Why tech is eating itself — the involution problem

Rohan Paul has a sharp piece on why the last few years of tech have felt so exhausting for no reason. The word he borrows is involution — from anthropology — and it describes a process where something gets bigger on the outside but hollows out on the inside. A cell that divides and divides until it's enormous and empty. A culture that expands its vocabulary but loses its ability to say anything new.

The tech version is this: we've been adding layers — more frameworks, more abstractions, more tooling — while the actual work gets harder to see through. Your React app now has a 47-dependency tree, a build system, a bundler, a component library, a state management pattern, and a linting rule telling you to use a different pattern. The app renders a button.

The best part of the piece is the contrast between two kinds of progress. One is evolution — a horse getting faster, a bird growing wings, a database getting faster at queries. The other is involution — a horse getting heavier, a bird getting more feathers, a database getting a new migration tool that does the same thing your old migration tool did. Involution feels like progress because there's more of it. It isn't.

Why this matters for us: the same thing is happening to AI right now — more models, more fine-tunes, more RAG pipelines — and the ones that actually save people time are the ones that got smaller, not bigger. The ones that do the work instead of the work's paperwork.