If you’re reading this, you probably have the same feeling I do: we’re stuck. Our political stagnation is one thing, a blob in Washington and beyond ensures that real change is nearly impossible. That’s plain for all to see. But as our ruling class calcifies and our economy languishes, it’s less clear how stunted we are on the technological front. We built the bomb, landed a man on the moon, put a computer in every pocket, and have made frightening advances in AI. Yet these advances are not all alike: we’ve gotten good at emulating the future in a virtual world, but we’ve forgotten what a tangibly different future even looks like.
This is the starting point of Boom: Bubbles and the End to Stagnation, a new book by techno-philosophers Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart, who, like the giants they admire, possess no small ambitions. Part science, part history, part philosophy, Boom looks to the greatness of the Western past to build a better future, offering not just a novel diagnosis of our malaise but a way up and out. However, it requires forgetting everything you think you know.
Is being “rational” a … bad thing? Yes, argues Boom. What else does being rational mean besides a studied cost-benefit analysis? In seeking the best outcome at the lowest possible risk, we’ve developed an almost compulsive obsession with safety. We saw it explode in the culture during COVID as much as we see it built into financial markets, and in both cases, it often delivers the precise disaster it seeks to avoid.
Our obsession with safety distorts our vision of what is, and what can be. With Facebook’s virtual reality and the conveniences of Amazon Prime and Uber, we think we’re living in the future. But what we see in this modern technology is merely a mirage, incremental advances that deliver slightly better modifications of the present. So your pizza delivery arrives a little faster, easier, and cheaper — but you’re still ordering pizza. This is fun at first, but you soon feel the stagnation set in even if you can’t quite see it.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Boom argues only risk can solve for the problem of safety, introducing the book’s central concept of “bubbles.” You know, what crashed the real estate market in ‘08.
Yet bubbles can be good, too. While they may represent a “collective delusion,” (e.g. housing prices will always go up) they can also be an “expression of a collective vision”: the Manhattan Project, the Apollo mission, semiconductors, fracking, even the crypto-revolution — all operate like financial bubbles, Boom argues. Each project brought together a small group of exceptionally talented and driven visionaries over a short time period, who, through sheer faith in a future different from the past, convinced the rest of the world to go along with their crazy ideas. Their seemingly irrational tolerance for risk opened the tap of talent, capital, and expectations, and, unlike the housing market, it paid off. The results are far-reaching and cumulative: the Manhattan Project’s computing advances paved the way for Apollo, which invested in the foundation of the technological revolution.
“Optimism can be a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Boom argues.
The meat of the book examines the 20th Century’s greatest innovations — true leaps into a new future — that shaped America and the world. While perhaps a little wonky at times for the lay-reader, Boom is worth reading for these inspiring and detailed histories alone. You feel the might of the Western spirit shine through, along with the authors’ admiration of it.
Yet this is no nostalgic lament. So what of return, or as Boom prefers, “escape”?
Most of us are not budding tech geniuses or wealthy financial speculators. We can’t drop everything to risk it all on the emerging technologies that Boom identifies as possible leaps to the future. “While superficially technological, secular, and hyper-rational in nature, each endeavor represents a fundamental yearning or quest for transcendence, redemption, and salvation”; a cultural problem requires a cultural answer. And it’s here, perhaps inadvertently, that Boom delivers a grassroots message that goes far beyond Silicon Valley.
All this technical talk of bubbles to explain what the penniless American pioneer understood hundreds of years ago, what an illiterate deck hand knew when he came aboard a journey to the unknown, what even women and children grasped as they set off to settle the New World. The culture of bubbles is foundational to the Western world, not just the great men who built it, but all who willingly and knowingly participated along the way. Ours is the culture of adventure, a spiritual self-confidence in ourselves and what we’re doing, even (or perhaps especially) when it takes on an iconoclastic disregard of the status quo. And whether secular or religious, that confidence cannot manifest without the earnest belief in answering to a higher calling. No wonder America loves an upstart and underdog; they are who built America. (RELATED: New Book Lays Out The Playbook For How To End The Marxist Takeover Of America)
This hasn’t just been lost in the top echelons of R&D, but the modern equivalent to the settlers and pioneers: an average person seeking a marginal improvement to his station for generations to come. At an individual level, we too often prioritize the comfort of the status quo over the risk of a better future, and like the frog slowly boiling, fail to see the stagnation fester around us. The answer is to reject the status quo in all of its not always observable iterations.
The answer might come from Elon Musk, or some future visionary, or it might not. But Boom is worth the read for every American who feels stuck and yet can’t quite explain why. Not only does the reader get a picture of just how stuck we truly are, but more importantly, gets a much needed kick in the ass to do something about it.
The future must be better than the present. The first step to getting there is realizing there’s no other option.
