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Technology


WELCOME TO THE AGE OF ‘FOOMSCROLLING’

The online frenzies that followed LK-99 and ChatGPT reveal a resurgent
techno-optimism—and a shared longing for a new technology that will free us from
human limits.

By Ross Andersen

Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.
August 8, 2023
Share
Saved StoriesSave


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.

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