“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”
In-depth investigations into an air tragedy and the internet boom. (Issue #441)
In 1905, writer George Santayana wrote down a quote that would be repeated for over a century: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
On Medium, writers are taking advantage of our recent updates to the way long reads work on the site to do exactly that: dig into the past, see what went wrong, and try to bring those lessons to the future. In this issue, we’re going to take a look at two highly researched investigations — one into a devastating accident, the other into an upbeat prediction — and see what happened so we can learn from our mistakes.
The confusion of intellect with wisdom is load-bearing. Take it out and the building comes down.
What happened to American Airlines Flight 5342?
On January 29, 2025, American Airlines Flight 5342 was on its final approach to Reagan National Airport outside Washington, D.C. when it collided with a US Army Blackhawk helicopter over the Potomac River. In Reaping the Whirlwind: Inside the Potomac River Midair Collision, writer Admiral Cloudberg does a deep investigation into the tragedy that marked the end of “America’s Golden Age of Aviation Safety.”
Admiral Cloudberg is known for her investigations into air accidents. By her own admission, the investigation into the Potomac Midair Collision is her “longest ever by a margin of approximately two thirds” (it’s a 193-minute read, so make sure to give yourself plenty of time to dig in). After going through transcripts and National Transportation Safety Board report, she weaves a narrative of the errors that led up to the fateful moment, starting with the harrowing final moments:
Suddenly, something large and fast surged into the pilots’ peripheral vision, just below them and to the right. Perhaps they had time to see that it was a US Army Sikorsky UH-60 Blackhawk helicopter, its blades slicing a path through the dark toward their plane, or maybe all they ever saw was a flash of movement and a streak of light.
Either way, at the last possible second Captain Campos hauled his controls all the way back, his sharp maneuver punctuated by an exclamation of surprise, followed by a shout of terror from his first officer.[1:9, 376] But it was too late.
Cloudberg then digs deep into the many small issues that contributed to the crash: overcrowding in the airspace above Washington D.C.; the many moving parts managed by Air Traffic Control at Reagan National; institutional “rot” and overuse of older equipment by the U.S. military. But rather than finding blame with any one individual, pilot, or institution, Cloudberg finds that it was a system set up for failure. It wasn’t just the Federal Aviation Administration or the Department of Defense (two organizations specifically called out in the investigation) but, she argues, “the pressures that were both imposed upon them and imposed by them upon others” — by members of Congress pushing for more convenient flights at their home airport, by cut budgets affecting control towers, by the leadership at the Pentagon pushing for more helicopter flights, and more.
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The accident has spurred a wave of safety improvements at Reagan National Airport for now, but, as Cloudberg writes, “For those who waited that night for a text message that never came, those who sat refreshing FlightRadar for a flight that would never arrive, the struggle is not over, and neither is it over for those who have dedicated their lives to the shining ideal that such loss is unnecessary.”
Grief doesn’t move in a straight line, it moves like a toddler on a sugar high, all directions at once, no warning.
— Chloe Carter in The 221, My Grandmother Waited Until Her Last Breath to Say Something Terrible
What happened to the long boom?
Back in 1997, at the start of what would soon be known as the internet age, WIRED magazine published an article imagining what that age actually would be. “The Long Boom,” by Peter Schwartz and Peter Leyden, laid out a sunny timeline of how the world would change through 2020. “It was the cumulative effect of countless negative stories forming one emotional conclusion,” writer Tim Ventura writes in his reflection on the influential article, “the future was closing.”
Now that we’re 29 years after the article was written — and a full 6 years after the end of their future history — how did Schwartz and Leyden do? It’s a mixed bag, Ventura says. Their central thesis was that major technological advancements in biotechnology, nanotechnology, and telecommunications would change the world. “This was the Long Boom’s deepest assumption, and it explains both its insight and its failure,” Ventura writes. “The technology arrived. The benevolent political settlement surrounding it didn’t.”
Schwartz and Leyden’s optimistic take, for example, would expect the wealth and prosperity from these tech gains to distribute evenly throughout the world; “The world did become far richer, but the gains didn’t distribute themselves,” Ventura points out. Fixing the hole in the ozone layer showed that the world could come together to solve major environmental issues, but “climate change produced the opposite result.” The article does include a caveat of ten potential events “that could terminate or weaken the boom.” Some of them are eerily accurate: A devastating pandemic (like COVID-19), terrorism (like September 11th), or a Russian slide into authoritarianism. But these “spoilers hiding in plain sight” don’t let Schwartz and Leyden off the hook; as Ventura writes, “They simply assigned those forces the wrong weight.”
With the rise of AI and its effects on engineering, medicine, and general productivity, Ventura argues that we are once again potentially at the start of another long boom. But we can take lessons from what we have learned since 1997:
But capability alone can produce at least three different futures: a broadly shared boom; a powerful but unequal technological boom surrounded by political instability; or a fragmented transformation slowed by rivalry, concentrated ownership, institutional failure, and public resistance. The lesson of 1997 isn’t that optimism is embarrassing. It’s that there’s no automatic mechanism converting technical abundance into social abundance.
It is good to be an old boy, still caring about the things that animated me so long ago.
A final thought
In Generations of Trauma: The Psychological Map of Palestine’s History, writer Ramsey Hanhan 🇵🇸 🌍 explains how history is personal to Palestinians, like him and his family. In the piece, he recounts his family’s story from the early 20th century to today. But it was this paragraph that stood out:
No part of the world has been free from trauma. If we cross-reference our histories, we will find that our traumas are all interconnected. Perhaps what is required is a global collective healing.
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Edited and produced by brandon echter, Scott Lamb, and Carly Rose Gillis.
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