| Hello, and welcome to this week’s installment of the Future In Five Questions. This week I spoke with Jeremiah Johnson, co-founder of the center-left think tank the Center For New Liberalism. He’s also author of the Infinite Scroll Substack, where he recently wrote about AI pessimism and Elon Musk’s turn to conspiracy theories. We talked about why he’s optimistic about America’s future, his belief that government needs to slash red tape to allow innovation in fields like nuclear and geothermal energy, and the stubborn cultural persistence of Meta’s social media platforms. An edited and condensed version of the conversation follows: What’s one underrated big idea? The way the social internet has completely changed how we live. We used to say “The internet is not real life,” but that’s no longer true. The internet is absolutely real life. You see think pieces about “Why don’t people hang out as much? Why aren’t kids getting driver’s licenses? Why do college students struggle with long reading assignments? Why is teen mental illness on the rise?”’ The answer to virtually all these trends is smartphones, it’s the internet, it’s the social web. The ways in which we consume news, form our identities, communicate and work and play — these are all being revolutionized by social media. People intuitively understand this and do talk about it, but it’s still massively underrated and under-discussed for how much it’s reshaping society. What’s a technology that you think is overhyped? Virtual reality, augmented reality and the metaverse may be a part of the far future, but I think the market for people who want to use these platforms every day is still really small. There are some uses for VR and AR. Gaming comes to mind as an obvious one. But outside gaming and a few other niche applications, I don’t see the immediate use case. They’re not going to be productivity tools, and most manufacturers aren’t even really trying to make them that. That leaves entertainment, which is cool but hardly revolutionary. And most people, regardless of what they’re using it for, simply don’t want to wear a headset for hours at a time. The physical challenges of eye strain, neck pain, etc., haven’t been solved. It’s a technology that is still a few generations away from real cultural relevance. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I think the best way to understand the future is to understand the past. If you want a wealthier, freer, more prosperous and more just future, then you need to understand how we developed our current levels of wealth and freedom. The best book I’ve ever read on the subject is Joel Mokyr’s “A Culture of Growth.” The question of why some countries are rich and some countries poor is largely a question of industrialization, which leads to the question, why did the Industrial Revolution happen when and where it did, and what can we learn from that? “A Culture of Growth” explains how the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution came to be, the importance of institutions, scientific communities, and of placing cultural value on progress. I tend to be an optimist about the long run. I don’t know what the future will look like, but as long as we can keep learning those core lessons it’ll be a future where we continue to make progress. What could government be doing regarding technology that it isn’t? Getting out of the way, especially when it comes to physical tech. My writing mostly focuses on the social web and online culture, but physical science is still unbelievably important. And there are so many ways in which the government is obstructing progress through red tape and sheer bureaucratic kludge. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in practice exists to prevent new nuclear plants from being built and prevent innovation in nuclear technology. The Biden administration did a great job with the CHIPS Act in allocating a big pile of money, but very little of that is accomplishing anything due to red tape delays involving slow grantmaking, immigration, workplace standards, unions, and more. Geothermal is an exciting potential green energy source, but it’s subject to harsher environmental review standards than fossil fuels for no good reason. Even for proven tech like solar and wind, NIMBYism often strangles our ability to actually build as much as we need. There are huge leaps we could be taking in the world of physical technology. We should be building all kinds of green energy as fast as possible, pumping out semiconductor plants, innovating in the biological sciences. But too often the government stands in the way and stops those things. What surprised you most this year? Meta’s continued success isn’t exactly a deep surprise, but I think most people would find the extent of their strength shocking. Meta had an absolutely blockbuster year — their stock entered January 2023 hovering around $130 per share, and it’s now at $470 per share [As of this newsletter’s publication, it was actually around $480 per share — ed.] Their market cap has more than tripled in a year. They’re hitting home runs in almost every metric. Active users are up across all their services – Facebook, Threads, Instagram. Revenue per user is up. Costs are down. Threads is growing incredibly fast. Reels is taking market share from TikTok. I think this would surprise most people because Facebook itself is culturally uncool, and the company’s signature bet on the metaverse has fizzled. But across all their core businesses, they’re killing it. One of Meta’s core strengths is sensing threats and copying features fast enough to either stalemate or overtake the competition. Stories was a response to Snapchat, Reels was a response to TikTok, and Threads has been a response to X (Twitter)’s implosion. All of those bets have succeeded.
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