Joseph H Sadove
2 min readMar 8, 2019

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It used to be we would reflect on the evolution of trends and innovations retrospectively. But now, more and more the notion of inventing them prospectively has become not only a trend, but a profession and religion rolled into one. As most attempts at doing this in the recent past have been fabulously and preposterously wrong, my prediction is this will follow that model. No, Mr. Keynes, we don’t have a 2 day work week. No we don’t have personal robots or flying cars and thank heaven for that. Nor are we likely to have colonies on Mars rather than the greater probability of mass extinctions here on earth, including quite possibly mankind. Never mind that real world stuff.
It also used to be that those working on innovations (solid state physics, ICs, telecom, networking, hypertext, etc.) steered free of grand predictions around political and social reorganization occurring as a result. There was a proportion and modesty.
We used to have really just one George Gilder getting things less right than a random algorithm trying to do the same. Now everyone is a George Gilder and ideology has penetrated deep into the breathless world of wonder and complete ignorance of history and current events.

Is a word like “Autonomy” just a new incarnation of Bookchin’s post-scarcity anarchism? Why not. Only, without the attempt at self-awareness of what that implies for the billions of people who already live in poorly governed corrupt societies.

Such turgid and breathless grand-schemery used to have the natural constraints of never rising out of undergraduate phase. Now it’s seemingly advancing into the post-graduate world oblvious of what that world really looks like.

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