viewer into a different relationship with time and attention. Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days is not a “tech critique” film, but it’s a film that understands saturation indirectly. It shows a life structured around repetition, craft, and observation, and it quietly asks what happens when meaning is generated by not chasing novelty. It’s a reminder that reflection is not a personality trait; it’s a condition created by the structure of days.

It might be true that we haven’t run out of technology; we’ve run out of meaningful problems worth solving with technology. This is not an anti-tech statement. It’s a problem-framing statement. If the dominant problems we choose to solve are “engagement,” “retention,” “frictionless consumption,” and “monetization,” then the output will feel like saturation. Because the solution space isn’t oriented toward human flourishing. It’s oriented toward system growth.

I think about The Whole Earth Catalog here not as nostalgia, but as an artifact of a different innovation ethic. It treated tools as a way to increase autonomy, competence, and connection to the physical world. It curated resources for building, learning, repairing, and making. The editorial stance implied: technology should expand what a person can do in reality, not just what they can browse. Compare that to today’s mainstream product culture, where innovation often means a new layer between you and the thing you actually want: between you and your friends, between you and your work, between you and your body, between you and your attention.

Design magazines like Domus or archives like MoMA’s design collections are useful here because they show that “innovation” can mean material science, ergonomics, public infrastructure, typography, industrial design problems that are physical, social, and long-horizon. When technology saturates, one symptom is that we keep inventing new ways to do the same narrow set of digital actions instead of widening the category of problems we consider worth solving.

The real scarcity today is not intelligence; it’s restraint. Intelligence is abundant. Tools can generate ideas, outlines, designs, variations, and strategies at scale. Scarcity shows up elsewhere: the ability to say no, to stop, to leave something unoptimized, to accept a ceiling, to choose a constraint that reduces possibility on purpose. Restraint is not just self-control. It’s an aesthetic and ethical position. It’s a decision about what kind of life you think is worth building.

This is where I find the most interesting connection to creative practice. In design history, restraint often reads as refinement. Dieter Rams’ “less but better” is over-cited, but the point remains: limitation is not a lack of capability; it’s a framework for judgment. In editorial design think of Emigre at its most deliberate, or even the best issues of The Face when it was building a visual language restraint shows up as consistency, pacing, and control of attention. The work is not trying to say everything. It’s trying to say the right thing.

Digital culture makes restraint harder because the environment rewards maximal participation. The feed is an argument for constant expression. The algorithm is an argument for constant output. So restraint becomes a form of authorship. It’s the choice to protect a pace that allows for coherence.

Progress might look different if the most impressive invention of the next decade is something intentionally simple. Not simple as in underpowered. Simple as in legible, repairable, limited, humane. Something that doesn’t demand a new behavior layer. Something that doesn’t produce a new dependency. Something that makes the physical world easier to navigate rather than making you spend more time inside a device.

This is where the idea of “technology saturation” flips into a more useful question: what would we build if we were designing for longevity rather than novelty? What would we ship if we were optimizing for maintenance rather than growth? What would we value if we treated attention as a public good? There are already glimpses of this in the revival of analog tools in creative circles film cameras, zines, printed ephemera, local events not as retro fetish, but as a search for formats that produce depth through constraints. Noticing that the medium changes the pace. Noticing that pace changes judgment. Noticing that judgment changes taste.

The conceptual shift I keep returning to is this: saturation is not only about the number of tools. It’s about the absence of a framework for deciding which tools deserve to exist in your life. For creatives, the work is less “keep up with innovation” and more “build a practice that can metabolize innovation without being governed by it.” That means making connections between incentives and outcomes, asking questions about what the tool is training you to become, building structures that protect attention, and treating restraint not as deprivation but as design.

In the end, technological saturation is a design problem. It’s a problem of boundaries, pacing, and intention. And the most durable creative advantage right now may be the ability to construct a working life where tools remain instruments—where they serve process, support structure, and leave enough quiet for reflection to stay possible.

Vongoval

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