The Long Boom (1997)

> I think the author's ideological bias is most revealed

> gap between rich and poor has become shockingly large

Your ideological bias is clearly revealed as well.

This really misses the mark for me, as well.

There was also absolutely no mention of any thought of climate change, besides a flippant, throwaway passage about how "with global warming and ozone depletion, we'll all either die of cancer or live in Waterworld." Well, that, and a dash of "oh, biotech will save us!"'

We have largely done nothing to reverse or slow the trajectory toward climate disaster we were on in 1997, and now we're down to the last few years where we can even hope to make a difference. Had people started taking greenhouse emissions seriously in 1997, we might have had a chance.

There is an interview question that is : “If you could add a President to Mt. Rushmore, who would it be?” The correct answer is Ronald Reagan. Not for any reason, other than that if you don’t say Reagan, than you’re not “one of us”. In 1997, I think people could reasonably say that “Reagonomics” was working, and this sort of litmus test likely would add credibility to a person’s rationality.

In 2021, it’s obvious that the combination of The Southern Strategy, The Moral Majority, and Gingrichian Hyper-Partisanship have endangered The Great Experiment to the brink of disaster. Reagonimics, today, stands for the destruction of main-street, the outsourcing of American jobs and prosperity, the heightening of capitalism-fueled inequality, the death of The American Dream for millions of Americans, and the near complete disillusionment of The Millennial Generation having been born while Reagan was in office and the first American generation to be financially worse off than their parents since these things have been measured.

Today, that litmus test is not a sign of rational thinking and grounded values. Today, it is an American flag being used to beat a federal police officer. It is a gun being used in a mass shooting and synagogue. It is a New York slumlord and Reality TV actor trying to become God-King and his throngs of loyal followers decrying reality itself in order to... well, the end never was clear.

I would like to think that I am morally innocent, that I do the right thing as often as possible. But, God save me from the morality of the future. I think that it’s hard to look at an article written a quarter of a century ago and project today’s sensibilities onto it. Though anyone interpreting these works today absolutely should see and understand the failures of their belief systems, especially when so clearly stated.

> benevolence of unfettered globalism hasn't exactly come to pass.

I remember laughing out loud listening to people talking about the "Arab Spring". As someone who splits his time between the US and the mid-east, I knew there wouldn't suddenly be a rush of western-style democracy flooding the Arab world.

5-10 trillion.

> prediction articles from the past -- I loved the specificity, depth, and unbridled optimism

Talking about Wired's unbridled optimism:

I recall a Wired article from approximately 20 years ago that predicted that someone born 20 years later (i.e. born today) would ride the technology curve to infinite lifespan. As he or she got older, more and more longevity problems would be solved keeping pace with your age. Today would be date to be born at which technology could outrace death.

I wish I could find the article to re-read it to see how the arguments hold up. A phrase from the article that sticks in my mind is something like if you're born negative 20 years ago, then bingo, where the author meant that "negative 20", from his perspective, is 20 years in the future.

I asked Kevin Kelly this in an AMA around 2010 or so and he said that he didn’t read any published magazines that were similar and the closest was an RSS feed of blogs. I followed up with that that list was but never got an answer.

I miss Wired. The current magazine is closer to Seventeen than the pub in the 90s and early 00s.

Ars Technica is perhaps the spiritual successor to the Wired of old.

Wikipedia gives credit to Dawkins for coining "meme" in 1976. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme

Richard Dawkins coined the term in his 1976 book titled The Selfish Gene. It was added to the dictionary by Merriam-Webster in 1998.

You are right about the timing. Google trend indicates it didn’t really register until 2007

Two books from 1996: Brodie - Viruses of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme; Lynch - Thought Contagion: How Belief Spreads Through Society

id doesn’t come from the french. it’s a cognate of gene, to get across the idea of information transmission

> Was “meme” a word in use in English in 1997 already?

I would assume so. Susan Blackmore's popular science book on memetics was published in 1999.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meme_Machine

Yes, except back then it was mainly used by the late 90s equivalent of the TED talk set. Richard Dawkins coined it in The Selfish Gene to refer to ideas that replicate and spread in the manner of genes.

Archive.org has memepool goin back to at least 1998

"All Your Base Belong To Us" was called a meme in 1998, so people already knew what a meme was.