REVIEW ESSAY
Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber
Stripe Press, 2024, 304 pages

The New Lunar Society:
An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution
by David A. Mindell
MIT Press, 2025, 288 pages

Tyler Cowen caused quite a stir when he published The Great Stagnation in 2011, claiming America achieved success by eating “all the low-hanging fruit of modern history” and was in for a period of stagnation. American productivity had basically been flat since 1973 and was under further strain from unproductive spending in government, health care, and education. David Brooks of the New York Times claimed that Stagnation “has become the most debated nonfiction book so far this year.”¹ Cowen was heralded as America’s hottest economist by Bloomberg and Forbes. Apparently, Brooks and many others were surprised to learn they were living through a Great Stagnation. As Americans emerged from the Great Recession, Cowen encouraged them to assess their lives with an entirely new and uncomfortable lens, even if it forced them to reevaluate commonly held assumptions about Ameri­can prosperity.

Dedication and acknowledgments pages are often ignored by modern readers, but sometimes you can learn a lot from them. Cowen writes in the dedication page of The Great Stagnation “To Michael Mandel and Peter Thiel, who have blazed the way,” and Peter Thiel is the first person listed on the acknowledgements page.² While Thiel was known in 2011 as an early investor in Facebook and as the former CEO of PayPal, he would not have been readily associated with the book’s ideas at that time. Thiel, however, is on record talking about technological stagnation as early as 2008 and is arguably the prophet of this contrarian concept.³

In 2014, Thiel published Zero to One, which is nominally about start-ups but is actually about technological stagnation being the greatest threat we face. It was well over a decade since the dot-com bubble burst and the Great Recession was in the rearview mirror. With iPhones in our hands and Apple, Facebook, Google, and Amazon triumphant, it felt like we were on the cusp of a technological revolution. In fact, the power of internet technology was perhaps the one thing most Americans agreed on and were optimistic about. That was what made Thiel’s insight all the more profound when he claimed that, since the 1970s, the world of technology actually hadn’t changed that much, with the exception of better TVs, endless video streaming, and addictive video games. The world of bits (information technology) may have been on an upward trajectory, but the world of atoms (physical products) had been stagnant for decades.

The Great Stagnation and Zero to One now serve as the foundational books of what might be described as the doomer techno-optimist discourse. But what exactly does this label entail? Quite simply, doomer techno-optimists are doomers with a plan. Their initial insight is that “It’s so over”—and the old way of understanding the world doesn’t work anymore—and there’s no going back. Instead of the growth and dynamism expected by previous generations, we face stagnation and (maybe) catastrophe. Rather than merely resign themselves to this fate, however, they propose an optimistic path forward through the rejuvenation of science and technology, defining a new vision of what it could look like for us to claim simultaneously “We’re so back.”

There have been a number of additions to this evolving discourse since 2014, such as Marc Andreessen’s essays “It’s Time to Build” and “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” or Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s contribution, The Technological Republic (2025), to name just a few. But two recent books are worth evaluating, particularly at a time when the political and cultural power of these Silicon Valley–inspired ways of thinking has reached new heights: the first is Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, written by tech investors Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber; and the second is The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution by MIT professor and investor David A. Mindell. Boom demonstrates the difficulties and risks of a flawed but catchy analysis of stagnation while New Lunar Society provides bold yet actionable ideas for bringing about progress. Taken together, these titles illustrate the high ambitions, potential strengths, and evident limitations of doomer techno-optimist discourse.

Rehabilitating Bubbles

Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber’s Boom has all the trappings of a spiritual successor to Zero to One.⁴ The book is published by Stripe Press, the publishing wing of the successful online payments start-up Stripe, which has built a distinct brand and a dedicated following by publishing the “Ideas for Progress” series. The authors make the bold claim that bubbles—contrary to being signs of economic instability and collapse—are, in fact, the cure for stagnation and the means to bringing about a high-growth, techno-optimist golden age. Boom attempts to recast the bubble as a mechanism to propel humanity forward through positive characteristics that usher in new breakthroughs and break the pull of stagnation, despite their inherent risks and excesses.

The authors develop a framework to identify good bubbles and evaluate their impact on society with the hope of encouraging others to recognize their growth potential. Boom is also an exhortation encouraging others to build: “If only one reader starts a new hard-tech company, contributes to a scientific breakthrough, or takes some other risk with a potential high civilizational payoff . . . we will have succeeded.”⁵

The authors’ starting point is that our “Stagnation, stasis and decline . . . are caused by a rise in societal risk intolerance, which has resulted not only in an increase in homogeneity and uniformity but also a crisis of meaning and a failure to build a definitive, optimistic vision of the future. . . .” In other words, we are stagnant because we lack the spirit required to generate a grand vision of the future and make it a reality. And “The cure that enables the Promethean spirit of risk-taking” can be found in “speculative bubbles.”⁶

According to the authors, bubbles aren’t all bad, they are just misunderstood. It’s true that there are bad bubbles that are destructive and cause widespread financial damage to society and the economy, but there are also good bubbles that can be generational opportunities for humanity to implement bold visions of the future (like the canal, railroad, dot-com, fracking, and Bitcoin bubbles). The good bubbles are a way that societies pour gasoline onto a small fire, turning it into a bright blaze that can change the world, even if at some point in the future the fire overheats, explodes, and the excess is more easily identified. Good bubbles are important because their transformational capacity vastly outweighs their destructive effects.

Good and Bad Bubbles:
A Distinction without a Difference

Boom begins by offering a framework to differentiate good and bad bubbles in hindsight by their vision, mission, and financial vector. Bad bubbles have a speculative vision, with “speculators egging one another on, pushing prices higher and higher, until the only justification for asset prices is the expectation that someone else will be willing to pay even more.”⁷

As speculative bubbles develop, they are not actually creating value for society or accelerating progress: they have a “mean reversion” mission, which is a “bet that the future will continue along present trends,” but that somehow a major source of long-term profitability has been identified. Symptomatic of the financialized, risk-averse mentality that dominates our time, a mean reversion bubble begins with an important insight on a market inefficiency that speculators pile onto until the bubble bursts. The authors give the corporate acquisition bubble and the subprime loans bubble as examples of this.

Finally, the financial vector of bad bubbles is credit, using leverage to invest in the underlying insight of the mean reversion mission to maximize profit. The use of leverage and asset classes that are commonplace in the economy (like housing) makes bad bubbles more destructive, more visible, and more impactful to the average person when they burst, giving all bubbles a bad reputation.

In contrast, participants in good bubbles have a near fanatical focus on creating a future that is drastically different from the world today. Good bubbles have a “filter” vision, in which “participants . . . wall themselves off from opinions they disagree with and become increasingly convinced that their viewpoints reflect the one true way to understand the world.”⁸ The mission of good bubbles is introducing a technological “inflection” point that will transform the status quo and which usually has both “fewer harmful side effects and more beneficial long-term effects” that embody the spirit of progress and stagnation-busting.⁹ Fueled by near fanatical dedication, participants in good bubbles personally invest in creating a new future, and thus the financial vector of good bubbles is equity. Given that good bubbles usually involve fringe technologies, when they burst, they usually do not impact the broader economy or the finances of the average person.

While this is an interesting start to the bad-versus-good bubble framework, its inherently retrospective nature prevents it from being useful to analyzing bubbles in the present. The authors equivocate about the ability to differentiate good and bad bubbles entirely, which they call the “duality of bubbles.” The standards used for bad and good bubbles both look and sound like filters in the moment: the missions of “Good bubbles start out looking trivial because their unforeseen effects are hard to estimate. . . . These dynamics create a challenging paradox in which the most productive bubbles are the only ones that can easily be dismissed as either pointless or crazy, while the bubbles that serious people buy into are often the most destructive.”¹⁰ Despite the different financial vectors the authors highlight, they acknowledge that both good and bad bubbles make use of a mix of credit and equity. Moreover, whether the bubble’s spillover benefits outweigh its costs becomes clear only after time has passed. For example, if the foundation for artificial general intelligence was laid during the dot-com bubble, it will have the potential to be the most successful bubble of all time. Twenty-five years have passed, and we still don’t know. By the end of their first chapters, the authors have undone all their progress and have become their own worst enemies.

None of the remaining elements defined by the authors are unique to bubbles: “Fear of Missing Out (FOMO),” “Parallelization” of innovation, “Clustering” of human and financial capital, “Self-Fulfilling” prophecies, and “Spillover” benefits. What is parallelization if not the development of a healthy ecosystem of innovative companies and institutions that collaborate with each other profitably? For all the metaphysical language about self-fulfilling bubbles whose participants bend reality through sheer force of will, the concept of “reflexivity” in social science suffices (the authors finally mention this in a footnote in the final chapter of the book). This hyperbolic language also overlooks the fundamental role of technology. Prophecies can only be fulfilled if the initial idea was correct and if people execute: if there is no new technology or business model, then there is no true prophecy in the first place.

Ultimately, these criteria lack rigor and analytical power. The main problem is not simply that Boom is unable to differentiate meaningfully between good from bad bubbles, but rather that if good bubbles are the key to ending stagnation, we are not left with any way to identify them (except retrospectively) that would allow us to create or participate in them.

Busting Stagnation with Bubbles, Projects, and Systems

Ultimately, the authors of Boom are so focused on proving their thesis that they ascribe to bubbles characteristics that are not unique to them and mistakenly classify entirely different phenomena as bubbles. They risk chasing bubbles rather than utilizing other strategies to achieve the desired end of breaking stagnation, approaches that might be better suited to particular, practical scenarios.

For example, bad bubbles (which apparently seemed like good ones in the moment) may have catalyzed the deindustrialization of America, but can we afford to wait for new bubbles to reindustrialize the nation, discover new biotechnology breakthroughs, or develop next-gen ad­vanced infrastructure? The authors likely recognize the corner they’ve backed themselves into, but rather than explicitly expand their analysis beyond bubbles or limit the scope to true bubbles, they create “species” of bubbles, such as megaprojects,¹¹ tandem,¹² social,¹³ two-sided,¹⁴ fi­nancial,¹⁵ and political.¹⁶ If everything is a bubble, then nothing is, and the concept loses its power.

What is similar about Bitcoin, the Manhattan Project, and Semiconductors? Not as much as the authors would have you believe. Instead, using examples from Boom and a more rigorous framework, we can differentiate bubbles from other phenomena, like projects and systems, based on criteria that truly define them. With this framework, we can see where the authors have successfully identified bubbles and where they have accidentally classified as bubbles things that are actually quite different. This gives individuals, entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers more options to break stagnation and foster growth.

The best examples of true bubbles given by the authors are fracking and Bitcoin: these fit the bill for bubbles in ways that the other examples in the book do not, but those insights are missed when indexing on filter visions, inflection missions, and equity vectors, not to mention FOMO and clustering. This alternative bubble framework characterizes fracking and Bitcoin as emergent in nature, driven primarily by private actors in the markets, and fueled by rapid, if volatile, financing and technological development. Bubbles are decentralized grassroots movements, driven by rebel operators, innovators, hobbyists, and investors who are passionate in the technology first and drive adoption and investment from the ground up until the bubble bursts. The actual bubble, however, requires the prior development of a robust technological platform and broader ecosystem, making them lag by nature. Bubbles form and pop while floating on major technological waves and, in this capacity, they can present a catalyzing event that drives innovation and widespread adoption of important innovations.¹⁷

Rather than bet the future of the country on more bubbles, we need sustained technological and industrial innovation across society, and here Boom stumbles in its analyses of phenomena that are more appropriately called projects and systems. Take the Manhattan Project and Apollo Program. Both of these achievements, which have since been immortalized as major inflection points in human history, were “projects” created primarily by the U.S. federal government in a geopolitical defense context with specific, planned goals in mind (inventing nuclear weapons and putting a man on the moon). While there were private contributors to these projects, they were executed under top-secret control by the government on a rapid timeline given the national security urgency. Though the number of participants exceeded that of a corporation, it was still much smaller than the number of participants in a bubble. These projects built fundamental moonshot innovations that enabled basic technological developments upon which future waves of commercial applications and bubbles are built. A similar analysis of the golden age of corporate R&D and the rise of the semiconductor industry under Moore’s Law demonstrates that they are more accurately described as “systems,” quite different from bubbles, and governed by more sophisticated dynamics than what Boom defines.

In fact, a higher-level view of the innovation wave of the twentieth century tells a story that is quite the opposite of Boom’s and more compelling. Consider America between 1939 to 1970. These years comprise one of the greatest periods of sustained technological innovation in human history, and rather than only evaluating their distinct parts, we should also ask about the unique characteristics and interplay that existed between finance, technology, human capital, and government: for these combined factors enabled a future that would have been considered pure fantasy to the general public in the early 1900s.

Surely, there were cultural and spiritual conditions that enabled risk-taking, which Boom documents, but there were also bold visions, bril­liant inventors, individual dedication, and long-term personal sacrifice, not to mention company formation, capital allocation, mobilization of broad swaths of the country, and successful government intervention. The true opportunity lies in analyzing all of this, and, as we will see from the next book, some authors are taking much deeper looks at the periods of history with society-wide technology inflection points that truly overcame stagnation to create a golden age.

A Little Light on the Inspiration

To inspire a new generation of dreamers to catalyze technological bubbles and break our stagnation, Boom concludes with two chapters entitled “The Metaphysics of Progress” and “Unleashing Prometheus: Technology and Salvation.” “Metaphysics” is the more interesting of the two. It discusses the spiritual and religious dimensions of bubbles and introduces René Girard’s mimetic cycle as the underlying engine of bubbles. This is an apt comparison.

The last section of the chapter breaks new ground by ascribing a Christian “messianic” dimension to bubbles, which engages in eschatology and the establishment of the Kingdom of Heaven via technology (however, the authors overlook the lessons of Eden and Babel, not to mention the warnings of Revelation). When this is paired with the spiritual causes of stagnation, detailed at the book’s outset, the authors have introduced something worthwhile into the doomer techno-optimist discourse. People commit to grand visions because of their spiritual dimension, and this is perhaps a prerequisite to having a definite optimist view of the world required for bubbles.¹⁸ In fact, start-ups themselves can take on a quasi-religious, messianic, or cult-like culture in pursuit of their world-changing ideas.

At the time of this writing, the beginnings of a new religious wave have emerged in the tech start-up world, with Peter Thiel, Trae Stephens, Gary Tan, and others holding what are arguably quasi-religious events for the Silicon Valley community.¹⁹ Boom has added to this techno-theological discussion, and this may prove to be the most enduring contribution of the book.

Stories inspire when they craft narratives about heroic achievement in the face of adversity. Analyses that identify connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena provoke thought and reflection. Brilliant exhortations shatter stasis, rouse the spirit, and inspire action. Ultimately, Boom fails to inspire because it misses what is inspirational to builders, and this is partly because the authors have backed themselves into a corner. The final two chapters, which are meant to be the most inspirational, fail by either covering too much ground with disor­ganized metaphysical, theological, and analytical claims or proposing a list of the next potential bubbles that don’t differ much at all from what many venture capital firms would suggest (i.e., bitcoin, space exploration, longevity, artificial intelligence, and energy). These are “jack of all trades, masters of none” chapters that come to half-baked or superficial conclusions and would have been more substantial with better storytelling of the individuals who propelled important bubbles, more practical advice for fomenting the next bubble, or seemingly outlandish “filter visions” of the future that could be the foundation of the next transformational bubble.

There may be a subset of readers who are new to doomer techno-optimism and haven’t already learned about the concepts of financialization, bureaucratization, and hyperspecialization (which were originally identified by others but rehashed in Boom). They may also appreciate the quasi-metaphysical analyses of stagnation and progress or the use of terminology like “FOMO” and “hyperstition.” But those who have been following along for years will see merely a consolidation of various existing concepts without much new material, a framework for bubbles that doesn’t hit the mark, and a call to action that doesn’t achieve the level of exhortation needed to build hard-tech companies and change the world.

Labor of Love: Systems, Process, and Maintenance

David A. Mindell is an engineer, academic, founder, investor, historian, and, in many ways, a philosopher of technology. His new book, The New Lunar Society, is the best new addition to the doomer techno-optimism discourse in recent years. Mindell’s goals are similar to those of Boom: identify the current challenges to technological advancement, but with a focus on industry and manufacturing, and encourage the next generation of builders to build. He weaves together a uniquely powerful work with chapters alternating between historical narrative, commentary, and analysis that make for a compelling response to the claims of Zero to One, The Great Stagnation, Boom, and “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”²⁰

The New Lunar Society revolves around a group of highly innovative entrepreneurs in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain who formed a group called the Lunar Society. This group and its network of prolific scientists and inventors—including James Watt, Matthew Boul­ton, Josiah Wedgwood, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson—were largely responsible for various technological advancements that became the foundation of the Industrial Revolution. Mindell, as a talented historian, makes it clear that we have a lot to learn from the Lunar Society. By skipping the rise of the world of bits and looking at the foundational events that revolutionized the world of atoms, namely the Industrial Revolution, Mindell presents a unique analysis of the challenges we now face and proposes solutions that have been overlooked by most of the techno-optimist world.

In many ways, but especially in the exploration of technology, The New Lunar Society is the anti–Zero to One. Mindell, as an engineer with a skeptical streak, takes the contrarian point that hype, memes, bubbles, and “start-up in the garage” mythology are simplistic, inaccurate, and detrimental to the task of building. This narrative overemphasizes “the lone inventor and the eureka moment, the simple invention from which all follows. It neglects the critical industrial substrates, the culture of ideas and machinery that shaped [James] Watt and brought his ideas to fruition. It obscures the numerous other people who contributed to the engine to make it work.”²¹ Contrary to what Hollywood, the media, and the VC world would have you believe, true technological progress emerges over time from the unpredictable, turbulent, painstaking roller-coaster journey of self-sacrifice taken by groups of individuals who build, operate, and maintain complex industrial societies.

Mindell threads the needle of the “You Are Not a Lottery Ticket” chapter in Zero to One. He does not diminish the ingenuity or vast contributions of specific individuals (as we see from his biographical chapters), but he also gives much credit to the milieu in which they operated. For Mindell, industry and manufacturing are the lifeblood of the modern world, and he doesn’t settle for flash-in-the-pan start-ups, exuberant but short-lived bubbles, or the empty promises of intellectuals and investors. He longs for a society like the one that created the Industrial Revolution—one that is filled with inventors and skilled workers, one that is steeped in the capacity, creativity, and determination to build, grow, and innovate.

Mindell attributes the source of this innovation to a focus on both product innovation and process innovation. In a chapter entitled “Designed in California . . . Made Where?,” Mindell blames the theoretically elegant yet flawed Wall Street concepts of “core competency” and “specialization” for pushing American companies to chase high-status product innovation at the expense of manufacturing and process innovation. The problem is that product innovation is “inextricably linked” to process innovation, and companies that lose their manufacturing edge soon lose their product edge.²²

Mindell goes even further, stating that the idea of selectively manufacturing just the high-value products is misguided. Engineers in Industrial Revolution–era Birmingham and twenty-first-century China may design and build high-value products, but they cut their teeth designing and manufacturing the low-value ones first. “Manufacturing commodity items like small mobile phone batteries . . . informs how we can make batteries for electric cars, and even how to make the cars themselves. . . .”²³ Commodity batteries are not step-function, “zero to one” inflection bubble technologies, but working on them is the best way to advance battery technology and may just lead to the inflection we are looking for.

While Thiel pushes founders to go from zero to one and build something entirely new, Mindell argues that we should “Get Excited about Maintenance,” the title of chapter twenty-seven. Mindell brings up a very good point: continuing to make, build, and repair the foundations of our civilization creates fertile ground for major innovations across “the fabric of our daily lives. . . . Maintenance breeds familiarity with the details of how machines and systems work, and therefore provides a site of expertise and improvement.”²⁴ You don’t have to take Mindell’s word for it: maintenance-led innovation is exactly how the Lunar Society developed their own businesses.

For example, Watt’s steam engine was initially built as an improvement of the Newcomen engine, but took decades and countless optimi­zations and breakthroughs before it became the steam engine that powered the Industrial Revolution. Watt further innovated on his first steam engine (adding a revolutionary governor to it) because of his continued maintenance work. This takes serious dedication and commit­ment. Mindell says that “Breakthroughs are overrated,”²⁵ and though he doesn’t say this explicitly, for him the innovating itself is a labor of love—why else dedicate every waking hour to building, repairing, and maintaining technology?

The Lives of the Engineers

Mindell is at his best telling the real stories of the members of the Lunar Society and how they made the world we live in. Despite his admiration, he sugarcoats nothing, exposing the good, bad, and ugly of technological progress through the people and communities whose work continues to impact our daily lives. The chapters on Watt, Boulton, Wedgwood, and, surprisingly, Paul Revere are the most compelling; Mindell carefully selects relevant biographical details that tell the unvarnished, inspirational stories about what it truly takes to create a technological revolution. They are especially relevant to founders today.

The chapters dedicated to the steam engine focus in equal parts on James Watt, the visionary engineer, and Matthew Boulton, the savvy technologist and businessman. Mindell tells the story of a deep partnership built on a mutual passion for industry, complementary skill sets, and a surprising lack of founder drama. In Mindell’s estimation, Boulton is often overlooked but is the “visionary” businessman who saw the global potential for the steam engine. It was even true back then that the technical cofounder needed a business cofounder (what we would call “Woz and Jobs” today).

Take also Josiah Wedgwood, who was born into a British pottery business that was inferior to the Chinese pottery of the time. “Wedg­wood started with the humble, low-quality products in his hometown and built a local manufactory, a workforce, and a transportation network that grew to lead the global industry. Process innovation, in the new glazes and techniques, combined with product innovation, in new shape and designs, flexibly tuned to local taste and demand.”²⁶ Wedgwood won in a saturated market with a dominant incumbent by making superior products and marketing them more effectively.²⁷ So much for picking a small niche where a founder can build a monopoly, as Thiel advised in Zero to One and which has become a commonly understood “law” for start-ups.

The final character introduced in New Lunar Society is Paul Revere, who played an important role in the manufacturing and defense industries in America after the Revolution. Revere, who was a silversmith, opened a foundry in Boston and eventually improved his metalworking skills (process improvement) until he could compete with British quality (product improvement).

Later, by manufacturing copper parts for the fledgling U.S. Navy (maintenance), Revere became aware of cladding the hulls of ships with copper sheets to prevent rot. Revere applied for and received a $10,000 federal loan and successfully built a copper rolling mill to supply the navy (though Thomas Jefferson canceled the program, perhaps highlighting another recurring “feature” of defense manufacturing). Revere received this loan by making the case for the national security requirement to domestically produce copper sheets for the defense industry. With Revere’s example, Mindell reminds us of the important participation of government in supporting manufacturing, our need to reindustrialize, and the role of industrial policy since the founding of the nation. “National defense has been America’s longest and most effective industrial policy.”²⁸

Rage Against the Hype Machine

Mindell’s passion for manufacturing cuts both ways, and he spares little criticism for the people he believes contributed to the challenges facing American industry today. Put bluntly, Mindell clearly has a dislike for the economists and investors whose theories and practices hollowed out American manufacturing (and thus technological innovation) while lining their own pockets.

Adam Smith gets a particularly scathing treatment early in the book. It turns out that Smith’s theory of extreme worker specialization in a pin factory was not only incorrect (workers in the pin factories in France executed multiple tasks, rather than just one, and were divided into ten groups, not eighteen, as Smith wrote), but also that Smith himself had never seen a factory in person—a glaring blind spot, to say the least. These harmful theories have poisoned the economics of manufacturing ever since. What followed caused significant harm: in a purely (and incorrect) theoretical sense, if the best workers are hyper-specialized, interchangeable, and unskilled, why not outsource them entirely and let someone else pay their health care costs?

Today’s economists and analysts still emphasize “the neat theory, the digestible point, [and] the generalizable principle, over grounded social and technical relationships of how things are actually made” at the expense of workers and the nation.²⁹ Unfortunately, this same search for elegant theory rather than complicated reality contributed to outsourcing manufacturing, disrespecting process innovation, and losing our industrial base. Maybe they should “visit a factory,” so to speak.

If there is a weak point in The New Lunar Society, it is that Mindell goes a bit too far in his defensive posture, becoming aggressive in ways that could discourage useful partnerships. He takes some pointed shots against venture capital, specifically calling out “Silicon Valley magnates brag[ging] of techno optimism, uninformed about industry or culture,”³⁰ or claiming that the venture funds speaking about “industrial dynamism,” “American dynamism,” and “Reindustrialization” don’t have the fund structure to accommodate true “industrial adoption cycles.”³¹

On the one hand, Mindell’s feeling is justified. The story of venture capital since the dot-com bubble has been to concentrate funding in “software, health care, advertising, and marketing” at the expense of the things he loves. On the other hand, this anger is misplaced. Why focus on the VCs trying to promote reindustrialization? Why not encourage more VCs to focus on the world of atoms, partner with them, and build out the other parts of the ecosystem? There is much work to do to rebuild and not enough people or firms to do it—yet. I say better late than never.

The reality is that a major cultural shift around manufacturing and industry is required to mobilize the nation to reindustrialize and rekindle our capacity for technological innovation. It may already be under way and Mindell himself recognizes this. In some ways, his call to action is the most ambitious of all the books in the doomer techno-optimism canon. While others call for start-ups (Thiel) or for piling on to bubbles (Hobart and Huber), Mindell calls for a major cultural shift and the reestablishment of an industrious people. He reminds us that the Industrial Revolution was made possible by the preceding “Industrious Revolution,” a sweeping cultural sea change in “how people . . . worked with new energy and purpose. Households both consumed and labored more in relationship with markets outside the home, enhancing both demand for goods and labor supply.”³²

To shape the culture, one needs to engage with it at the level of values and ideals. In Watt’s and Boulton’s time, this was accomplished by the author Samuel Smiles, who wrote a book called Lives of the Engineers (a clear nod to Lives of the Saints), and who was the first author to “make middle class heroes out of inventors.”³³ At a time when the pantheon of British heroes was mostly composed of kings and warriors, with only Isaac Newton to represent the inventors, Smiles’s book fomented a new culture of admiration for men of industry.

In our time, the equivalents of Samuel Smiles are ambitious videographers like Jason Carman; insightful writers like Ashlee Vance; iconic American Flag memes from El Segundo; industrial founders like Palmer Luckey and Elon Musk; and real cultural movements like American Dynamism and Reindustrialize. At the time of this writing, JD Vance, the vice president of the United States, just attended the American Dynamism Conference in support of rebuilding our industrial base. The importance of that should not be understated, and it was accomplished by the leadership and marketing teams of Andreessen Horowitz, the same venture capital firm that wrote the techno-optimist manifesto Mindell criticizes.

The focus on software may have gotten its start in garages, board rooms, Wall Street, and even public policy, but it captured the minds of young people who saw their peers building social networks, “disrupt­ing” industries, and having three fully catered meals at the office while making lots of money. Mindell consistently juxtaposes Watt’s technological genius with Boulton’s business and marketing mind. These were two sides of the same coin that turned Watt’s steam engine into a success. To catalyze the change he wants to see, Mindell should channel a little more Boulton and Wedgwood and try harnessing—rather than simply second-guessing—the cultural shift toward industry we are now witnessing.

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, and a Way Forward 

The vision of New Lunar Society is presented in full in chapter forty-two, “The New Industrialism.” What stands out is the humanity of Mindell’s vision, which calls for a technological future that is squarely human-centric, and a revolution in our thinking about how technology can enable people rather than eliminate them. In our day and age, where technology itself is the primary consideration and Universal Basic Income (UBI) a “reasonable” position, Mindell’s is a bold vision touch­ing upon everything from the national culture to the reigning economic models to notions of finance and human capital to rightly ordering the relationship between technology, industry and society.

If Thiel is about monopolies and secrets, Andreessen about eating the world, Boyle about national dynamism, and Hobart and Huber about bubbles, Mindell is about gardens and their planting, cultivation, and growth. Clearly, he has a passion for industry and technology and speaks of it beautifully, much like how one would expect a painter or composer to describe the arts. For Mindell, technology connects the world together and enriches our lives, making us not just more productive but also able to do new things and live more fulfilled lives. His is a call to take up the cause and shoulder the burden like the past generations that built their future, which we inhabit today. Technological innovation at a grand scale requires vision, but also sacrifice, just as everything that is truly important does.

Taken as a whole, these two books should be seen as responses to The Great Stagnation and Zero to One. Boom attempts to create a framework to boldly break stagnation at a greater scale than a start-up, pushing us to channel the energy of risk tolerance into large, transformative movements. New Lunar Society is a reminder that visionary ideas and flash-in-the-pan bubbles can only take us so far, breaking stagnation at a national scale requires the hard work and deep commitment of individuals and society.

As Boom illustrates, however, there are excesses within doomer techno-optimism as there are in any movement. Boom is overambitious, straying too far into pseudo-philosophy and flawed analysis in the attempt to imitate Thiel’s contrarianism. New Lunar Society, with its more nuanced and serious analysis, brings much-welcomed balance and fresh insights to the discourse.

Prophets and their warnings arise in times of peril, and the arrival of the doomer techno-optimist discourse is fortunate. Simply put, we needed the wake-up call. Yet, if the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one, then the second step is actually doing something about it. To that end, what is needed from the next phase of contributions to this discussion are proposals to reboot science and generate breakthroughs, policies to create an environment in which transformative growth is possible, and new economic analyses that more accurately account for the role of technology in growth. In fact, doomer techno-optimists have an opportunity to take their unique blend of harsh reflection on the present and bold vision for a sci-fi future and fuse it with creative and actionable proposals to realize such ambitious dreams.

What strategies could the doomer techno-optimists propose? One approach could be adding a fourth category to the table of growth drivers above: government as “market maker.”

Consider doomer techno‑optimist darlings SpaceX and Tesla. Both companies, which have each developed and driven rapid adoption of advanced technologies, were largely made possible by Obama administration policies: canceling the NASA Space Shuttle program while privatizing the space shuttle missions; and creating a tax credit program for purchasing electric vehicles, either making them more affordable or subsidizing their higher price points, depending on your political persuasion. Similar events are playing out in the defense industry, with Palantir and Anduril challenging defense primes by building advanced AI products and defense systems to claim a slice of the massive defense budget (it is currently rumored that the defense budget target will be $1 trillion).

In this model, government can pull policy, regulatory, and fiscal levers (domestically and internationally) to develop advanced technology companies in the private sector in a less interventionist and politically charged way than during the Corporate R&D Golden Age. This approach mixes the energies of the private sector valorized by Boom, powered by the capital of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, with the federal entrepreneurial state highlighted by New Lunar Society. It might be so over for the corporate R&D systems of the good old days, but we could be so back with a market-as-maker approach.

Furthermore, there is evidence that the doomer techno-optimists are already making an impact: “It’s so over” appears to have hit the political sphere. The current thrust of the Trump administration at the writing of this article is a simultaneous domestic de-regulation and an international trade re-regulation. It appears the goal is to make it easier to build and invest in America while revising trade agreements and reordering supply chains to protect domestic industry. Could this help recreate a dynamic, industrial economy in the United States again?

Leading high-technology companies are announcing significant rein­vestment in America, including $500 billion by Apple³⁴ (after having secretly invested $275 billion developing China’s workforce³⁵) and another $500 billion by Nvidia to manufacture advanced AI servers.³⁶ This, of course, builds on the groundwork laid by the chips and Science Act, passed during the Biden Administration, which encouraged the construction of new semiconductor fabs across the country, including those built by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). These policy tools (deregulate, renegotiate, protect, and invest) have created a short but welcome break from the post-1970s stagnation and the post-1990s software dominance. Both sides of the political aisle would do well to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each approach and when they are most appropriately used. Furthermore, the libertarian techno-right should consider the impact of these policies holistically and acknowledge the critical role government plays in developing high tech industries, from Paul Revere through 2025.

In parallel, leading venture capital firms are accelerating investment in start-ups with the potential to transform the future of aviation, drones, spacecraft, batteries, nuclear reactors, mining, manufacturing, robotics, submarines, naval surface vehicles, and more. Though still nascent, the pace and level of investment in these classes of company were unheard of just five years ago. This trend may well continue as the historically high financial returns on software investment come into question in a post-zero interest rate world. As many hard tech founders would say, it’s so over for SaaS.

With these developments, we see the beginnings of a new collaboration across business, finance, and government. Given this momentum, perhaps the world of atoms is on the verge of having another day in the sun. Maybe, just maybe, we’re so back.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 2 (Summer 2025): 222–40.

Notes