- The other night on the Twitters, young bon vivant of the econoblogosphere and all around pissant, Noah Smith, voiced a critique of that ridiculously unintelligible (even for Graeber standards) piece that David Graeber did in the Baffler
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit | David Graeber | The BafflerDavid Graeber from The Baffler No. 19 To read more great writing from our past issues, click here. A secret question hovers over us, a se...- His tweet seemed innocent enough...
- But look who shows up
@Noahpinion - wait, it wash't you who wrote the tweet on the subject several hours before that ended "what an idiot"?- Now, the important thing to observe here is that Noah Smith didn't "@" Graeber, and Graeber doesn't follow Noah. So what we know is that David Graeber has an automatic web search on the twitters for himself.
In polite circles, we call that, being a naval gazing social media douchenozzle.
The conversation is preserved below, for posterity. 
@davidgraeber Hmm, can't find the tweet now...if so I apologize...- @Noahpinion - that was all I was reacting to. If I'm mistaken and it was someone else then it's me who owes an apology
- @Noahpinion - anyway the antigrav was just a whimsical metaphor - point was that for 200 years our conceptions of what was possible (...)
- @Noahpinion (...) kept changing, for c50 it's been stable. It's possible we just got it all right now; I was exploring the other possibility
- @davidgraeber I don't think I would use the word "idiot", but I do tend not to censor myself on Twitter, so, sorry for whatever I did say...
- @Noahpinion of course what _could_ have happened if historical circumstances were different is the one thing you can't possibly know
- @Noahpinion it's the ultimate limit to human knowledge; I've argued concepts like luck, fate, mana, sakti, are all ways of reflecting on it
- @davidgraeber Well, I think we can know. Our physics theories say there's no way to shield gravity. If those theories are right (1/2)...
- @davidgraeber ...then they've been right throughout history. Same with the light barrier. It seems to be the law of the Universe.
- @davidgraeber The question of why people (temporarily) believed that fantasy science would soon become reality is an interesting one...
- @Noahpinion - the reason is because for c100 years. scifi fantasies regularly did become true. That was my starting point.
- @Noahpinion - if for example the top speed at which humans could travel had been increasing exponentially for generations, you don't (...)
- @Noahpinion - (...) need to come up with a special explanation for why people assumed that trend would continue and not suddenly stop
- @Noahpinion - my point was simpler: it seems unlikely we are not going to have any unexpected conceptual breakthroughs in science ever again
- @Noahpinion - obviously we don't know what they're going to be, or what exactly the technological implications will be
- @Noahpinion - the point is that such breakthroughs were pretty constant in the period roughly 1750-1950 but have now slowed or stopped
- @Noahpinion - it strikes me as unlikely this is because we've learned all there is to know (especially since people always think that)
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