"Technology has to be invented or adopted"
About this Quote
Diamond’s line has the blunt efficiency of a historian who’s tired of techno-mysticism. “Technology has to be invented or adopted” reads like a shrug, but it’s actually a corrective aimed at a very modern habit: treating innovation as a natural resource that simply “arrives,” detached from power, geography, and contingency. He strips away the romance of solitary genius and replaces it with a two-lane model of change: either you make the tool yourself, or you take it from somewhere else. No third option, no magical self-generation.
The subtext is about inequality without the sermon. In Diamond’s world, the key question isn’t why some societies were “smarter,” but why they had more chances to stumble into useful ideas, refine them, and then spread them. “Adopted” quietly carries the heavy baggage of contact: trade routes, proximity, conquest, prestige, coercion. Adoption isn’t a neutral download; it’s mediated by who controls networks, who can afford to retool, who is allowed to learn, and who gets punished for lagging behind.
Contextually, this fits Diamond’s larger project in Guns, Germs, and Steel: moving the explanation for global technological asymmetries away from cultural superiority and toward structural conditions. The sentence is deceptively simple because it wants to be portable, almost policy-ready. It nudges readers to stop asking “Why didn’t they invent it?” and start asking “What blocked invention, and what blocked uptake?” That shift is the argument.
The subtext is about inequality without the sermon. In Diamond’s world, the key question isn’t why some societies were “smarter,” but why they had more chances to stumble into useful ideas, refine them, and then spread them. “Adopted” quietly carries the heavy baggage of contact: trade routes, proximity, conquest, prestige, coercion. Adoption isn’t a neutral download; it’s mediated by who controls networks, who can afford to retool, who is allowed to learn, and who gets punished for lagging behind.
Contextually, this fits Diamond’s larger project in Guns, Germs, and Steel: moving the explanation for global technological asymmetries away from cultural superiority and toward structural conditions. The sentence is deceptively simple because it wants to be portable, almost policy-ready. It nudges readers to stop asking “Why didn’t they invent it?” and start asking “What blocked invention, and what blocked uptake?” That shift is the argument.
Quote Details
| Topic | Technology |
|---|
More Quotes by Jared
Add to List
