It pays to keep this in the context of the events in our recent history which some argue have lead to a certain stripe of ideological stagnation in America, not just in the way we perceive modernity but in also their debilitating influence on how we perceive actual technological progress itself.
Peter Thiel has been steadfastly vocal on this :
I think one of the … you know, the counter-cultural in the '60s
was the hippies. You know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969.
Woodstock started three weeks later, and with the benefit of
hindsight, that’s when progress ended, and the hippies took over
the country.
Today the counterculture is to believe in science and technology.
You know, our society, the dominant culture doesn’t like science.
It doesn’t like technology. You just look at the science-fiction
movies that come out of Hollywood — Terminator, Matrix, Avatar,
Elysium. I watched the Gravity movie the other day. It’s like you
would never want to go into outer space. You would just want to be
back on some muddy island. And so I think we’re in a world where
actually believing that a better future is possible that you can
have agency and work towards a better future, that is actually
radically counter-cultural.[1]
Peter Thiel and Glenn Beck discuss what the counterculture looks like.
http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/10/21/could-this-be-the-new-co...
(or if your political persuasion forbids you against patronizing Beck)