A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false…
This article started with an interesting premise and then derailed itself. I love the point about the USSR being a competitive pressure on the US, it definitely resulted in more focused and centralized development.
What’s bizarre here is Graeber’s definition of the future being based in shit like flying cars and rayguns. It’s a very inflexible view and he has a surprising amount of nostalgia for the 50’s and 60’s. News flash: those eras fucking sucked for everyone who wasn’t a white cishet guy.
The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue.
This is a boomer-level understanding of how the Internet works, even back when this was written in 2012. Even then, “all we are talking about” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.
Had the Internet been described to a science fiction aficionado in the fifties and sixties and touted as the most dramatic technological achievement since his time, his reaction would have been disappointment. Fifty years and this is the best our scientists managed to come up with? We expected computers that would think!
And we have the beginning of those. Turns out this shit is complicated and we didn’t manage to advance the hardware as fast as we thought. Also, futurists were predicting things like video calls and remote shopping / work in the 50’s and 60’s.
In addition to that Graeber has some brief ableism in the paragraph where he dismisses psychotherapeutic medication as a tool of the working class meant to keep people working. That’s a general reductionist soapbox of his I strongly dislike and makes me wonder whether he’d have wound up as an antivaxer if he was still alive.
That all said, I agree with his assessment that neoliberalism has resulted in technological research being dispersed and less focused. The point on America as a nation of bureaucrats also rings pretty true.
This article started with an interesting premise and then derailed itself. I love the point about the USSR being a competitive pressure on the US, it definitely resulted in more focused and centralized development.
What’s bizarre here is Graeber’s definition of the future being based in shit like flying cars and rayguns. It’s a very inflexible view and he has a surprising amount of nostalgia for the 50’s and 60’s. News flash: those eras fucking sucked for everyone who wasn’t a white cishet guy.
This is a boomer-level understanding of how the Internet works, even back when this was written in 2012. Even then, “all we are talking about” is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence.
And we have the beginning of those. Turns out this shit is complicated and we didn’t manage to advance the hardware as fast as we thought. Also, futurists were predicting things like video calls and remote shopping / work in the 50’s and 60’s.
In addition to that Graeber has some brief ableism in the paragraph where he dismisses psychotherapeutic medication as a tool of the working class meant to keep people working. That’s a general reductionist soapbox of his I strongly dislike and makes me wonder whether he’d have wound up as an antivaxer if he was still alive.
That all said, I agree with his assessment that neoliberalism has resulted in technological research being dispersed and less focused. The point on America as a nation of bureaucrats also rings pretty true.