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The Five Phases of Technology

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Phase 1: Origin, development and first hobbyist community.

• The technology is invented for the first time, often as little more than an intellectual exercise. It gets researched internally by a governmental or educational institution, or sometimes by a company or individual.
• Researchers and academics (or the company or individual) complete their initial development of the technology and decide not to build it further. Sometimes another party invents the same technology independently. Its existence, and access to it, is revealed publicly.
• Technically-minded hobbyists pick it up and a community forms around it. New ideas are tried, paradigms are discussed, and standards slowly develop organically. The community builds the technology into a viable small- to medium-scale system.
• The technology experiences a "golden age" as a free, open, deregulated paradise. It rises in grassroots popularity as a result. Barrier to entry remains high, however, due to significant technical knowledge or financial outlay needed to use it.

Phase 2: Mainstream introduction, commercialization and dominance.

• A forward-looking company sees potential profit in the technology and makes their own watered-down version. The watered-down version is marketed to, and designed to be used by, people who are not tech-savvy.
• News of the technology begins to spread outside the hobbyist commuity, via the marketing or by organic word of mouth. Trend-setting casual users discover the technology through the company's implementation. They begin to talk about it as the hot new thing. The original hobbyists are excited to share their passion for the technology and eagerly advocate for its adoption.
• The general public picks up on the fad and adopts the technology on a large scale. Some do it because of the utility of the technology, while others simply want to keep with the times. The technology begins to appear everywhere, being recommended and used by influential people and organizations. The hobbyists are hired by corporations to develop it professionally. The technology becomes dominant in the mainstream.
• Other companies quickly jump on the bandwagon and create their own versions, causing the technology to be diluted to a shadow of its former self. A flood of intellectual-property claims make the technology, or at least its extensions and wrappers, proprietary.

Phase 3: First problems, top-out and end of heyday.

• The ubiquity of the technology leads some people to use it for taboo, dangerous or illegal purposes. It develops an unsavory reputation in some traditionalistic parts of the mainstream. Moralists start to complain that it's not being regulated enough.
• Companies join the cry to regulate the technology, primarily as a means of destroying competition. Media outlets report on the "danger" of the technology in order to attract fear-driven views and clicks. The bad press foments public opposition to the technology, but its detractorship remains a minority.
• The government uses public outrage to seize control over the technology. The technology is stifled by the restrictive patents, licenses and copyrights. The little remaining growth potential is crushed by government regulation.
• Technically-minded hobbyists begin to lose interest in the technology because it can no longer be developed freely. Bleeding-edge enthusiasts and some trend-setting casual users are off-put by its restrictions or reputation, and they begin to switch away. However, the technology still enjoys considerable popularity in the general public.

Phase 4: Popular decline, retirement and obsolescence.

• One or more events cause mainstream use of the technology to begin declining. The restrictions might cause all development, even commercial, to slow to a standstill; the technology might reach its practical limit and be unable to evolve further; an incompatible technology might rise up and outcompete it; its bad reputation might overshadow it and cause the mainstream to disavow it; or it might be found to be fundamentally and irreparably flawed in some way.
• Companies start to deprecate the technology and use it only as a fallback. It falls out of style and the public sees it as outdated and archaic. It becomes legacy technology, only used casually by a few holdouts.
• Major organizations eventually intentionally break compatibility. All remaining casual users are forced to switch away, and the only remaining users are hardcore, knowledgeable enthusiasts. Despite the complete evaporation of any significant userbase, the old regulations and IP restrictions remain.

Phase 5: Second hobbyist community, miniature revival and death.

• A small, dedicated core community keeps the technology alive unofficially. For a while the glory of the early days are reclaimed on a small scale. Its unofficial usage violates the old corporate and government restrictions; the community is forced underground and becomes even smaller as a result.
• The tiny size of the core community leads to stagnation. Usable supplies become harder to source and compatible code becomes harder to maintain. Eventually even the hardcore hobbyists lose interest or are unable to continue.
• The technology dies, abandoned and forgotten. Most of the content that could only be accessed through the technology is lost.

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I originally jotted down this note in early 2019, almost two years before I first heard about Gemini. Right now I see Gemini solidly in phase 1--but with the rise of easy-to-use clients and services such as Lagrange and Bubble, we may not be far from the beginning of phase 2. I hope that given the protocol's functional limitations, which are quite intentional, it will not suffer the same extent of commercialization that kills so many other useful technologies.

Obviously not every technology goes through all of these phases, or in the same order, but in my experience this is the norm.

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[Last updated: 2023-06-07]