No Religion. No Technology.

A review of “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation” by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber

Technology has stagnated because we lack religious goals. We lack a mission that goes beyond what is measurable as useful – like going to the moon, like doubling transistors on a chip every 18 months, like the Manhattan Project, like research at Bells Labs or Xerox’ PARC.

Utilitarianism is bland and the last decades of technology have been incremental. We need portals to new futures, and bubbles are our salvation.

The Core Problem: Indefinite Money, Indefinite Future

When we dropped the gold standard, we dropped our ability to plan for definite futures.

“The abandonment of Bretton Woods means monetary value can no longer be stored over time. Instead of taking calculated risks with savings that have future purchasing power, the post-Bretton Woods system incentivises a distorted approach to risk-taking. Under this model, you must chase almost every bubble and momentum trade just to preserve the present value of your money…”

A Bubble is a Plan for a Definite Future

Those inside a bubble live in an alternate present.

For those on the outside, a bubble is one possible alternate future.

Sometimes – as happened for space travel, semiconductors and the internet – the present for a few becomes the future for many.

This is how we have progress, and this is how we have history.

Bubbles as Coordination Mechanisms

Bubbles allow coordination, sometimes turning independent low-probability initiatives into correlated successes.

“The fundamental utility of inflection bubbles comes from their role as coordinating mechanisms.”

Nvidia alone building on GPUs would not lead to anything. But Nvidia GPUs, plus OpenAI models, plus Cursor coding assistants etc… increases the chances of success of each individual initiative.

Bubbles as Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

Moore’s Law (transistor numbers on a chip doubling every 18 months) shows how bubbles can create a vision of a future that, through belief and action, becomes the present.

There is no reason Moore’s law had to be true:

“There is nothing inevitable about chips becoming more efficient over time, nor did Moore suggest as much.”

and yet, it provided a basis for industry to plan for decades:

“Once the cadence of chip performance was set, every chip designer knew there would be demand for the next generation.”

Parallelisation and Redundancy

Bubbles rely on parallelisation, as in the Manhattan project:

“The trouble was no one could say for sure whether U-235 or plutonium would be the ideal material for a bomb. What’s more, it wasn’t obvious how to obtain sufficient quantities of either. The Manhattan Project launched multiple large-scale manufacturing facilities in parallel…”

Or the Apollo project:

“This created some waste and duplication, but it also meant that launches weren’t delayed; parallelizing the process ensured that something would be ready by the target launch date.”

I see parallels here to OpenAI’s strategy of parallelisation. Inference scaling (i.e the o3 model) worked – and probably supported OpenAI’s growing valuation – even though GPT-5 has not yet been released.

Centralised Drivers of Bubbles

It’s hard to get away from the portrayal of government as central in creating/allowing bubbles, either through direct initiatives:

“It would be fair to say the Apollo program created the semiconductor industry by driving down the price of chips.”

or, by allowing monopolies:

“AT&T struck a sort of grand bargain. On the one hand, the company let local providers use its long-distance lines…On the other hand…the company managed to gain an exemption under Willis-Graham Act’s antitrust regulations, allowing it to swallow up most of the rest of the industry.”

Technology, as presented, is not solely a libertarian, decentralised or anarchist pursuit – although some tech is moreso than others (fracking, btcoin).

Transcendental Goals and the Loss of Religion

Boom’s closing chapters are reminiscent of Tyler Cowen’s take that “The most important thinkers will be religious thinkers.”

“… we predict that [visionary technologists] will most likely exhibit a deeply spiritual—and, in some cases, explicitly religious—impulse toward realizing and participating in something transcendent.”

There are elements of Thiel (technological progress being underpinned by those who have a clear alternate vision of the future), and also Deutsch (the bounds on knowledge are infinite):

“There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits.”

We’ve lacked a transcendental purpose, falling into utilitarian optimization and bureaucracy. Finite spaces saturate; infinite progress requires transcendental aims.

“We need to recognize that equilibrium is not, in fact, an ideal or achievable state but a segue to stasis, decline, and death.”

The loss of religion (or, perhaps, the ability to think religiously) is shown to be a loss for technology, too.

And thanks to Byrne for providing a free book copy to Diff subscribers.