The Future Is Not Only Useless, It’s Expensive

And so the internet’s latest shining promise of creative autonomy denatures into another burnout-inducing hamster-wheel game of keep up, as Gimlet executive Reyhan Harmanci noted recently.

Today’s economic constraints may be enforcing a degree of sobriety, but even before the pandemic, the easy money was clearly concealing a stagnation. This is the thesis of the Umami essay: that material progress had plateaued, leaving us to manipulate symbols and create the mere illusion of value (this is also what David Graeber argues in his “we w

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If you flip over all the cards with NFTs, what’s revealed is how the current economic moment depends on technological mystification.