Article by Carlo Cordasco: “…What none of these critics could have told you was that anaesthesia would make possible open-heart surgery, organ transplantation, neurosurgery, and the entire architecture of modern surgical specialisation. The benefit was not a more comfortable version of what surgeons had been doing. It was the appearance of a possibility space whose contents were inconceivable from inside the surgical practice of 1846.
Cases of this kind have a particular structure. An innovation arrives whose costs are perfectly legible, since they are visible against the baseline of the practice it is reorganising and can be measured with the practice’s existing instruments, while its most profound benefits depend on practices, institutions and concepts that do not yet exist at the moment of evaluation. Serious critics with domain expertise document the costs, often correctly, since costs of that kind are precisely what the evaluative vocabulary they have inherited is built to measure. There is no possible evaluation in the critical moment that could capture the benefits, because the vocabulary that would describe them is itself one of the things the innovation is going to bring into being.
Take dating apps. Eli Finkel and others have shown that app-mediated dating can produce choice overload, weaken commitment formation, and reduce the development of relationship skills that older modes of meeting cultivated more naturally. The empirical literature on loneliness, declining marriage rates among the young, and the collapse of casual in-person romantic initiation is now substantial. The critics are documenting real things, and their evidence is solid in just the way Harrison’s evidence on anaesthesia was solid.
What this evidence cannot capture is the set of effects that have emerged through the existence of the apps themselves and that nobody arguing about Tinder a decade ago could have specified. Public space itself has been quietly transformed, since the existence of an alternative channel for romantic initiation has weakened the normative status of an in-person approach to the point where women navigate streets, cafés and workplaces in ways that would have been unrecognisable in 1995. Some of what used to be ambient harassment in physical settings has been redistributed onto platforms where it is at least more controllable, since digital interactions can be filtered, blocked, reported and audited in ways that street and workplace harassment cannot…(More)”.
