Where did the future go, again?

The iphone6 and the end of history.

A decade ago this month, Apple released the iPhone6. It would become the best-selling iPhone of all time. Though you can point to camera upgrades and battery life, the 6 didn’t have that many new features. It was just the first robust enough to handle our tech-addled physical abuse and Apple’s incessant OS upgrading for any extended period.

And it was fatefully the last iPhone with a headphone jack. Despite the new camera widgets and annoying AI add-ons, our experience with mobile devices hasn’t changed in a decade.

“What if the real end of history was the iPhone6?” This was the open question Jay Kang asked to conclude our conversation on the Time To Say Goodbye podcast last month. That conversation with Jay and Tyler and Leif Weatherby was about how we’ve all grown tired of the tyranny of data. 2014 was the peak of the promise of data for everything, too. Data was BIG, and that BIG data was the new oil. People were in love with neural nets again. Everything was going to get so much better by moving to “AI first.” Part of the loss of shine of data is the fact that we’ve been in a decade of technological stagnation.

And yet, in rich countries, our experience of computation hasn’t changed in years. Computers are not only not getting faster, they are not perceivably different. If anything, the medium has gotten more frustrating. A tab in a browser that views a 5KB text file needs 200 megabytes of RAM. When you buy a printer, you have to pay a subscription fee to use the toner cartridge. Everything now has a touchscreen, no matter whether that makes the interface more frustrating or not. You can’t serve ads without a touchscreen. New technology is less tactile, has longer lags, and has more ads. 

People have been making similar complaints since the fateful release of the iPhone6. In September 2014, The Baffler magazine brought together two very different thinkers to discuss their disappointment with the stagnancy of technological progress and debate their alternative proposals for the future. On one side was Peter Thiel, the billionaire capitalist wizard, founder of PayPal and Palantir, funder of Facebook, and champion of Silicon Valley.¹ On the other side was David Graeber, the prolific anthropologist and one of the best-known, most eloquent voices in the Occupy Wall Street movement. 

You’d figure these two would be at each other’s throats, but both men had penned essays motivated by the question of why, in 2014, we didn’t have flying cars. The Baffler decided to get them together to see how two very different intellectuals came to the same conclusion.

Moderator John Summers framed the debate with the question: “What's the matter with America, and what does technology have to do with it?” Why did none of the predictions of the 1960s pan out? 

Graeber began his presentation with a discussion on the prescience of science fiction. Verne and Wells talked about “flying machines and submarines and rockets and talking boxes” that all came to be within the next 50 years. But the sci-fi of the 60s promised “anti-gravity sleds and teleportation devices and Mars bases and robot androids that could do chores for you and immortality drugs.“ None of this came to pass. Why was it that the science fiction of the early 20th century was predictive, but the 1960s fiction was not?

You can say, “because it’s fiction,” but science fiction reflects our present into possible futures. It is a genre that distills cultural optimism. These books were set in an ostensibly near future. 2001 was supposed to have a space odyssey, remember? Why was our optimism in the 1960s so diverged from the future of the 2010s?

Graeber blames the stagnation on the simultaneous corporatization and bureaucratization of research and development and the virtualization of money. It’s not just that post-war bureaucracies have metastasized. It’s their systematic obsession with key performance indicators, forcing everyone to constantly engage in a game of marketing and competition.

Thiel doesn’t disagree on the problem but spars with Graeber about the solution. Whereas Graeber argues for a wide sharing of resources so that people can be unburdened from constant self-marketing, Thiel thinks these resources should go to a small group (his friends). Thiel’s aggressive venture capitalism embraces a revolutionary politics, one that envisions funding misfits to attack our institutions to change things for the better. In Thiel’s mind, startups are radical means of reshaping society through rule-breaking. If you get a small number of people together with a vision, they can break through technocratic regulatory logjams. He cites PayPal, Uber, and Airbnb. Thiel argues that the only way to fix sclerotic academia is to abandon it, giving resources to the most talented, visionary young people instead. He trumpets his Thiel Fellows program. 

Despite their anarchistic optimism, the decade after the debate gave us more of the same virtualized, financialized information technology that makes the rich richer and our spirits poorer. We still don’t have flying cars or teleportation devices. What comes next? 

I have no idea what comes next. I don’t make predictions because I’m always wrong. But I can reflect a bit on this conversation.

Hindsight shows Thiel’s model isn’t the solution. It’s part of the problem. It makes some people very rich and brings us more of the same. All of his exciting startups bring us further virtualization, financialization, and exploitation. Thiel fellows have brought us… Figma and Ethereum. Even Techbro Übermenschen couldn’t free us from the vicious chain of technocracy. Part of the reason why the big technologies of the past decade have been crypto and AI is that the tech itself has stalled.

Frustratingly, Graeber didn’t propose an alternative path. He vaguely argued for a liberal anarchistic utopia where people were given the means to figure things out for themselves, but he didn’t make a case for how to get there. Graeber was ideologically against proposing policies. In 2018’s Bullshit Jobs, he wrote

“If an author is critical of existing social arrangements, reviewers will often respond by effectively asking ‘so what are you proposing to do about it, then?’”

I’ve been thinking about how to write something about this remarkable debate for a month. I’ve failed to publish it because I wanted to have some sort of optimistic end. But the 10th anniversary of the iPhone6 is over tomorrow. Tomorrow is the future. 

I’ll have to settle for channeling my inner Graeber and accept that sometimes you just have to articulate a problem. I’m not proposing anything other than a broader awareness here. Critiques like those leveled by Graeber and Thiel have been around since the 1980s. Whether it’s the postmodernists or Neil Postman, we’ve had plenty of substantial articulations of the downsides of digitizing everything. But now, with Moore’s Law over, with the internet a mess of AI slop churned out by energy hungry GPU farms, and with few cool ideas on the horizon, maybe we can think again about what comes after data. I like rethinking things, and a call for dialog can itself be a positive ending.

1. 2014 was before Thiel had been outed for bankrolling Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker. It was before he came out as a full-throated Trump supporter. It was before he was advocating doomsday prepping in New Zealand and drinking young blood. A kinder, gentler, younger Thiel. But he was clearly a right of center thinker in 2014, having written for the National Review and publicly espoused arguably radical libertarian politics.