Technology is popularly misunderstood as "gadgets and lab science". But the root of the word is shared with technique. That is, if I have a technique for apply

Technology is popularly misunderstood as "gadgets and lab science". But the root of the word is shared with technique. That is, if I have a technique for applying leverage, and I use it to make a lever, that's a simple technology. If I define a new system of organizing my home according to some principles, that's a technology. And so on. It is certainly the case that we have found new techniques and technologies in recent decades. But in defining a "tech sector" and relating it to measurements of GDP growth we have tokenized a particular mode of it, one which some parts of society propose is increasingly irrelevant to the quality of our existence. It's often pointed out that wars are "good for the economy" in that more stuff is manufactured, overlooking the destructive aspects of war. And so the definition of productivity is also worth questioning, because it's tied to a model of society based around the firm and its capacity to produce quantities of assets and trade them for money. This model has been in place for a few hundred years now(see early merchantalist writing) and is in need of reassessment. Much of what the economy has done since the beginning of industrialization is simply in the realm of creating more monetizable spaces and optimizing towards the "frictionless" everything-for-sale optimum. It worked for a while, but at this point, we're basically hindered by the frameworks used to define value and enforce sale. There are huge realms of technical innovations that don't get explored because we don't have a place for them. Instead we have to aim to "fit in" with the legacy system.