Lately the idea of technological stagnation has begun to brood over the Western world. The dominant spirit of our times is still gaga for gadgets, still over the moon for iThis and iThat, but there is an increasingly powerful countercurrent, a sense that perhaps the technological future is actually conspicuous in its failure to arrive. “When tracked against the admittedly lofty hopes of the 1950s and 1960s,” Peter Thiel argued in these pages three years ago, “technological progress has fallen short in many domains.” The left-wing essayist David Graeber put things more sharply in the pages of The Baffler: “It seemed unlikely that I’d live to see all the things I was reading about in science fiction,” he wrote of his 1960s-era youth, “but it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t see any of them.”
Among the more literary-minded stagnationists, there is a sense that our failure is partially one of imagination as well as one of technique — that not only science but science fiction is somehow falling short, trading in its golden-age élan for a pessimistic bias, a dystopian default. Hence the angst of the sci-fi novelist Neal Stephenson, who recently launched a literary project encouraging his fellow scribblers to imagine anew the possibility that future generations could actually “get big stuff done” — with the long-ago Apollo mission as the paradigmatic example.
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