This post is a compiled snippet from a Twitter thread that I've transported over here for posterity. The original thread started here: https://twitter.com/b_cavello/status/1177719089554427905

I received this as a classic piece of chain mail back when chain mail was even a thing, and it has informed my thinking ever since.
I think of it most when exploring the myth of constant technological improvement. We are so beholden to past innovation and so confined by it. twitter.com/BillHolohanSC/status/1177631604186996737

Our technology and systems are built on top of the skeletons of those that came before. Our progress is neither inevitable nor singular. There could have been other ways, other decisions, other skeletons.
There are choices that stick with us longer than we know.

Like the myth that evolution produces “better” life forms (rather than just ones that survive under particular environmental conditions) or the myth that society grows more progressive or just, the myth that technology is always improving is a powerful one that is hard to shake.

This is not to say that we cannot improve. I believe we’ve created extraordinary things, given the circumstances.
But we have also created horrible, egregious things. And also a lot of crap.

Standards, formalized or merely widespread, can sink us into weird local minima. The horse-wide tunnel is a strange gravity well that we may never entirely escape. That may be fine, but it’s not nothing.

Ultimately, in time, there is no control group.
We can speculate alternate histories and otherly futures, but we can’t be sure what might have been. Too many compounding vibrations have been combined to decompose back into component parts.