# Where Is My Flying Car? *Originally self-published 2018. Re-released by **[[Stripe Press]]** in **December 2021** in the imprint's signature edition. Author: **J. Storrs Hall** — engineer, futurist, former president of the **Foresight Institute**, founding chief scientist of Nanorex, Inc., and a long-time figure in the [[Extropianism]] / nanotechnology research community.* **Draft profile.** A 400-page polemic that begins with the literal question — why don't we have flying cars? — and uses the answer to mount a sweeping case that **technological progress has been catastrophically slowed since the 1970s** by a hostile culture, suppressed energy technology, and timid public policy. The book is one of two Stripe Press titles ([[Stubborn Attachments]]) that anchor the **Progress Studies** intellectual project, and it is the more **viscerally extropian** of the pair — Hall is openly nostalgic for the *Atomic Age + nanotech utopia* worldview that descends directly from K. Eric Drexler and the 1990s Extropy Institute. ## The Argument Hall's case unfolds in four moves: 1. **The flying car is a real engineering possibility.** The early-20th-century trajectory of personal aviation — [[Henry Ford]]'s autogyro, the Aerocar, the Moller M400 — was on track to produce a working flying car by the late 20th century. The book opens by walking through, in detail, the engineering arguments for why this was technically feasible. 2. **It didn't happen because of a "Great Stagnation."** Borrowing the framing from [[Tyler Cowen]]'s *The Great Stagnation* (2011), Hall argues that productivity, energy intensity per capita, and technological ambition all stalled out around 1970. 3. **The stagnation was caused by hostile culture and bad policy.** Specifically: the rise of an anti-progress, anti-nuclear, anti-development counterculture; the regulatory state's strangling of nuclear energy; and the suppression of cold fusion and molecular nanotechnology. Hall presents this not as accident but as ideological capture. 4. **A nanotech-and-nuclear future is still recoverable.** The closing chapters lay out Hall's vision of *Henry Adams curves* — exponential energy abundance — produced by molecular manufacturing and revived nuclear power. The book ends in an explicitly utopian register: abundance, wonder, "the future we were promised." ## Why It Matters in This KB ### 1. It's the engineer's companion to *Stubborn Attachments* [[Stubborn Attachments]] gives Progress Studies its **moral philosophy** (growth-maximization as ethical imperative); *Where Is My Flying Car?* gives it its **historical narrative** (we were on track, then we lost our nerve). Together, these two Stripe Press titles form the **founding canon** of the movement. ### 2. It reactivates the Extropy Institute's worldview Hall is a direct intellectual descendant of [[Extropianism]]: nanotechnology as the substrate of post-scarcity, energy abundance as moral imperative, the "anti-progress counterculture" as the enemy. The book launders 1990s extropian ideas into 2020s respectability — same K. Eric Drexler / [[Max More]] / Foresight Institute genealogy, repackaged for a Stripe-coded readership. See [[Extropianism]] for the parent ideology. ### 3. It is the intellectual prehistory of "It's Time to Build" and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto [[Marc Andreessen]]'s 2020 "It's Time to Build" essay and 2023 [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] are downstream of this book's diagnosis: we stopped building because we lost the will to. Hall makes the *engineering* version of the argument that Andreessen later turned into venture-capital ideology. ### 4. It is the Andreessen / Collison / Altman reading-list staple Repeatedly cited and recommended across the Silicon Valley investor class. Tyler Cowen called it *"perhaps the most thought-provoking work of nonfiction I have read this year."* The Stripe Press edition is a status object in the Progress Studies / [[Roots of Progress]] / [[Institute for Progress]] orbit. ## Where the Book Is Strongest - The technical history of personal aviation and autogyros is detailed and idiosyncratically interesting. - The "Henry Adams curve" framing of long-run energy intensity is genuinely useful as a heuristic. - The cultural diagnosis — that postwar America had an *ambition* about the future that has since drained away — captures something real about the institutional psychology of the late 20th century. ## Where the Book Is Weakest This is the section that matters for KB purposes: - **Cold fusion and "suppressed nanotech."** Hall takes seriously claims about cold fusion and molecular manufacturing that the mainstream physics and chemistry communities consider unfounded. The book treats these as suppressed truths rather than evaluated dead-ends. - **Regulatory diagnosis is one-sided.** Nuclear's decline is treated almost entirely as a story of irrational regulation, with little attention to cost-overrun economics, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, or the actual operational record. - **Counterculture as villain.** Hall's account of why progress slowed leans heavily on a "the hippies ruined everything" narrative that maps cleanly onto [[Marc Andreessen]]'s later anti-regulatory rhetoric — and just as cleanly avoids interrogating the role of corporate consolidation, financialization, or private capital allocation. - **Implicit politics.** The book is presented as engineering history, but its policy implications (deregulate energy, build nuclear, redirect resources toward molecular manufacturing, treat anti-progress culture as the enemy) are exactly the politics of [[American Dynamism]] and the [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]]. The framing of "this is just engineering" obscures the political payload. ## TESCREAL Mapping - **T** (Transhumanism) — Implicit. Hall's nanotech utopianism is the substrate of much transhumanist medical optimism. - **E** (Extropianism) — ✓ Strong. Foresight Institute lineage; the book is essentially an extropian manifesto in historical-engineering clothing. - **S** (Singularitarianism) — Adjacent. Henry Adams curves of exponential energy descend from the same family of "exponential trend → discontinuity" arguments. - **C** (Cosmism) — Adjacent. The flying-car-to-space-colony arc is implicitly cosmist. - **R / EA / L** — Adjacent through Progress Studies but not the book's own framing. ## Companion / Counterpart Texts - *[[Stubborn Attachments]]* (Tyler Cowen, Stripe Press 2018) — the moral-philosophy half of the Progress Studies canon. - *The Great Stagnation* (Cowen, 2011) — the diagnosis Hall's book extends. - *Engines of Creation* (Drexler, 1986) — the canonical nanotechnology text Hall builds on. - *[[The Techno-Optimist Manifesto]]* (Andreessen, 2023) — the venture-capital crystallization of this book's politics. ## Draft Notes / To Expand - Add detail on Hall's Foresight Institute and Nanorex history - Pull specific Tyler Cowen and Marc Andreessen endorsements / blurbs - Trace which sections of the book Andreessen quotes/echoes in *It's Time to Build* and the Techno-Optimist Manifesto - Document the book's reception among physicists and energy economists vs. its reception in Silicon Valley - Cross-link to a future [[Progress Studies]] concept page once created - Add a [[J. Storrs Hall]] author profile (currently unlinked) - Investigate Hall's current affiliation with the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing ## See Also - [[J. Storrs Hall]] — Author - [[Stripe Press]] — Publisher of the 2021 edition - [[Tyler Cowen]] — Most prominent endorser; coined "Great Stagnation" - [[Stubborn Attachments]] — Companion volume in the Stripe Press Progress Studies canon - [[Patrick Collison]] — Stripe Press patron; reading-list amplifier - [[Marc Andreessen]] — Downstream political beneficiary; [[The Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] - [[Extropianism]] — Parent ideology - [[Progress Studies]] — The movement this book helped anchor - [[TESCREAL]] — The broader bundle - [[Foresight Institute]] — Hall's institutional home for much of his career - [[Techno-Optimist Manifesto]] — Downstream political crystallization of the worldview