I remember the first time I saw the floaty rock. It was the middle of night, and I was facing the insomniac’s dilemma: to reach for the phone or not. I reached and opened Twitter—this was two weeks ago; the new name hadn’t yet sunk in—on the theory that a scroll through my feed might achieve some hypnotic effect, creating an opening for sleep to take hold. That’s when I saw the blurry video. In it, a scrap of material, small and misshapen like a pencil’s broken lead tip, hovers mystically above a thick wafer of polished metal.
I scrolled right by. Despite following a fair number of “neat science thing” aggregators, in the wee hours I do not always thrill to edification. But a few minutes later, I saw the video again, and then a third time. I registered that this was not some didactic explanation of magnetism. This was news: The floaty rock was LK-99, a substance synthesized by a team of South Korean scientists, who believe it to be a room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor.
I’d like to report that the words room-temperature ambient-pressure superconductor were meaningful to me that night, but no. I puzzled over this phrase, like an ape taking stock of a monolith. I looked for contextual clues. I counted exclamation points. After a few minutes of internal resistance, I did some due diligence, by which I mean light and bleary-eyed Googling. Eventually, through some effort, I came to understand that LK-99 was potentially a holy-grail finding for materials scientists.
But not only materials scientists! This was not like the observation of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere in 2020. Had that discovery held up—alas, it did not—it would have strongly suggested the presence of life on that planet, an epochal finding but not one that would transform our world. The existence of a room-temperature superconductor would not simply be a nice new fact about nature. Rather, according to some observers, it would mean we have access to a magical, all-purpose substance that can deliver us into a new technological age, where electricity flows through our world without friction, more computers are quantum, and trains, too, are floaty.
Given LK-99’s alleged import, a global race to reproduce the South Korean findings was already under way, with much of the internet watching, excitedly. The specter of China getting there first added a layer of geopolitical intrigue. (I liked to imagine America’s materials scientists huddled together, bracing for their Sputnik moment.) Meanwhile, the South Korean scientists were reportedly feuding among themselves. And everyone could follow along on social media, marveling at each levitating rock the way that Twitch viewers marvel at a gamer’s latest kill shot. If nothing else, it’s a great way to pass time until a gleaming techno-utopia materializes around us.
[Read: A big week for floating rocks]
What I’m describing is, to be clear, the vibe surrounding LK-99 as I’ve experienced it. Its closest analogue may be the frenzy that accompanied ChatGPT’s release last November. Perhaps you remember: Late-pandemic malaise was wearing off; people were ready for shiny new things; and then, suddenly, those things appeared in the form of bots that could chat, code, and maybe even break up your marriage. Social-media feeds filled up with screenshots of their cleverest and most devious exploits.
In the months after ChatGPT’s release, some came to believe that a “foom” was taking place. In the AI literature, a foom occurs when an AI’s cascading self-improvements accelerate its own development until it becomes powerful beyond human comprehension. (The term is meant to evoke the sound of an explosive eruption.) The neat thing about this particular, supposed foom: It was being experienced in real time, at least by those who were sufficiently online. Technology was about to deliver us from suffering and scarcity, we were told, and you could see it all on Twitter. During the Trump presidency, the word doomscrolling was coined to describe the habit of mainlining bad news through your smartphone. This was different; it had a positive valence. Call it foomscrolling.
Not every emerging technology will lead to foomscrolling. When its extraordinary powers can be demonstrated in some immediately recognizable visual form—two-tone chat screenshots, say, or floaty rocks—the behavior is more likely to occur. More important, to be eligible for foomscrolling, an emerging technology needs to be the kind of thing that could plausibly level up the species. (The Apollo missions would have led to endless foomscrolling; imagine 1 million reposts of the Earthrise photo captioned we are so back.) GLP-1-receptor-activating drugs, like the one that’s in Ozempic, provide an instructive counterexample. Despite constituting a long-hoped-for miracle—a weight-loss medicine that works—they address only certain problems. No one is posting that these drugs will end up solving climate change; Ozempic won’t prompt anyone to foomscroll.
[Read: Goodbye, Ozempic]
In the case of AI, foomscrolling quickly curdled into something self-parodic: a cottage industry of AI influencers. They had paid-for blue checks and bios that carefully laundered their previous crypto enthusiasms. Initially, they were useful. The field was moving quickly and it was nice to have some aggregators of industry news, however credulous. But they soon overwhelmed the discourse with claims that this week’s list of mind-melting breakthroughs was even more extensive than the last. It all started to seem a little sad, like LinkedIn.
Perhaps this is just the foomscrolling cycle. In recent days, the LK-99 fandom has been on the back foot; an aura of deflationary realism has begun to color the story. Some commentators are claiming that LK-99 is merely a ferromagnet, and scientists have got the word out that even if the substance is indeed a room-temperature superconductor, the path to the future depicted in the How Society Would Look meme will be a long one. Replication claims are no longer topping my “For You” feed. Nuance and sobriety appear to be winning the day.
Peak superconductor foomscrolling may have already passed. But the cultural desire that fueled it—the hunger for a new tool that will lift us out of our human frailty and onto some smooth exponential trajectory to a shimmering and deathless future—that looks to be quite resilient. That collective longing may have been with us since Olduvai, in one form or another. The internet only magnifies it into a kind of searchlight. I imagine that its beam will soon find something else to lock onto, something new for the world’s insomniacs to Google in the dead of night, in the hope that maybe, this time, the foom will be real.