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>>diodor+(OP)
Growing up in the oughts, the future was Ghost in the Shell: SAC and Xenosaga and .hack//Sign and Gundam 00. I didn't see the dystopia; I imagined a glass metropolis beside a glittering bay, bleached and blue; VR diving into pools of ephemeral neon filament; trips to a space colony. The ISS had launched when I was in elementary school. 2012 came, and I graduated from college, and the Rift had its Kickstarter. I had a supercomputer in my pocket and a black president. Things seemed on track.

Of course, Oculus dragged its feet until it was bought by Facebook, who dragged things even more. Obama droned weddings. The ISS prepares for reentry burn in a few years. Et cetera. All of it - the corporate politicking; the political atrocities; the logarithmic progression of scientific advances, where technological progress is overtaken by the social calamity it unleashes - predicted by the media that had set my mental image of the future in the first place. Whose fault is it that the future failed to materialize again? I'd say corporate greed and the captured institutions that are supposed to police them for the greater good, but the fact that we're seeing the dream die again means that laying blame might be futile (particularly if we're not going to actually do anything about the bad actors).

Essentially, the Millennial era has been one where the glamour ghost came a-knockin' again, but the smart people who were paying attention already knew how the story goes. As for the rest of us? Mana du vortes.

>>underl+VLc
a view from a generation earlier: >>39084117

Re: Ghost in the Shell, I find it amusing that Gibson's 1984 opening line: "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." used to mean grey, but now could mean bright blue (or even black?) due to the march of progress...

>>082349+4Qc
I tend to think that the 90s actually did see its analogue to psychedelics in the internet. No need to be a psychonaut and fry your brain anymore; just surf the web. It's the same sort of ideal of connecting with universal knowledge.

There's even a heuristic to track these kinds of awakenings, roughly, and I'm absolutely certain you're not going to guess it. Got it in your head? Okay, wrong, it was "landmark black cinema." The Wiz came out in 1978 after 4 years of the musical. In 1995, we had The Lion King, followed by the Broadway play in 1997. If you look for something repeating the pattern, you find Black Panther in 2018 (alongside a glamour around a specific component of the web, social media and the mature smartphone).

I don't mean to make any sort of causative connection, but perhaps there is something about a widespread desire to "move forward" and "embrace openness" that also benefits the funding of these sorts of productions (and then the subsequent public enthusiasm for them upon release). And there's always a collapse back to conservatism shortly thereafter (Disco Demolition Day and Reagan; Bush and 9/11; COVID and its backlash, and the subsequent failure of Bernie Sanders to beat Joe Biden, and then Joe Biden/Kamala Harris to beat Donald Trump).