Authors
Alexei Kojevnikov1; 1 University of British Columbia, Canada Discussion
Poetic technologies, in David Graeber’s conceptualization, refer to futuristic imaginations of wonderful discoveries and inventions that have not materialized, or rather, in some period in history, after 1970, were abandoned or stopped coming into being. Graeber’s problem and his proposed explanation can be approached from another angle, namely what had motivated those utopian expectations in the first place, during the so-called Sputnik moment in world history, or momentum that lasted approximately ten years. This paper will characterize three global waves of important social consequences triggered by the launch of a very small but enormously symbolic material artifact in 1957. The most visible of these ramifications was the global expansion of higher education, its radically broadened demographics, accessibility, multiculturalism, and the resulting brain market and intellectual overproduction. The other affected the practice of scientific research through redefining the relationship between pure and applied science, large-scale civilian funding, rearranging priorities between fields, and broadening the boundaries of science by including topics and styles that had previously been considered suspicious or not sufficiently respectable for academic research. And, last but not least, the encouragement of a radically different futuristic vision, both scientific-technological and politico-social, a historically contingent future that has since been forgotten or lost. 
