I'll strive to avoid that trap by foregoing any mention of Todd and focus on what really intrigued me about the essay. At several points, the author mentions, with an elegant casualness, certain ideas, which, if taken seriously, are quite arresting.
In a nutshell, it's asserted that capitalists, the world over, and the workers they employ or discard, have no real notion of the future, no vision beyond simple accumulation. This will seem self-evident to many (if they agree, some may see too many plans - all terrible) but looked at with fresh eyes, this idea might reveal a hidden layer of ennui beneath the surface frenzy.
It is summed up in the following passages:
Once upon a time, people had nightmares of scientists and technocrats running the world all too efficiently, the discipline of the bean-counters and rocket scientists, imposed by computers—raw material worked up into steel, concrete, and numerous twentieth-century dystopias—now finance is the peak of power, and we can never forget that Kenneth Lay was praised to the skies for his successful swindling: the rapacious chief executive, the lumpencapitalist on the hunt, trading, buying and selling, extracting income for himself, caring absolutely nothing for management, let alone management of anything remotely like “society,” if he hasn’t already armed himself with Beckerite nostrums about individuals and rational choice
[...]
The world bourgeoisie has no program. A friend said “about the only thing they can agree on is to attack the working class.” With Maastricht and the euro, the primary project of European zero-thought, “it is for nothing that one has made the French population, and, as a side effect, the German population suffer, because it is evident that in the middle term the depression of interior French demand has accentuated the crisis of the German economy.” That was 1998. In the meantime, “the longer the global slowdown persists, the greater the risk that the world’s largest and third-largest economies, the US and Germany, will follow Japan, the second-largest, into deflation.” Marvin Harris quoted George Gilder, early Reaganite ideologist and now-broke technofuturist bubble booster: “Gilder writes: ‘The first principle is that in order to move up, the poor must not only work, they must work harder than the classes above them.’ Hard-nosed capitalist roader and woolly-brained entropy freak meet each other on common ground here, each proposing to change society by offering people less rather than more for helping to solve America’s cultural crisis.”
[...]
In recent years, I've noticed that all the things which once seemed to me (as a child and eager young man) to be harbingers of the future - space flight, advanced computer tech, bio-engineering, etc. - have all been reduced to interesting but oddly futureless enterprises. Of course, it's a given that continued tweaking and study will create subtler devices and finer grained manipulations of nature, but this no longer appears to have any meaning outside of providing businesses with new products to sell.
And even businesses that provide science and engineering based products and services appear to be the heavy, unwanted baggage of companies that would much rather be playing endless, circular games with capital (wasn't Enron supposed to be actually involved with power production?).
.From the McMansions with their huge lawns and German cars, to the most neglected inner city neighborhoods, I see people adrift without dreams of what the future might be like.
Even science fiction television shows and films (with the exception of Star Trek's hallucination of super-competence) present rusted, hideous, rusting starships, downtrodden characters and nightmare scenarios.
It's a vision of consumerism, stretching endlessly into the future, providing more sophisticated versions of existing devices to an ever-smaller number of people able to afford the price.
Which is to say, no future at all.
DRM
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