Life has been getting better every year I have been alive. Billions of people have been moved out of extreme poverty and the average person lives a easier and safer life than almost anyone in history - I would rather be a poor man today than a king of the past.
This is the cold, severe reality of the day. I can't hand-wave away facts of my community for the tail end of the industrial revolution applied in Africa.
I have my optimism that in the darkness life will be conserved and born anew. We don't need another aphorism extolling the virtues of how bright some corner of the planet is and how that is a worthy trade-off for personal or collective suffering.
I'd prefer to live in the '90s when you could keep a secret and have a life that was not inside a panopticon. That was safety, not this metaphysical slavery to a set of advertising megacorps that pushes our behaviour around by statistical application of recommendations. I miss going on holiday and coming back with stories of the new world, rather than being able to bring up a 4k photo of every location within 250ms. I miss being able to fight people and gentlemen's agreements on the back of a handshake and a word. We have lost a lot, I pity those that forget so easily.
Living in the 50s with a stable job that can support two adults and some kids with appliances that never die and vaguely drive-able cars seems a hell of a lot easier and safer than now. There are always brighter moments in the past, it's pointless to even make the rebuttal about living in the past, as if we could.
Your work depends on pulling dark information on genomes into yet another database for a client. I doubt I'm going to sway you on the damage of recent progress. GATTACA is closer than I'd (we'd?) like and you probably won't be around to see it. The worst part is that it's likely to be secret, no blood tests at the gate required. Just sort a database row and you have your secret candidates for the next task.
A two thousand year semi-respite from the naturally severe realities of life is ending and nobody seems to having anything to say about the shining beauty of a mankind that valued truth, a good handshake and gentlemanly behaviour. Is violence such a bad price to pay for freedom? I guess you can buy people off with iphones and widgets while they get slowly locked up by a system seeking absolute control over their lives.
C'est la vie, long live man.
0. https://www.tillett.info/2018/12/21/the-last-word-on-free-wi...
Yes, that does not mean we shouldn't look back on the things in the past that were good & now are not. But if a wholesale reversion to a past time was possible, we would still find the golden parts of that earlier age to be apportioned to some, but not others.
Another consideration is that while I don't like life inside a panopticon, its absence in the 90's meant those of us fortunate to be "golden" simply had less awareness of those who weren't, hence the false impression that perhaps there was a lot more gold everywhere.
That sounds good to me. To me, and it may have been my own misconception, the tone of your original post seemed to convey a belief it would be great to return to a prior time. If you're actually saying you'd like to choose just certain aspects of those times to bring forward instead of a wholesale return to those times, then I can wholeheartedly agree.