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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

Maybe you're too young to remember the kind of vibe and optimism that people rode in the 90s.

Felt like everything was going to be better, like we humans were going to be better. More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us.

In fact, I invite you to re read your entire post. You post achievements in conveniences as major milestones for human progress, but...people have never read as little as they do today, never went to so few concerts as today, or the movies and the average adult in US spends less than 4 hours socializing (including both family and friends) per week, that's less than half the quote of the 90s which was already less but not as significantly.

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I started getting online in around 1996 for whatever that’s worth.

> You post achievements in conveniences as major milestones for human progress

A careful reader will note that I did not do this.

You didn't explicitly call your examples major milestones of human progress but you did use rather trite examples of consumer capitalism as a counter example to my disappointment at the lackluster end game of 20th century techno-futurism.

As other commenters have stated the techno-futurist vision that comes out of the Whole Earth Catalog was radically utopian and far grander then "I get to watch low value consumer media whenever I want."

I’d say dirt cheap solar panels and CRISPR based vaccines are pretty cool. I’m also quite optimistic about the proliferation of plausible SMR designs. That new concrete that self heals and sequesters carbon is cool too.

I think it's a category error. The optimism isn't about tech, but rather about society changing in ways that make life better:

> More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us.

If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving health globally, but I'm not sure if that's the case. It doesn't quite feel like it at least.

> It doesn't quite feel like it at least.

I think that's a function of social media and living in a society where things are objectively already really good for the vast majority of people compared to 50 years ago.

We're talking about the whole earth here, not just the societies that we live in.

And globally, things are not so rosy.

Specifically the point of electrification, might be that we electrify more, but globally the CO2 emissions are on the rise still, and have continuously risen in the past 50 years.

It's only good if you over focus on material things.

As soon as you start looking at: mental health, drug addiction, loneliness rate, sexual activity, going out, etc, by all metrics we're way worse than our parents, let alone our grandparents.

And we have the administration of the ex-hegemon working to demonise most of the cool innovations we do have.

These are much better examples.

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