Comment by hkpack
15 hours ago
It is about trends and perceptions - 70s were very hopeful, now with global problems - wars, climate, AI, uncertainty, what is growing is desperation.
I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.
15 hours ago
It is about trends and perceptions - 70s were very hopeful, now with global problems - wars, climate, AI, uncertainty, what is growing is desperation.
I definitely don’t envy kids that are born nowadays.
The '70s were not hopeful. Economy was terrible, Vietnam ended but still hung over the culture, Watergate, Three Mile Island, Iranian hostage crisis, cold war threatening to turn hot at any moment, double-digit mortgage rates.... and Disco.
Definitely not the 70's. I think the most recent age that might have counted as hopeful was really between the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) through the beginning of the GWOT (9/11/2001). So basically the 90's.
The seventies were a more representative time for technological hopes, during a time when it was not yet clear which are the right technological choices. The nineties were a time of rapid technological progress, but most of it was perfectly predictable, without surprises. The only thing that was surprising during the nineties was how important the Internet became in practice, even if the evolution of its underlying technology was not surprising.
The time correctly delimited by you was the time of the greatest false political hopes, when everybody around the World believed that we got rid of the communist blood-sucking parasites and now the World would become that which had been described for decades in the propaganda of the Voice of America, where the political elites are held accountable for their actions, so if they are bad they are replaced through democratic elections, and the bad commercial companies are eliminated by competition in the free market.
Instead of this happening, already a couple of years before 9/11 a wave of destructuring many important historical companies happened, followed by a huge wave of mergers and acquisitions that has continued until today and which has eliminated competition from most markets, so that they are now dominated by quasi monopolies. Then the democratic elections have brought to power worse and worse human beings, all of whom have been much worse than some citizens that would have been randomly selected for those positions.
Nowadays, the economies of USA and of the other "Western" countries, and also their political institutions, resemble much more those of the socialist countries that they mocked during the seventies, than those of USA and W. Europe of that time.
So all the hopes of the nineties were naive and none of them was realized.
Some parts of the US economy may have been terrible (perhaps due to the increased oil price, which became closer to the true cost of oil than that of the previous cheap oil, which was so cheap because it was basically stolen by USA), but in another parts of the world the economy was great in comparison with what followed after 1980.
Moreover, even in the US, the seventies were the greatest time for the electronics and computers industries, when the greatest amount of innovations have been made.
After 1980, there have been huge advances, but all of them were completely predictable, i.e. the electronics and computing industries settled on an evolution path that was well defined for a few decades, with very few surprises.
The seventies were much wilder, when much more diverse things have been tried (and many of those have failed) and they were surely hopeful, especially in their second half.
During the seventies, there were a lot of US companies that I liked and I was convinced that if I bought something from them that was mutually beneficial, because they really tried to make products that fulfilled as well as possible the needs of their customers, while ensuring a decent and reasonable profit for the vendor.
Nowadays there exists no big company in the entire world from which I can buy a product without feeling that this is an adversarial transaction, where they try as hard as they can to fool me into paying as much as possible for something that is worth as less as possible.
Patagonia is up there for me in current day. Let my people go surfing by the founder is a great read IMO
> The '70s were not hopeful
Civil Rights Activists protested against Apollo 11 at the Kennedy Space Center in 1969, and "Whitey on the Moon" was released in 1970.
The Father of Disco was involved in the song "Electric Dreams" associated with a film about AI in a love triangle.
Have you checked the news recently?