How Every Great Invention Turns Into Its Opposite

Money became debt, school became work, and people became objects

Human inventions often end up at cross purposes with their original intentions — or even at cross purposes with humans ourselves. Once an idea or an institution gains enough influence, it changes the basic landscape. Instead of the invention serving people in some way, people spend their time and resources serving it. The original subject becomes the new object.

Or, as we may more effectively put it, the figure becomes the ground.

The idea of figure and ground was first posited by a Danish psychologist in the early 1900s. He used a simple cardboard cutout to test whether people see the central image or whatever is around it. We now know the experiment as the drawing that can be seen as a white vase if you look at the middle of the image or as two black faces in profile if you focus on the periphery. The model of perception was useful to psychologists, who were attempting to understand how the brain identifies and remembers things.

What fascinates people to this day is the way the perception of figure or ground can change in different circumstances and cultures. When shown a picture of a cow in a pasture, most Westerners will see a picture of a cow. Most Easterners, on the other hand, will see a picture of a pasture. Their perceptions are so determined, in fact, that people who see the figure may be oblivious to major changes in the background, and people who see the ground may not even remember what kind of animal was grazing there.

Neither perception is better or worse, so much as incomplete. If the athlete sees herself as the only one that matters, she misses the value of her team — the ground in which she functions. If a company’s human resources officer sees the individual employee as nothing more than a gear in the firm, he misses the value and autonomy of the particular person—the figure.

When we lose track of figure and ground, we forget who is doing what for whom, and why. We risk treating other people as objects. Worse, we embed these values in our organizations or encode them into our technologies. By learning to recognize reversals of figure and ground, we can liberate ourselves from the systems…

Related posts:

CA Brightside is a support offering from Broadcom that helps with scaled adoption of open source projects for Mainframe DevOps. It includes enterprise-grade support, convenience installers, training…

Two Can Keep A Secret’ by Karen M. McManus is a Young Adult Murder Mystery novel that takes place in the modern day. This book focuses mainly on two twins who move to this small town called Echo Park…

Budget and financial advice for young people -- focused on men but useful to all.