Round the decay Of that colossal wreck,

From Technology Stalled in 1970 by Tom Simonite. An interview with Pete Thiele

You have to think of companies like Microsoft or Oracle or Hewlett-Packard as fundamentally bets against technology. They keep throwing off profits as long as nothing changes. Microsoft was a technology company in the ’80s and ’90s; in this decade you invest because you’re betting on the world not changing. Pharma companies are bets against innovation because they’re mostly just figuring out ways to extend the lifetime of patents and block small companies. All these companies that start as technological companies become antitechnological in character. Whether the world changes or not might vary from company to company, but if it turns out that these antitechnology companies are going to be good investments, that’s quite bad for our society.

Echoes of The Rise and Decline of Nations by Mancur Olson and of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn.

Something arises or is invented which allows us to produce more. We refine that development and systematize it. Then we set it in concrete with barriers around it so that it doesn't change. Sooner or later it becomes a testimonial to a past age. By defending it against change we seal its fate and isolate ourselves from a better future. Percy Shelley captured the natural tendency towards stasis in his poem Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".