What Henry Farrell thinks about optimism

@henry-farrell · 33 positions · On ppll ↗

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

Henry Farrell did not write this page.

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Only Henry Farrell on optimism. See everyone on optimism

1 dated position, 2026, in their own words. Our reading of what Henry Farrell has said — not written or endorsed by them.

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1. 8 Aug 2026

   Our readingSilicon Valley's actual trajectory increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory fiction rather than the optimistic space-age visions of Asimov and Clarke.

   Silicon Valleyconsciousness

   Their wordsIncreasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

   ↗We're stuck in Philip K. Dick's imagined universeprogrammablemutter.com 1st of 3 in this piece