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.
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.