Beyond the horizon of industry lies a frontier of invention — but frontiers have a way of disappearing. In Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, former hedge fund analyst Byrne Hobart and frontier tech investor Tobias Huber argue the case for industry bubbles as necessary for attaining new frontiers, and thereby building the future.

To weigh the stakes, Hobart and Huber first lament our current state of innovation stagnation. The rate of transformative invention in healthcare, aerospace, industrials — just about every expression of a future-forward society — has slowed, even as Moore’s Law marches on. In our Internet Age, we tend “with irresistible momentum toward exponential conformity,” Hobart and Huber contend. Put simply: We’re stuck. The hyper-financialization of the 1970s, the abandonment of public-private R&D, and an indulgence of complacency have delivered a slowdown of scientific and technical progress which Boom argues is more catastrophe than complication. While Hobart and Huber are far from the first diagnosticians here, they differentiate their critique by joining a newer chorus who believes that bubbles, rather than speculative waste, offer an escape hatch from stagnation’s sinking ship.

Boom curates a convincing library of historical bubbles as evidence. While even the definition of ‘bubbles’ here is broad — Boom’s use of the term includes filter bubbles, financial bubbles, the Apollo program, Bitcoin, and calculators — they’re strung together in a neat, big-tent typography. Bubbles that succeed are ones which predicate a belief that the future will look unlike the present (see the PC wave). Bubbles which fail believe that the future will look like the present (see the 2008 financial crisis). Distinguishing between the two is historical work; successful bubbles are hard to spot in the moment, but clear in hindsight. For example, in 1947, transistors debuted to a skeptical vacuum tube industry. Humankind has now constructed more transistors than there are grains of sand on Earth.

By doubling down on futurist bubbles, Boom relies on a Silicon Valley techno-optimism which might fall deafly onto risk-averse ears. In this, Boom provides little for skeptics and safetyists. The authors, for instance, endorse Facebook’s “move fast and break things” motto with hardly a mention of just what has been broken along the way. Boom dismisses the unsustainability of some innovations as necessary precursors to sustainable payoffs. (In a chapter lauding the fracking boom, Hobart and Huber hand-wave worry about natural gas dependence, promising that the “arc of progress is also a long series of unsustainable practices that eventually lead to more sustainable ones.”) Whether that argument holds remains for the reader to decide. Hobart and Huber, for their part, identify building safely as part and parcel of building fast. One chapter memorably ends: “It’s this kind of tension, between the fear of ending the world and the feeling of being the only one who can save it, that produces transformative technological change.”

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation offers escape to a radically different future. Bubbles, manifest visions of the future, might wax and wane. Beliefs subside to beliefs. We may now be amidst one such phase of belief, whether in AGI or in ‘topographical qubits’. But at the heart of bubbles is atension between fear that the imagined frontier never arrives and stubborn hope that it will. To reach a future brighter than our past, to find a frontier vanished, we mustconjure fresh courage — and, with it, a willingness to begin.