
David Graeber: Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit - rjknight
http://www.thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars/print
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rjknight
Yes, it's long. But it's a lot more thoughtful than the usual "where's my
jetpack?" article and makes a number of points that seem to confirm the
general world-view of the startup community.

Graeber is an academic, mostly known for his book "Debt: The first 5000 years"
and his (somewhat vague) role in coordinating the Occupy movement, yet most of
this article could have been written by Peter Thiel:

 _Breakthroughs will happen; inconvenient discoveries cannot be permanently
suppressed. Other, less bureaucratized parts of the world—or at least, parts
of the world with bureaucracies that are not so hostile to creative
thinking—will slowly but inevitably attain the resources required to pick up
where the United States and its allies have left off. The Internet does
provide opportunities for collaboration and dissemination that may help break
us through the wall as well. Where will the breakthrough come? We can’t know.
Maybe 3D printing will do what the robot factories were supposed to. Or maybe
it will be something else. But it will happen._

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waterlesscloud
Good stuff all around, the really interesting ideas are in the last third but
read the whole thing to see how he gets there.

Gives me more to think about than most anything else I've read of late.

