David Graeber vs. Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?

Once upon a time, in the heyday of social prognostication, many Americans believed that gadget-related knowledge would surely yield immeasurable leaps forward in the progress of the human species. Yet as David Graeber argued in his Baffler essay “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit,” Information Age capitalism has mainly given us better ways to shop—and handed the government unprecedented opportunities to watch.

Was the gilded promise of innovation a con game all along? What does Peter Thiel, the renowned Silicon Valley author and investor, think about the reality of technological progress? How do Thiel’s libertarian principles stand in relation to Graeber’s revolutionary anarchism? Come, see the future vanish—and possibly reconstitute itself—before your very eyes! With David Graeber and Peter Thiel. Hosted by John Summers at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, New York, on Friday, September 19, 2014.