Why did the future stop looking like flying cars and start looking like paperwork?

Why did the future stop looking like flying cars and start looking like paperwork?

In “David Graeber: On Bureaucratic Technologies and the Future as Dream-Time,” Graeber argues that the mid-20th-century expectation of dramatic technological futures—Mars colonies, robot factories, flying cars—did not simply fail because those dreams were childish. He traces a post-1970s shift away from technologies that might enable alternative futures and reduce work, toward information, medical, military, financial, and administrative systems that intensify labor discipline and social control. The talk’s central claim is that bureaucracy did not disappear under neoliberal capitalism; it fused with markets, corporations, universities, and government, turning creativity toward form-filling,