Somewhere between starting fires and flinging electric cars into space, human beings became disconnected from technology. Progress, long contingent on people doing things, was pushed across some invisible psychic line to become its own force.
Moore’s Law is not an industry insider’s term – it’s a capitalist philosophy. Every year, tech brands release shinier, newer, and nebulously ‘better’ versions of the dusty, scuffed and concretely ‘worse’ things we bought last year, because this is what technology does.
When it doesn’t – if, say, a global pandemic were to hobble the production of a new games console – the professionally furious will skitter out from the craterous hellscape of social media to shriek at technology until it can once again keep pace with their entitlement. Come war, come pestilence, come famine or plague, the engines must be stoked, the line must be kept clear, the train must never slow down.
This makes supersonic flight a singular anomaly...