Magazines like Wired were promoting a glittering future where technology would soon be a panacea for all of mankind’s ills. Books like Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines promised that technology might help us transcend death itself. Bestsellers like The Long Boom and Dow 36,000 made the argument that technological advances were enabling a structural shift that would kick the global economy into a new, higher gear, almost unfathomable to contemporary minds.
