The cult of innovation asserts that these new "technologies" are good simply because they are new and provocative and especially impractical. Adherents to the cult aren't really interested in changing the world -- a deeply banal affair and extremely political affair -- it's just the opposite, it's all about peddling the fantasy of change, the drama of change, without much work and zero sacrifice. The delicious irony here is that the real moon shot wasn't the story of a bunch of plucky Randian individualists fighting against the unthinking herd of socialists, rather it was the story of massively expensive, highly bureaucratic, and extremely risky government investment that didn't pay off for nearly a decade. This is of course exact kind of real change-the-world innovation that libertarians like Cowen absolutely hate.
