From Bubble to Bust--and Perhaps Boom Again? Notes on Technological Hype

At this point I am old enough to have lived through a number of cycles of boom and bust for technological hype. And I think I have noticed a possible pattern in recent busts, certainly with regard to the "bust" end of the broader cycle. In particular it seems that this tends to combine three features:

1. The failure of much-hyped technologies to actually materialize.
2. Economic downturn.
3. A crisis which gives the lie to self-satisfaction over some particularly significant claim for our technology as a revolutionary problem-solver.

Back in the late '90s there was enormous hype over computers. Of course, this period did produce some genuine, significant technologies of everyday life--personal computing, Internet access and cellular telephony--beginning to become genuinely widespread, and becoming refined considerably in the process, culminating in the extraordinary combination of power, versatility and portability of our smart phones and tablets with their 5G-grade broadband two decades on.

Yet as a review of Ray Kurzweil's predictions for 2009 makes clear, much that was widely expected never came to pass. Artificial intelligence, virtual reality, nanotechnology. To put it mildly, progress in those areas, which would have had far more radical consequences, proved . . . slower, so slow that expectation fizzled out in disappointment.

Meanwhile, the New Economy boom of the late '90s turned to bust, a bust which never quite turned into boom again, so that not the crash but the years of growth turned out to be the historical anomaly, and even the most credulous consumers of the conventional wisdom reminded that the idiot fantasy that the economic equivalent of the law of gravity had been suspended was just that, an idiot fantasy. This was all the more painful because, in contrast with the New Economy promises that science was liberating us from our reliance on a finite and frail base of natural resources, we confronted spiking natural resource prices, above all fossil fuel prices, that brought on a global fuel and food crisis (2006-2008). And then the comparatively crummy performance of the early twenty-first century, which was really just another, much less impressive bubble--and that not in any fancy new tech, but old-fashioned real estate and commodity prices--led straightaway to the worst economic disaster since the 1930s, from which we have been reeling ever since.

Science fiction, a useful bellwether for these things, showed the reaction. Where in the wake of the '90s boom and hype the genre showered readers in shiny, ultra-high-tech Singularitarian futures, and through sheer momentum this substantially continued through the early '00s (it can take years to finish a book, years after that to get it into print), it was all post-apocalypse and dystopia--like World War Z and The Hunger Games and Paolo Bacigalupi's stuff. And even when science fiction bothered with the future it was the future as it looked from the standpoint of the past--as with steampunk, which was very popular post-2008 as well.

Of course, the popular mood did not stay permanently down in the dumps. The economy made a recovery of sorts--a very anemic one, but a recovery all the same.

And there was renewed excitement about many of the very technologies that had disappointed, with the companies and the press assuring us that they were finally getting the hang of carbon nanotubes and neural nets and virtual reality and the rest. Soon our cars would drive themselves, while drones filled our skies, bringing us, if we wanted them--and we would--our virtual reality kits, our supermarket orders of clean meat.

Alas, just about none of that came to pass either--and where in the '90s we at least got the PCs and Internet and cell phones, I cannot think of a single real consolation prize for the consumer this time around. Meanwhile a new crisis hit--in the form of a pandemic which underlined just how un-automated the world still was, how reliant on people actually physically doing stuff in person. And underlined, too, that for all the talk of our living in an age of biotechnomedical miracle that has filled the air for as long as I can remember, the war on viruses is very, very, very far from being won. All of this contributed to an even worse economic disaster than the one seen in 2008 (not that things ever normalized after that).

It seems to me not just possible, but probable, that the combination of technological disappointment, crisis and economic downturn will spell another period of lowered expectations with regard to technological progress. Indeed, I have already been struck by how the chatter about the prospect of mass technological unemployment in the near term vanished amid economic crash generating plenty of the old-fashioned, regular kind.

Of course, in considering that one should acknowledge that some are pointing to the current crisis, precisely because of the way in which it has demonstrated certain societal vulnerabilities and needs as spurring further efforts to automate economic operations, or at least permit them to be performed remotely--with implications extending to, among much else, those drones and self-driving cars. A similar logic, some hold, may work in favor of clean meat.

It is not wholly implausible, of course. Crises can and do spur innovation, when the backing is there--when the prevailing institutions elect to treat a crisis as a crisis. However, I have yet to get the impression of any such sensibility among those flattered by the feeble-minded everyday usage of terms like "world leader."

Because No One Else Seems to be Keeping Tabs--A Glance Back at the Past Decade's Techno-Hype

The vast majority of people, I find, are very "well-trained" consumers. By that I mean that they have been trained in the way marketing hucksters want them to be. They completely swallow the hype about how soon a thing will be here and how much difference it will make in their lives--and then after the product's arriving later, or maybe not making so much difference, or maybe never even arriving at all and therefore making no difference whatsoever, thinking in terms of the hype rather than their own lived experience. They dutifully remember nothing and learn nothing, so that they are just as ready to believe the promises of the next huckster who comes along. And they pour scorn down on the head of anyone who questions what might most politely be called their credulousness--when they are not absorbed in the smart phone they believe is the telos of all human history--adding meanness to their extreme stupidity.

Still, as the words "vast majority" make clear, not everyone falls into this category. Some are a little more alert, a little more critical, than others. And sometimes those with the capacity to get a little more skeptical do so.

I think we are approaching such a period, because so many of the expectations raised in the 2010-2015 period are, at this moment, being deeply disappointed--and not simply because the ill-informed hacks of the press have oversold things far beyond their slight comprehension, but because in many a field those generally presumed to be in a position to know best (like CEOs of companies actually making the stuff in question) have publicly, often with great fanfare, announced specific dates for the unveiling of their promised grand creations, and those dates have come and again, sometimes again and again, as a world in need of the innovations in question goes on waiting.

Consider the Carbon NanoTube (CNT) computer chips that were supposed to keep computing power-per-dollar rising exponentially for a generation as the old silicon-based chips hit their limits.

Back in 2014 IBM announced it would have a commercial CNT chip by 2020--winning what has with only a little melodrama been called a "race against time."

Well, it's 2020. That commercial chip, however, is not here. Instead we are hearing only of breakthroughs that may, if followed up by other breakthroughs, eventually lead to the production of those chips, perhaps sometime this coming decade.

Indeed, the latest report regarding the Gartner Hype Cycle holds that carbon-based transistors are sliding down from the "Peak of Inflated Expectations" into the "Trough of Disillusionment."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the progress of artificial intelligence, on which so many were so bullish a short while ago, is also slowing down--in part, for lack of computer capacity. It seems, in fact, that even carbon nanotube chips wouldn't get things on track if they were here. Instead the field's spokespersons are talking quantum computers, which, to put it mildly, are a still more remote possibility.

Also unsurprisingly, particularly high-profile applications for that artificial intelligence are proving areas of disappointment as well.

To cite an obvious instance, in 2013 Jeff Bezos said that within five years (by 2018) drone deliveries would be "commonplace."

In considering the absence of such deliveries years after those five years have run their course the press tends to focus on regulatory approval as the essential stumbling block, but, of course, the requisite technology is apparently still "under development."

Perhaps more germane to most people's lives, back in 2015 Elon Musk predicted that fully autonomous cars (Level 5) would hit the market in 2017.

That prediction has fared even more badly, with the result that the self-driving car (certainly to go by the number of articles whose writers smugly use smug phrases like "reality check" in their titles) is starting to look like the flying car. (Or the flying delivery drone?)

The Oculus Rift created quite a sensation back in 2013.

Alas, today the excitement that had surrounded it is even more completely recognized as past.

Clean meat was supposed to be on the market in 2019, if not before the end of 2018.

Now in 2020 the Guardian is talking about clean meat's hitting the market happening "in a few years." (For its part, IDTechEx says, think 2023.)

In area after area, what was supposed to have been here this year or the year before that or even before that is not only not here, but, we are told, still a few more years away--the Innovations talked up by the Silicon Valley Babbitts and their sycophants in the press receding further and further into the future.

Will it necessarily always be so? Of course not. Maybe the dream deferred will be a dream denied only temporarily, and briefly, with the semiconductor factories soon to be mass-producing CNT chips, which maybe along with quicker-than-expected progress in quantum computing will keep the AI spring of the twenty-first century from giving way to a long, cold AI winter, while perhaps even without them the delivery drones and the self-driving cars arrive ahead of schedule. Maybe, if still rough around the edges, next year will be VR's year, while this time it really is true that clean meat will be in our supermarkets "in a few years."

However, as one old enough to remember the extraordinary expectations of the '90s in many of these precise areas--nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, virtual reality--the disappointment is already very familiar, and worse for that familiarity, as well as how little in the way of tangible result we have been left with this time around. (The disappointments of the '90s were colossal--but we did get that explosion of access to personal computing, cellular telephony, the Internet, and those things did improve quite rapidly afterward. What from among the products of this round of techno-hype can compare with any of that, let alone all of it?) And if anything, where the development is less familiar but perhaps potentially more significant, the disappointment is even more galling. (Clean meat could be a very big piece of the puzzle for coping with the demand of a growing population for food, and the environmental crisis, at the same time.) In fact I cannot help wondering if we will not still be waiting for the promised results in twenty years--only to be disappointed yet again, while the hucksters go on with their hucksterism, and a credulous public continues to worship them as gods.

Contextualizing the French War in the Sahel

When we hear about the French operations in Mali and surrounding countries, I suppose few have much sense of how extraordinary the action is. I suspect that those who follow the news casually take it for granted that France has long been involved militarily in sub-Saharan Africa, without much sense of history or the details. This is all the more significant because, certainly where an American news audience is concerned, the commitment of 3,000, or even 5,000, troops to the region does not sound like very much, used as it is to thinking in terms of tens or hundreds of thousands of troops in overseas action. And Americans who have seen their forces almost continuously engaged against or in Iraq since 1990--for thirty years--might not be too struck by a commitment that began only in 2013. And so what France is doing in the Sahel does not seem like anything out of the ordinary.

Still, it is worth remembering that if France remained militarily active in Africa after decolonization, with its bases numerous and its interventions frequent, it has during that last half century been very sensitive to the scale and length of operations, especially where they have involved "boots on the ground." (By the end of the '60s France's sub-Saharan presence was down to 7,000 troops, total, and trended downward afterward.) The French government preferred brief actions emphasizing air power rather than ground troops (its '70s-era interventions sometimes referred to as "Jaguar diplomacy" for that reason), while its '80s-era confrontation with Libya over Chad, was exceptionally taxing--scarcely feasible without considerable American support.

Indeed, for the whole generation afterward no operation was comparable to the '80s action in Chad in its combination of scale and duration. Given the difference in population and the size of its armed forces (one-fifth and one-seventh of the U.S. figures, respectively), France's deployment has been comparable to a commitment of 15-35,000 American troops, equal to what the U.S. deployed in Afghanistan for much of that war--and likewise fulfilling an evolving mission over a far vaster area. What had originally been an action to recover specific ground from a specific enemy (recovery of northern Mali from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad) turned into a broader regional alliance/counter-terrorism operation (the Joint Force of the Group of Five Sahel/Operation Barkhane) against a multiplicity of groups extending across the Sahel, from Mauritania to Chad (an area the size of Western Europe)--overlapping with but separate from the ongoing peacekeeping mission in north Mali that picked up after the original French operation, the "United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali" that quickly acquired the dubious distinction of being the world's most dangerous peacekeeping operation. Moreover, in contrast with the direct clash-avoiding, selective, minimalist use of force seen against Libya three decades ago, combat, if comparatively low in intensity, has been a continuous feature of the operation, which increasingly looks like an indefinite commitment to the general policing of this vast and still unstable region.

Consequently it is not for nothing that a recent New York Times article called it "France's Forever War." One might add, moreover, that the Sahel military operation(s) are just one way in which French policy has become more militarized, with France pursuing new overseas bases, and talking about sixth generation fighter jets, and French Presidents even fantasizing about (and perhaps even taking small steps toward) reviving conscription. And that, in turn, bespeaks how the conduct of every last major power has become increasingly militarized this past decade, supposedly pacific "Old Europe" included.

Yes, Tony Blair Was a Neoliberal

Recently surveying Tony Blair's record as party leader and prime minister I saw that the pretense of Blair not being a neoliberal is just as risible as Bill Clinton's not being a neoliberal, given his not only acquiescing in the profound changes wrought in English economic and social life by his predecessors (privatization, union-breaking, financialization, etc.), but his particular brand of budgetary austerity with its tax breaks and deregulation for corporations and stringency with and hardness toward the poor, his backdoor privatization of basic services such as health and education (with college tuition running up from zero into the thousands of pounds a year on his watch), his hostility to government regulation of business, his inane New Economy vision of Cool Britannia (groan), and the rest. (Indeed, examining his record, and reexamining that of his predecessors, I was staggered by how much of it I had seen before reviewing the comparable history in the United States.)

That said, even considering the ways in which offended and disappointed many on the left, can seem halcyon in comparison with what has been seen since. The economic disasters and brutal austerity seen since his departure from office, which really does seem to spell the final doom of the post-war welfare state--the shift to an American-style regime with regard to higher education, a slower but still advancing shift in the same direction with the country's health care system, the raising of the regressive Value Added Tax yet again to 20 percent, the renewed assault on the social safety net of yet another Welfare Reform Act (2012) that delivered Universal Credit and bedroom tax, the hundreds of thousands of "excess deaths" in recent years traceable to cuts in care facilities, the plans to raise the retirement age (perhaps all the way to age 75, effectively abolishing retirement for most)--and all that, before the current public health/economic crisis.

I admit that next to that Blair's tenure does not look quite so bad--until one remembers the extent to which his policies did so much to pave the way for all of it, in carrying forward what apologists for New Labour tend to think of as Conservative projects, and his general lowering of the bar for what constitutes tolerable government. That led to this. And so lends the question "Was Tony Blair's Prime Ministership neoliberal?" an additional, very contemporary, significance, the more so with the Labour Party, for the time being, still walking the Blairite road.

Was Tony Blair a Neoliberal?

In recent years figures like Jonathan Chait have made it fashionable to deny the existence or salience of neoliberalism as a concept--and this has especially been the case in regard to the term's use as a descriptor for the (nominally) left of center parties of the United States and Britain.

My personal experience of discussion with those who espouse this view showed differences among those making the case in these respective countries. Those I encountered on social media who denied that Bill Clinton was a neoliberal were never equipped with any facts, only bullying and abusiveness that gave the impression they were professional trolls intent on silencing anyone who publicly espoused such an opinion. That only underlined how they had nothing to say on behalf of a position that even slight familiarity with Clinton's actual policy record makes appear risible--a line of thought which had me soon finding that there was a scarcity of comprehensive, systematic and thoroughly grounded assessments of that record to make this clear.

The thought of, if only in a small way, redressing that deficiency led to my paper, "Was the Clinton Administration Neoliberal?" and after that a book examining the U.S. policy record from the 1970s on in more comprehensive fashion (The Neoliberal Age in America: From Carter to Trump), both of which endeavor to offer an explicit, testable definition of neoliberalism, and then systematically consider the record of the administrations in question against it.

Those who contested Blair's labeling as neoliberal, however, assumed a different tone--in part, I suppose, because they did have something to say for themselves. They would point in particular to his establishment of a minimum wage and other rights for British workers that, certainly by American standards, appear very generous; and his funding of social services, which, again by American standards, also appeared very generous at the time. It did, at least, compel me to think about what they said, the more in as I was less familiar with the finer points of Blair's policy record than I was with Clinton's, or for that matter, Margaret Thatcher's, or Harold Wilson's, or Clement Attlee's.

In that I do not think I was alone. My impression is that Blair's domestic record has been overshadowed to a considerable degree by his foreign policy record--above all his supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and bringing Britain's forces into the invasion along with it even as longtime NATO allies France and Germany (to say nothing of other powers like Russia and China) forcefully and publicly opposed the move. Moreover, critical examination of Blair's ministership would seem to have been inhibited by, on top of the generally lousy job with these things done by public intellectuals these days, the extreme resistance of the neoliberals in the Labour Party, whose hostility to any change of course was made all too plain in the pathetic lows to which they descended in their campaign against Jeremy Corbyn.

Still, examine Blair's record I did. And in doing so I saw that the pretense of Blair not being a neoliberal is just as risible as Clinton's not being a neoliberal, given his not only acquiescing in the profound changes wrought in English economic and social life by his predecessors (privatization, union-breaking, financialization, etc.), but his particular brand of budgetary austerity with its tax breaks for corporations and stringency for the poor, his backdoor privatization of basic services, his hostility to government regulation of business, his embrace of flaky New Economy thinking, and the rest. (Indeed, examining his record, and reexamining that of his predecessors, I was staggered by how much of it I had seen before reviewing the comparable history in the United States.)

You can check out my examination of Blair's record--which also includes an equally detailed examination of Margaret Thatcher's record--here at the web site of the Social Sciences Research Network.