I attended David Graeber’s talk last Thursday at New York’s School of Visual Arts, On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time. I want to post some notes and thoughts from the lecture. Graeber framed his talk around the idea that the science fiction of 1900 had been, largely, realized by 1950. Whereas the ideas from science fiction from the 1950s era have gone mostly unfulfilled today. We, in the West (and especially the U.S.) suffer a sort of social trauma because of our failure.
Artist's concept of possible colonies on future mars missions. NASA