Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
Adam Mastroianniexperimentalhistory.substack.com
Saved by Johanna
Ideas aren’t getting harder to find and anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward and I will fight them
The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place—yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them.
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
The answer, I think, is what it almost always is: that inventors are simply extremely rare. People can have all the incentives, all the materials, all the mechanical skills, and even all the right general notions of how things work. As we’ve seen, even Savery himself was apparently inspired by the same ancient experiment as everyone else who worked... See more
Anton Howes • Age of Invention: Why wasn't the Steam Engine Invented Earlier? Part III
Horizons have shrunk. Novelists and filmmakers seem far more at home with dystopias than with the possibility that the world might get better. The institutions that once fuelled our shared imagination have, for different reasons, given up, leaving public intellectual culture recycling old ideas, while much of politics has drifted into nostalgia.
Geoff Mulgan • Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination
