![]() ![]() ![]() Or, at least, a sense that if an idea seems to rhyme with another it can be chalked up as a win for the author’s thesis. ![]() The breadth and suggestiveness of Johnson’s thesis is a strength but also a weakness, and there’s a good deal of cherry-picking and post-hoc-ergo-propter-hockery at work. The utilitarian account of human progress, he argues, concerned chiefly with work, market efficiencies and the hierarchy of basic human needs such as shelter, food and nookie, misses several tricks. It is that one of the most important drivers of human progress is fun, leisure, novelty, the impulse to delight: aka, mucking around. “In Wonderland, the author of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter advances another slickly counterintuitive hypothesis. Review excerpt by Sam Leith entitled “The importance of being frivolous”: ![]() Devoting one chapter to the visual illusion industry (panoramas, phantasmagorias, magic-lantern shows, cinema), he finds that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused. He highlights how the overwhelming majority of devices such as the ones portrayed in the ninth-century Book of Ingenious Devices are objects of amusement and mimicry - are toys. In his new book, Steven Johnson argues that the pursuit of novelty and wonder has always been a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. ![]()
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