Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

After the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program, whose major technological innovations—atomic bombs, nuclear energy, rockets, semiconductors—were largely physical, progress became increasingly confined to the virtual.

The words “progress,” “innovation,” and “disruption” have become empty signifiers, ritualistically evoked in pitch decks and advertisements to suggest “world-changing” “novelty,” “creativity,” or “originality.” Semantically, these words have become hollowed-out totems of a culture optimized for algorithmically enhanced engagement and excitement.

We’ve reached a point of diminishing returns, in which many areas of research produce noise but no signal and the cost of even minor innovations rises with no end in sight.

Fields ranging from physics and neurobiology to cognitive psychology and quantitative finance have recently experienced a reproducibility crisis, wherein their findings have been impossible to replicate.

Many of those who participated in the Bitcoin bubble can attest that a bubble completely warps one’s sense of chronological time, a feeling captured by a viral meme that likens experiencing the bubble to the experience of the two protagonists of the 2014 movie Interstellar when they arrive on a planet where a few hours correspond to a few years in

Energy is another field that possesses the potential for technological transcendence. This is most apparent in the field of nuclear energy, which has been indelibly linked with the imagery of salvation and damnation. As early as 1908, a popular book titled The Interpretation of Radium suggested that harnessing nuclear power, which promised a limitl

Unsurprisingly, the Human Genome Project also exhibited a bubble dynamic, driven as it was by an ambitious vision and characterized by excessive government overinvestment.

Bubbles are simultaneously technologically deterministic and socially constructivist in nature. They only work if the new product is physically possible, but they also rely on discrete choices by specific people.

In contrast to mere imitation, which refers to the positive effects of copying someone else’s behavior (which facilitates learning, for example), mimetic desire—desiring the other’s desire—opens up a deeply violent dimension.