zlacker

>>diodor+(OP)
A great essay, worthy of detailed reading as it contains so many interesting connections and associations from the past to explain the present and maybe forecast the future.

Just one example among the many:

> Making family-sized dwellings abundant and thus affordable for most people would be the single most effective step toward restoring faith in progress.

We are drowning in stochastic parrots and cryptographically minted "wealth" while very fundamental aspects of wellbeing are delegated to the dysfunctional, stagnating "technologies" of yesteryear.

My only criticism would be the subtitle: no, the future when it arrived did not feel ordinary. It felt disconnected from the human predicament and ominous about our prospects.

>>openri+1xd
Oooh, that's interesting to me, as someone who sees a common pattern in the way ills that tend to vex black Americans in one generation come back to haunt the rest of the country a few down the road (and often, silently, visited Native Americans first)[1]. There's been a decent amount of scholarship on the gulf between white and black Americans on their experience of the moon landing (shining beacon of progress versus a waste of taxpayer money while food and housing was insecure). Now, everyone's feeling the, "Can you please fund basic things that actually matter," blues. (For the NA analogue, perhaps the way the "progress" of industrialization made their subjugation and denial of land all the easier.)

[1]E.g., the crack epidemic, the opioid epidemic, and alcoholism on reservations, respectively.