On the Bubble

Humans born in 1900 witnessed a startling stream of technologies that transformed their everyday lives and their understanding of the universe. Cars, telephones, and the internet overturned where we lived, how we worked, and whom we knew. Other scientific feats took the breath away by their sheer might—most of all, the atom bomb and a man on the Moon. Whatever else, rapid innovation ensured that the 20th century was never boring.

But those witnesses’ grandchildren have seen comparatively little change, as all that dynamism has devolved into stagnation and repetition. Infinite digital novelty distracts from the lack of progress in the physical world; look up from your phone, and everything is in stasis, or even decay. Energy density, transportation speed, and crop yield have hardly budged in half a century. Scientific productivity has declined, and we haven’t gone to the Moon in decades, let alone Mars. Our culture is worn out, too, hooked on sequels and reboots. Is there a way out of this endless present?

In Boom, Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber offer a novel solution: bubbles, the collective deliria that sweep up ever more people in a self-reinforcing social vision. Whether it’s the Dutch speculation on tulip bulbs in the 1630s or the Beanie Baby mania of the 1990s, bubbles are typically seen as short-lived psychotic cults, in which a mass of suckers urge each other on, only to lose their shirts when the bubble inevitably pops. Call them "extraordinary popular delusions," the "madness of crowds," or "irrational exuberance"—these sources of investor awe and terror hardly seem a promising mechanism for delivering our long-overdue flying cars.

But Hobart and Huber, tech investors themselves, make a strong case that bubbles are vital for technological progress. As collective bets on a distinct vision for the future, bubbles can jolt society out of its funk and achieve breakthroughs in science and technology. Telegraphs, railroads, and dot-coms, for example, all emerged from bubbles, and while those who got in at the wrong time wound up in the poor house, we’re all better off for their investments and discoveries. Bubbles’ ability to "stimulate collective risk-taking, nurture extreme enthusiasm and commitment, and excessively fund trial-and-error innovation" makes them just the thing to end our stagnation and usher in a more creative, dynamic, and just plain exciting future.

Because we can’t get bubbles’ benefits without the costs that come when they burst, Hobart and Huber’s proposal is a risky one. But risk is exactly what we need more of. If we’re stuck in place, it’s because no one will stick his neck out and accept the possibility of failure. Behind our societal stasis, Hobart and Huber identify a great risk intolerance. Paralyzed by fear of calamity—say, from killer robots or climate apocalypse—we’ve locked ourselves into the status quo, where we’re at least still alive. Inventions and discoveries, or just an original flick at the box office, will require us to be more open to mad plans, with their corresponding chance of disaster. It’s as though we’ve settled for omelets, with the certainty of breaking eggs; but to make a soufflé, we’ll have to risk blowing up the kitchen.

In its disappointment at today’s technological malaise and low ambitions, Boom gives voice to a growing discontent within the tech industry. Embodied in such figures as venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen (both of whom blurbed this book), this outlook yawns at tweaking search engine results or Uber-izing one more service, and yearns for something bolder—artificial general intelligence, or a manufacturing renaissance, or interplanetary travel. Boom’s blend of business and tech history, finance, and philosophy make it perhaps the most sophisticated and syncretic expression of this mood yet.

But one need not be a bitcoin-holding, Elon Musk-praising coder to find Boom an impressive assessment of our latest disappointments and the role of new technologies in reaching future bliss. Hobart and Huber flesh out their argument with case studies of bubbles that led to long-term scientific progress. The Manhattan Project, the Apollo Program, and the development of the semiconductor might not seem like bubbles in the conventional sense, but each exhibited a bubbly ability to coordinate a group of true believers who doggedly pursued a seemingly impossible dream. "By generating positive feedback cycles of excessive enthusiasm and investment," these bubbles rallied the funds to back disruptive technologies before they could be profitable, extending the frontiers of knowledge in the process.

What makes Boom so compelling is its ability to tie its explorations of these megaprojects, with all the details of science funding, government policy, and technological tinkering, to a larger philosophical diagnosis of stagnation. Hobart and Huber are more alert than many techno-optimists to the spiritual urge behind the pursuit of scientific achievement, fingering our "lack of transcendent vision" as the ultimate cause of our intellectual and cultural exhaustion.

Their praise of new deeds, if only to prove that they can be done, has an unabashedly Faustian slant, resembling J. Robert Oppenheimer’s own apology for the Manhattan Project: "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success." But elsewhere, the authors note the deep and articulate religious fervor behind many of those working on the Apollo missions and other space programs. Theirs was a pursuit of something beyond the human, rather than a mere enlargement of it.

There is a tension here, between transcendence as deification of man, and transcendence as recognition of something above man. Which is more likely to get us to our grand intergalactic future? Here, Hobart and Huber hedge, invoking a nebulous "technological sublime" and a "spiritual or religious experience of transcendence." But there’s all the difference in the world between narcissism and piety.

My money’s on the latter. If the "Promethean spirit" "transcends" anything, it is only the boundaries of one’s ego, which are pushed back for preening on a yet-more-cosmic scale. In contrast, the Apollo 8 crew broadcast home a reading from the Book of Genesis, and Buzz Aldrin took communion before stepping out on the Moon—actions that recognized humanity’s greatness, but also its paradoxical smallness before something greater that elevates us in our attempt to reach it. If we are going to build those colonies on Mars, we may first need to build a few more churches on Earth.

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
Stripe Press, 304 pp., $35

Robert Bellafiore is director of research at the Foundation for American Innovation.

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