a cheap, mendacious world, where what passes for progress almost always turns out to be a confidence game

A few things lend a particularly zeitgeist-y heft to this Graun essay about “cellular agriculture”, better known (perhaps to its due detriment) as “lab-grown meat”. One of those things is, of course, its being very much of a piece with the more general trend of disillusionment with regard to the brash promises of technological progress to be delivered by venture capital; that it has been (re)published in the immediate aftermath of the striking volte face of the US midterms serves only to sharpen the point. This passage makes a pretty fine job of the jab: There is a widespread feeling in the US that everything is a hoax or a Ponzi scheme, and this feeling is only reinforced by the news. The news that self-driving taxis, when they become confused, are actually operated remotely from the Philippines. The news that the mysterious invention that could scan your blood for any number of disorders was an era-defining scam. The news that the crypto entrepreneur who pledged to secure the…

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