The history of technology as a story of "key points"
The question of which technologies get adopted is much more contingent than we think. Tennis can help us think about it.
The most read post in this Substack has been the one I wrote on David Graeber’s theory of technology. As I wrote in that post, Graeber is a strong social determinist when it comes to understanding how technology works. He thinks the question of technological invention and adoption is entirely up to the ruling classes; they snap their fingers and redirect resources and get the technologies they want. If only the ruling classes had let it happen, we would have flying cars; but because they didn’t (their hatred of progressive social movements exceeded their appetite for profits), we have the internet.
Against this, I contrasted how much historians of technology think about contingency and the wide range of non-technical factors that matter for technology production and adoption. Since I was not able to write a new post for this week, I want to use an old essay I wrote as a term-paper for a class that used tennis—my favorite sport—to think about the role of contingency and counterfactuals in the history of technology. (I’ll also admit that it is a little dated because Federer had an even more heartbreaking loss to Djokovic—again with two match points on his own serve—in the Wimbledon final of 2019. Still, the 2011 semifinal has the smash Djokovic return which is a thing to watch.)
The post is below, lightly edited.
The Federer-Djokovic showdown of 2011
Coming into the 2011 US Open with a track record of winning all but one of the Grand Slam matches that he played that year, Novak Djokovic was facing Roger Federer in the semi-finals, the man responsible for his only Grand Slam loss that year. And ominously, he lost the first two sets, 6-7(7), 4-6 before rallying to take the next two 6-3, 6-2. It was now the final set and Federer, having just broken Djokovic’s serve in the final set to go up 5-3, was serving at 40-15, with two match-points. Upset at the crowd, which was cheering Federer on wildly, Djokovic seemed out of sorts, angry at himself, perhaps, for being in this position despite playing a flawless third and fourth set.
The interpretation of what happened next remains hotly debated in tennis forums, YouTube comments, and the blogosphere (see the video above). Federer served out wide to Djokovic’s forehand. It was not a bad serve, but Djokovic swung at it hard, and literally smashed it cross-court for a clean winner. There was shocked silence for a second before cheering erupted. Djokovic walked to the other side of the court, raised his hands and looked at the crowd. Appreciate me, he seemed to be saying. The crowd obliged even as a bemused Federer stood waiting to serve on the other side of the court.
It was still match-point. Federer threw a good serve straight at Djokovic’s body, and a small rally ensued, which ended, heartbreakingly for Federer, with his shot striking the net-cord and then dropping back on his own side. Deuce. Djokovic went on to win the game breaking Federer in the process. He then won the next three games as well, winning the final set 7-5 to defeat Federer and reach the final. It was, in fact, a daunting deja vu: in their semi-final at the same event in 2010, Djokovic had saved two match points in the fifth set to go on to win the match.
What was going on in Djokovic's mind when he hit that screaming forehand winner off Federer's serve? Was it hit in anger or was it a calculated risk? How much did Djokovic's gamesmanship – seeking the crowd’s approval – affect Federer on his next serve? Tennis fans and analysts continue to debate this.1 My own thought, as I was watching the match, was that Djokovic, who can often be peevish and irritable on court, was angry with himself and swung at the ball, more out of pique than anything else. But the shot went in, and Djokovic used it to rally the crowd to his own side. On the other side of the net, Federer suffered a dent in his own confidence, and this allowed Djokovic (the undoubtedly the best at that time) to put himself back into the match.
Both players themselves offered contradictory interpretations of the return. “It’s a risk you have to take,” Djokovic told Mary- Joe Fernandez in the on-court interview. “It’s in, you have a second chance. If it’s out, you are gone. So it’s a little bit of gambling.” Federer, on the other hand, was having none of it. “Confidence, are you kidding me?” he scoffed in his post-match interview, hurting, no doubt, at squandering match points in two successive years. “I never played that way. For me, this is very hard to understand how you can play a shot like that on match point.” He continued: “To lose against someone like that, it’s very disappointing, because you feel like he was mentally out of it already. Just gets the lucky shot at the end, and off you go.” Djokovic acknowledged that he needed to “get some energy from the crowd. Look, I was a little bit lucky in that moment because he was playing tremendously well with the inside-out forehand throughout the whole match. This is what happens at this level. You know, a couple of points can really decide the winner.”
What is a “key point”?
The first Federer-Djokovic match point is often what both tennis players and tennis analysts refer to as a “key point.“ These key points, as Djokovic points out in his post-match interview, are often the ones that “decide the winner.” This notion of “key points,” I want to argue in the rest of this post, might be relevant to those of us who do the history and anthropology of technology, particularly as a kind of teaching aid in helping our students understand non-deterministic theories of technological change.
What is a “key point”? A key point is a point (possibly among a set of points) which seems to have determined the outcome of the match, as seen by the players or the analysts (or both). Players often sense that a point will be key during the match itself and go all out in their effort to win it, perhaps by hitting extra hard, taking a risk, or by running down a ball they would rather have left alone to conserve their energy. Analysts too, as interested observers of a match, can sense whether a point will be key to the outcome (if you’re watching it live, that’s the one when your heart seems to be hammering against your chest).
But while an upcoming key point can be sensed by the players and the spectators, key points can be definitively identified only after the match is over. In other words, the identification of key points is contingent on the outcome. In the Federer-Djokovic encounter, the courageous (or reckless, depending on your POV) Djokovic return at 15-40 is a key point only because Djokovic won the next four games to win the match. If Djokovic had lost the next match-point, this point would never have been talked about as a key point but as a fluke. Instead the game in which Federer broke Djokovic at 4-3 in the final set would have turned out to be the key to the outcome of the match.
To restate this point, the key to winning a match is to win the key points, but the points that are key to winning a match can only be determined after the match is won (or lost).
What is more necessary to winning a match: talent or key points?
It is worth discussing an alternative explanation of match outcomes: that the more talented player wins the match. I quoted a part of Djokovic’s post-match interview above. On actually watching the interview, it turned out that the quote left out a crucial part. Djokovic actually said: “This is what happens at this level – when two top players meet. You know, a couple of points can really decide the winner” (Italics mine). The implication here is that it is only when players are evenly matched in terms of “talent,” that the outcome hinges on a few key points.2
These two theories – the “more talent” theory vs. the “key point” theory – could be mapped to theories of technological change. One theory, called technological determinism, is that a new technology gets deployed when it is “better” than its competitors; this is the “talent” theory as applied to technology. The other theory, that historians of technology often espouse, is that technological change happens because certain groups of people are able to defeat, or persuade, their opponents through the particular, contingent, channels available to them at certain crucial junctures; this is the “key point” theory as applied to technology.
The dilemma of doing the history of technology
Thinking in terms of key points, especially in sports, can highlight the dilemma in thinking about the question of technological change. On the one hand, historians need to account for the sense of contingency and unpredictability that people in the past often felt while thinking about their future. On the other hand, they also need to account for why the events of the past seem so inevitable, the way they seem to lead to the present so unproblematically. For example, we think that, of course, the refrigerator would look like it does today; but in the 1920s, the companies making gas and electric refrigerators did not know which one would succeed.
Some of the best histories of technology show us how “key points” mattered. Alfred Chandler's study of the rise of managerial corporations in the US and William Cronon's story of the grain trade between Chicago and its hinterland3 both hinge on one key point: the rise of the railroads in the United States. But they differ in their account of the specifics.
For Chandler, managerial capitalism is the most efficient organizational structure that can cope with the new economy of railroads. This is akin to the "more talent" theory of tennis match outcomes: the vertically integrated managerial corporation is just better suited to the new economy of massive sites of production connected by railroads than other forms of social organization. It should be mentioned that Chandler's narrative is rich in details which makes it more than a just-so narrative. What it lacks, which the key point theory helped me understand, was that it does not involve actors fighting over the outcome. In his book on the history of American business schools, Rakesh Khurana points out that the emergence of the managerial corporation was hardly straightforward. Shareholders and owners remained suspicious of the new class of managers and often fought, unsuccessfully, to take control away from them. They did so primarily through legal channels by lobbying legislatures to change incorporation laws to restrict managerial control. Yet perhaps share-holders had the last laugh as starting from the 1970s the role of managers came to be redefined: instead of management being seen as a profession with certain responsibilities to society as a whole, managers were now seen as responsible only for maximizing shareholder returns.
In Cronon's story of the grain trade, the "logic of capital" seems to drive events towards their inexorable outcome. But it is also rich with accounts of fights between different historical actors. For Cronon, the key point in the transformation of Chicago and the Great West was the building of railroads that connected them. Then, to maximize the productivity of the railroads, the grain elevator was invented. Cronon is good at detailing how each step along the way was fought over by different sets of actors: the farmers, the Chicago Board of Trades, the grain traders, the elevator operators and regulators. Each group was responding to a vision of the future and each group was aware of the stakes. A key point in the transformation of the Great West was being enacted.
What would be the “key points” in the history of technology?
How to think about “key points” in the history of any technology? First, the actors themselves should have some dim awareness that something important is happening and that different visions of the future are at stake (just like tennis players instinctively know what is a key point). Second, the outcomes of these key points should result in the victory of one group over others, thereby setting in motion a certain kind of future. Third, these key points can only be determined authoritatively in retrospect, i.e., only after the outcome is known.
Tennis key points are heuristics, of course. And they can be difficult to find, even in tennis matches (it can get even more complicated for sports like soccer where there are no discrete “points” and worse, there’s a team to think about!). But that’s the point. One point seemingly leads to the next: if the Djokovic screaming forehand winner was a key point, what about the points before that one? What about the two dueces that followed after Djokovic saved two match-points? What about points that decided the first four sets? Would it have mattered if Djokovic had won the first set–which he lost narrowly in a tie-breaker (9-7)? The boiling down of a match outcome to a series of key points shows us both how events can be simultaneously contingent and patterned. A match between Roger Federer and Tomas Berdych was more predictable than one between Federer and Djokovic. Those are the kinds of explanations/narratives of technological change that the key point theory would ask us to look for: highly contingent, built out of specific events, but with specific patterns that are by no means law-like.
The New York Times tennis blogger, Dave Seminara, says in his blog-post that he thought the same initially but changed his mind after watching other Djokovic matches where Djokovic used a similar return. He argues that what was unique was that Djokovic had never quite used this return at such a crucial stage. See http://straightsets.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/open-moment-before-and-after-that-djokovic-shot/.
Talent, of course, should not be taken at face-value. The term can hide the years and years of practice that often go into seemingly-effortless performances, as well as the efforts of coaches, trainers, and equipment-makers into shaping the performance. Still, a black-boxed category of “talent” will do for now.
To be fair, I’m speaking more of Chapter 3 of Cronon: the magisterial story of the grain trade and the grain elevator.