[HN Gopher] The world of tomorrow
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       The world of tomorrow
        
       Author : diodorus
       Score  : 20 points
       Date   : 2024-12-08 05:14 UTC (4 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (worksinprogress.co)
 (TXT) w3m dump (worksinprogress.co)
        
       | Animats wrote:
       | That's the view from a country on the trailing edge. In Shenzhen,
       | or Seoul, or Tskuba, or Tapei you'll find enthusiasm for
       | technology.
       | 
       | The US can't even make a smartphone any more. Or electrical
       | distribution equipment. Or telephone central offices. Or TV sets.
       | Next to go, cars. (Chrysler just exited the car business.
       | Minivans only now.)
        
       | Supermancho wrote:
       | The productivity increases of the modern times led to a corporate
       | class. These oligarchs have eschewed the progressive initiatives,
       | in eager pursuit of even greater wealth, supported by the wholly
       | owned media and a bribed political class. What has been more
       | evenly distributed globally is the ever-growing poverty,
       | pollution and apathy against these powers.
       | 
       | To be fair, some improvements have been made, even at the feet of
       | these giants, driven by government action and populist
       | initiatives. This has been at the cost of concentration and
       | increases in pollution and poverty in the poorest nations. The
       | future looks bleak today, as the divide grows and progressive
       | progress has all but halted.
        
       | negativez wrote:
       | > When the future arrived, it felt... ordinary. What happened to
       | the glamour of tomorrow?
       | 
       | That's the... subtitle? Thesis statement? It's the first line
       | after the title at any rate. I stopped reading as soon as the
       | first paragraphs felt the need to define glamour. Anyone with a
       | modicum of life experience should already intuit one obvious
       | answer: glamour can only exist in brief moments in reality. "The
       | Future" necessarily only exists in fiction, and fictional works
       | can string together glamourous moments end-to-end indefinitely.
       | 
       | But in real life, you can't keep the glamour turned on. People
       | need to defecate, that toilet eventually needs be cleaned, and
       | the sewage treatment plant needs to keep working. People have to
       | start as infants that scream and adults that have to hold them
       | and hear it, then toddlers that make messes everywhere, etc.
       | Maybe dinners could all be glamourous, if you want it bad enough,
       | but are you going to get up, do your makeup and put on your most
       | stylish breakfast clothes everyday? Can you get away with the
       | same outfit at lunch and still be glamorous?
       | 
       | "Life" cannot be glamorous unless you are fabulously wealthy AND
       | make very specific life choices.
        
       | underlipton wrote:
       | 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.
        
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