#38: Hyperloop of the Mind
One prevailing narrative about contemporary technology is that meaningful progress has slowed down over the last fifty years, with today’s innovations inspiring less awe than the railroads and moon landings of generations past. David Graeber popularized this attitude by lamenting that flying cars and the sci-fi future of his 1960s childhood never quite materialized as promised. Put another way, if you'd experienced the euphoric optimism of midcentury American progress and projected it forward linearly, you might indeed expect the present to resemble Star Wars more than it does, and you also might consider the modest degree of visible change since then (aside from the ubiquitous glowing screens) a failure. A century ago the Italian Futurists could exclaim that “a roaring motor car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace” and mean it, while any movements today that feel comparable enthusiasm about iPhones or cloud computing haven’t managed an equally powerful statement.
It’s possible to feel Graeber's disappointment while totally disagreeing with his point. Anyone paying attention should find the present era’s technology as impressive as any other's, but that appreciation is increasingly cerebral. not visceral, as its objects are so often tiny, invisible, and subtle. Even the big, physical components have a prosaic quality: Amazon’s supply chain and Google’s data centers could be monumental triumphs but instead they’re hidden in the woods and made intentionally boring. David Graeber thus finds it possible to complain about how nothing's really being built now—nobody building it wants him to get excited. We also didn’t really need flying cars.
As if born out of this tension, Elon Musk emerged, promising to finally build the flying cars (actually tunnels, but for similar reasons) and give 21st-century technology the virility it got this far without. Hyperloop, his iconic megaproject proposal, has something important in common with yesteryear's flying cars: It also hasn’t been built. Graeber pointed toward “technologies of simulation” as our post-1970s innovation mode, in which "the only breakthroughs were those that made it easier to create, transfer, and rearrange virtual projections of things that either already existed, or, we came to realize, never would.” Technology has bifurcated into the quietly functional and the audacious virtual. Hyperloop and the flying car have plenty in common: We reap all of their benefits before they ever exist.
Reads:
A fascinating explanation of how Google Maps combines its various datasets to identify those copper-colored "Areas of Interest" in cities.
A haunting semi-eulogy for the shopping mall (vaporwave alert)
Ian Bogost, "HQ Trivia Is a Harbinger of Dystopia." I was waiting for this (and now I can't stop imagining Scott Rogowsky as the "I'd buy that for a dollar" guy from RoboCop).
Until next time,
Drew