What We Talk About When We Talk About Progress
By Julia Henley
Progress is one of those words that has done so much work for so long that it has nearly worn through. We use it to mean growth, and efficiency, and innovation, and disruption, and occasionally — almost as an afterthought — human flourishing.
These are not the same thing.
The conflation has consequences. When progress means growth, we measure it in GDP and square footage and throughput. When it means efficiency, we optimize for speed and cost and scale, and we call the things that resist optimization — relationships, place, craft, care — inefficiencies to be engineered away. When it means innovation, we celebrate novelty for its own sake and treat the question "but is it better?" as somehow beside the point.
I am not against growth or efficiency or innovation. I am against the unexamined assumption that more of them, automatically, constitutes progress toward anything worth having.
The Brave New World of Huxley's novel is not a dystopia of scarcity or violence. It is a dystopia of satisfaction — a world in which every desire is met so efficiently that desire itself has been hollowed out. The citizens of that world are not suffering. They are simply not fully alive.
We are not there. But we are building infrastructure — technological, economic, social — that points in that direction. Platforms designed to maximize engagement rather than meaning. Algorithms that optimize for attention rather than understanding. Cities designed for throughput rather than life.
The alternative is not to reject the tools. It is to ask, seriously and repeatedly, what they are for. What kind of communities do we want to live in? What do we owe each other? What does a good life actually require?
These are old questions. They have been asked by every generation that has faced a significant disruption in the conditions of daily life. The answers are never final. But the asking — honest, grounded, willing to be inconvenient — is the work.
This column is an attempt to do some of that work. Not to arrive at conclusions, but to think carefully in public about the world we are making and the world we might choose instead.