Who benefits from progress?
In a recent post, Chasing the Meta: Fundamentals, Hype, and Progress, I talk about the elevated train lines that got built in New York in the early 1900s.
I left something out. Something about who built them and why.
It wasn’t just about efficiency. It wasn’t just improvement.
Robert Moses, the man who shaped much of New York’s infrastructure, deliberately routed highways through neighborhoods for convenience in spite of the largely minority communities who lived there. He prioritized personal cars by building overpasses too low for buses to pass, and gutted communities like Tremont for the Cross-Bronx Expressway.
He called it “progress.”
If you’ve ever spent two hours traversing the Cross-Bronx Expressway like I have, consider that it’s just under seven miles long. That’s 3.5 miles per hour. I walk at around that speed.
The infrastructure he built caused real harm. More than just causing traffic by prioritizing cars over people. He decimated communities for the sake of convenience for the wealthy.
What he considered progress got leapfrogged by moves towards standardization, but many of the issues from the intentions behind his actions linger to this day.
With a variety of technologies today, there’s a rush to build the next thing with confidence that this is the inevitable future. Sometimes there’s a mess leftover when the ground shifts.
Who benefits?
Who suffers as a result?
Who gets to decide?
Let’s start with EV chargers
Section titled “Let’s start with EV chargers”The United States had an industry standard that was a combination of CCS/SAE.
Some electric vehicles (EVs) still have the ports, but you might have noticed that a different style has emerged as the defacto standard: Tesla’s proprietary charging connector.
Around 2013, Tesla started building a vast network of charging stations that only worked with their proprietary charging port. Why? A widely-available network is a desirable feature for a population that might not be fully ready to move away from the availability of gas stations.
On top of that, Tesla charging stations can be a separate business model from the vehicles themselves.
Tesla worked hard to establish their own proprietary chargers as the standard, and effectively crowded everyone else out.
The network grew large enough that other manufacturers had to adopt the connector to access it. Tesla “opened” the network in 2022, which looked like generosity but acted as leverage. Either manufacturers adopted their connector, or lost access to the largest charging network in North America.
Like with Robert Moses, the infrastructure acted (or still acts) as a control mechanism. Harm distributed across EV buyers on a forced standard, for better or worse. Not like, community-wrecking worse, but I don’t think the intention was altruism either.
More chargers, but Apple and USB-C
Section titled “More chargers, but Apple and USB-C”Apple held onto their proprietary Lighting charger up until the iPhone 15, when it finally replaced that charger with USB-C.
And only because the European Parliament passed the common charger directive which took effect for small devices in 2024.
This is the opposite of what Tesla did. Users won because a powerful actor was forced by external pressure to abandon their proprietary standard.
Why?
Why is it better or why did it require legislation? To me, if I was thinking about the user’s experience, I’d want to make it easier to use cables they already use for everything else.
As a side note though: I don’t mean to argue that USB-C doesn’t have its own mess of standards to untangle between charging speed, data transfer speeds, throughput, and others. At least the plug is the same.
So what?
Section titled “So what?”Are humans going to benefit from technology and progress?
Or is it just going to be a few humans benefiting at the expense of greater society?
Most of us use QWERTY keyboards, a keyboard layout that doesn’t make a lot of sense based on ergonomics or letter use. Why?
That’s just what we got stuck with.
You can switch to something else if you try hard enough, but you’ll never really escape the QWERTY life.
QWERTY keyboards weren’t a nefarious, money-hungry corporate decision. And I don’t think it was based on racism or classism the way I think some of Robert Moses’s decisions were.
The keyboard layout isn’t as much about setting a standard as it is about our just being stuck with what came out and happened to take off at the time.
While it is true that I really dislike the cramped “resting” position my hands wait in on Apple keyboards, either pointing at F and J, or with my left thumb on command and my pointer stuck between c and v, that’s more because the world of “personal computers” and the “IBM compatible” had no way of knowing what was coming.
Command+C resting-face
In some cases, businesses should be willing to iterate and accept the potential costs of shifting to a better way, even if that means abandoning something like the Lightning cable. In every case, businesses should reconsider who their decisions are for.
Volvo developed the three-point seatbelt harness in 1959 and released the patents so all other vehicle manufacturers could implement it. To their credit, Tesla did release their connector for use by other manufacturers in November 2022, rebranding it the North American Charging Standard, or NACS (as a result of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act). NACS became SAE’s official J3400 Recommended Practice in September 2024.
When we can see the human cost on a clear horizon, it should be a mandate. The kind Volvo gave itself, voluntarily. Because it was the right thing to do.
To refute Ford, nobody was asking for a faster horse. They were asking for the cable they already had. They were asking to be considered in the design for a product that they’d have to deal with.
Advancement should be for human advancement, and otherwise it is not progress.