In ave of progress, still

Recently, when SpaceX successfully caught Starship rocket with Mechazilla claws, my Twitter timeline got filled with technoptimism. For an hour or two, good old days returned — everyone were cheering on Elon, his team and the might of the US entrepreneurial culture.

Of course, this quickly escalated. Some people maintained that since SpaceX do incredible things, any opinion of Mr. Musk is unquestionable true.

My excitement was tamed. My vision blurred with a tragedy unfolding over the last 2,5+ years: while the space frontier is conquered, Russians are hunting civilians in Kherson region with drones, in something described as a human safari. Some of humanity’s highest feats are sharing the informational space with an unseen barbarity. You can practically watch it live: grenades dropped on elderly, cars and playgrounds, helpless people crawling in their own blood. I tweeted about feeling “dead inside” about any tech progress, but later that evening found myself in a nostalgic mood.

I do feel sad. But that statement was not true. Not only I’m not indifferent to what tech delivers, but I have an oversized feeling of technological progress due to the rather unusual combo of personal details. Perhaps it’s time to share them, since it will shed some light on a few bigger things (such as Eastern Europe dynamism).

I was born in 1998, which disqualifies me from an internet pioneer generation, by a huge margin — by the time I was 10, it was already an iPhone era, currently the last big pillar of modernity. But I was living in a different timeline.

Growing up in a small village in the Northern-East of Ukraine, my world was slowed by decades. I remember black-and-white TV with a faulty antenna. A cassette player as the sole way to listen to music. My first gaming console was a Chinese-made Dandy rip-off — with my (incredibly sparse) pocket money, I was travelling 5 km by foot to buy cartridges. I played the original, 2D Super Mario Bros. — a game from the mid-80s — a full 20+ years later, when people were lining up for PS3. And that was peak entertainment for me. I was not even fully aware about the lag.

My means were modest, but not my appetite for knowledge and progress

Of course, this world was not fully encapsulated, modernity was ripping off the retro continuum constructed by poverty and rural environment. Modern phones were popping up here and there — mostly Nokias, Sony-Ericssons and Samsungs. iPhone was a thing from the glossy phone guides, and its cost was prohibitive to even think about. Internet was not really a web. Later I peeked into it through the tiniest window, WAP.

My means were modest, but not my appetite for knowledge and progress: I was reading non-stop, learning English and constantly dreaming about tech. Typing, making digital notes, browsing websites, just having some cool piece of hardware like an iPhone or an iPad — I dreamed about those. But I lived in a village of roughly 1000 residents, and my class (quite large by local standards) was of 9 pupils.

Don’t worry, I won’t bore you with my whole biography. Eventually we moved to a city (Dnipro, 1M+ residents) and I instantly caught up with the modernity. Smartphone, internet, social media — by the year 2010 I was teleported back into the present. But not without a great deal of amazement, which got entrenched into me forever since. From time to time, I snap out of regular moods and revive that curious little boy from the past.

“Wow, we have an e-book? And we can afford any title? And we can have internet 24/7? What do you mean, live video? Wait, this is an iMac? Are we millionaires?”.

Now let’s shift focus. Eastern Europe as a whole was initially devastated by the crash of the USSR, and left with an incredible technological backlog, spanning every aspect of life. It caught up and in many aspects raced beyond when it comes to digitalization, internet-powered services and so on.

But I don’t want to simply say that e-gov services in Estonia or Ukraine are better than in Germany. They are. But this is still marginal.

What makes a huge difference is this — we got catapulted through decades of progress in mere years. This leaves a lasting influence. It also complicates communication with people from much wealthier parts of the world. They take for granted what some of us seen unfolding right before our eyes.

To naturally move from a Dandy to PS4, from Super Mario Bros. to GTA 5, you would need approximately four decades, while I did a 4x speed run. Some things are incomparable altogether, thanks to the catastrophic disregard of the USSR to personal comfort, and the misery which followed upon its collapse. They are trivial, but will help you see how low is the bar. Kitchen appliances (e.g. dishwasher), any kind of delivery options, air travel, taxis, cleaning services — even by the early 2000s, all of this was still something out of the ordinary for me and millions of people around. And now? Now I’m subscribed to Wolt+ and regularly get my groceries delivered in less than 15 minutes. Now I have a razor-thin iMac instead of a 10-tome Soviet encyclopedia to learn things about the world.

I guess — and I can be totally wrong — that moving from a tiny rural shop where bananas were a luxury to a world of hyper-fast gig economy, on-demand everything; from rolling blackouts (a thing in my childhood) to 5G access, is kinda unique. I think — again, assumption — that the intensity of progress was much lower for most people in the West, especially if they are mid-20s now. How exciting it is when you move from ordering pizza over the phone to an app? Maybe a bit less. Maybe progressing from a bulky Sony TV set to a flat screen is less impressive.

I do not imply that everyone but me was getting it easy: poverty and hardship are universal. But I remember how Robert Caro described the rural life experienced by LBJ in the Texas Hill Country — no electricity, hard labour, and very few amenities. That was shocking by early 80s, and even more now. But somewhat of a similar gap still could be contained in the memories of a fairly young person. It’s safe to generalize a bit: there’s no denial of the staggering quality of life difference between, let's say, US and Ukraine.

I saw things improving so dramatically that I can not lose my faith in capitalism and the technological progress it brings.

Therefore, I can not really get cynical about progress, even when my heart is so full of sadness and misery due to the war. I saw things improving so dramatically that I can not lose my faith in capitalism and the technological progress it brings. I do acknowledge that it’s not the ultimate answer to everything, that it needs checks and balances. Likewise, I know how it can bulge and swell, how high-tech and low-life are just meters apart.

Rewinding all the way back: catching a 25-story skyscraper descending from the Earth orbit is an incredible sight for me, too, and I share the joy with millions of people. In some way, I’m impressed even more. My experience — with some non-fundamental variations — is similar to the lives of millions of people in Eastern Europe. No doubts it adds to the affection this region has with all things digital, to the dynamism of its economies, to the prevalence of YIMBY attitudes. When you see things change, it’s hard to stop believing in achieving the next step. Even when you see a much more mixed picture, the winds of progress are still with you.

Ukraine still hasn’t had its lasting economic miracle moment. Its GDP is still below the late 80s, and per capita numbers are somewhere at the level of Iran. Poland or Estonia (where I live now) are much clearer examples of success. Yet I can not pretend that life hasn’t improved dramatically in my lifetime. Things would be considerably better if Russia fucked off, of course.

There’s will be no moralizing, no “don’t take things for granted”, because the low starting point does not really make you better. It adds many strains. I don’t want my kids to live through the same modernization — because it would mean they, again, were starting way behind.

That being said, I backtrack my initial words, and can safely say that I’m still in ave of progress. Sadly, for the first time in my life, I need to remind myself about it.