Ahhh, a new year. Welcome!

Let's think about a word: technology.

What comes to mind for you? Smartphones? Laptops? Tablets? Hoverboards? Heated toilets with bidets that speak Japanese? V12 engines that shatter Mach speed with boring regularity? Air fryers? Those fans without blades? The Boston Dynamics creatures? Sewing machines? I, Robot (2004)? Bose speakers? JBL speakers? Harman Kardon speakers? Snow shoes? Snow tires? Augmented reality contact lenses? Connectomes? Moog synthesizers? Comprehensive blood panels? The particle colliders that they be using to discover new particles? When you smash two particles together, you can look and be like oh wow new particle? Turn to your colleague and be like ‘new particle!!!’? The Canon 1DX II with the 85mm L-series lens that they use to take your photo at the Nobel ceremony? ICBM’s? 1 PB SSD’s? Lasers that tell you how far away some shit is (better than tape measures)? Tape measures? SSRI’s? Tamagotchis? Node.js? Aqueducts? The Burj Khalifa?

But wait lemme figure out how to make my point now I don’t mean to waste your precious time my friend okay lmaooo uhhhhhhhhh.....

So what’s the common denominator between all the technologies listed above? They’re all made manifest through engineering. And engineering is just applied science and mathematics. But science and mathematics are really just collections of ideas. And so: a technology is something useful that results from the application of some combination of sensical ideas. And like the organism(s) that creates and deploys them, a key feature of technologies is that they’re subject to evolution.

Okay but watch this curveball lmao ready? Economic systems, therefore, qualify as technologies.

I’ll spell it out. Are economies useful? Yeah, when we organize the ways we produce and distribute resources throughout a society, mortality rates go down and quality of life goes up. Do economic systems evolve? Well, 700 years of feudalism culminated in the Renaissance, then 200 years of capitalism took the US from some renegade colonies to the wealthiest society in human history to date, and most recently, 70 years of (quick, click this) communism in Russia and China delivered those nations from abject poverty to launching the world’s first artificial satellite (it only took 40 years for this to happen technically, quick turnaround from pissing icicles in Siberia) and leading the entire world in GDP ($27T, compared to the U.S.’ $23T), respectively. In other words, the latest economic tech allows societies to develop at warp speed when compared to any we’ve ever seen 🤪

Usually I would add a bunch of links and shit to corroborate what I’m saying but on this occasion imma leave it up to you to be rigorous and explore and confirm or deny and tease apart the truth from the falsity cuz that’s what life is about you lazy piece of shit I fucking love you!!!

Oh wait, did you expect me to answer the question posed in the title of this article? Don’t worry, I wrote that article a couple years ago: click this, then this.