Where did the grandeur go?

Superlative projects are made possible by great collective efforts.

This version of the future isn’t about radical discontinuity at all, just an intensification of the business practices that promise to give us Amazon Prime by drone at the same time that the real Amazon burns. This is what they teach in business schools – how to keep calm and carry on doing capitalism. But the problems we face now are considerably bigger than a business school case study, so is it possible to rescue managery from management?

This essay is full of wonderful quotes, be it about Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg or directly borrowing Gil Scott-Heron’s words. Particularly fitting I found the section about fantasy universes right at the beginning: “Jon Snow and the New Avengers will come to save us, swinging swords to ensure that everything stays pretty much how it was before Voldemort, Sauron or the White Witch started messing things up” – with the reference to Epic Pooh which in turn contains gold like this: “If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob – mindless football supporters throwing their beerbottles over the fence”. The notion that “the fantasists were essentially nostalgic for a past in which everything had its proper place: the king on his throne, the dragons slain, the ordinary hobbits happy with their pastoral lot” so very much resonates with my dislike for fantasy in general, I just could not put it in fierce words like that, yet.