This is utter bullshit. Warren Ellis's excelent "How to see the future"[1], addresses why we're perpetually bored by the times we live in, and are always nostalgic about some bygone golden age:
...We look at the present day through a rear-view mirror.
This is something Marshall McLuhan said back in the
Sixties, when the world was in the grip of authentic-
seeming future narratives. He said, “We look at the
present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards
into the future.”
He went on to say this, in 1969, the year of the crewed
Moon landing: “Because of the invisibility of any
environment during the period of its innovation, man is
only consciously aware of the environment that has
preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully
visible only when it has been superseded by a new
environment; thus we are always one step behind in our
view of the world. The present is always invisible because
it’s environmental and saturates the whole field of
attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an
earlier day.”
There are six people living in space right now. There are
people printing prototypes of human organs, and people
printing nanowire tissue that will bond with human flesh
and the human electrical system.
We’ve photographed the shadow of a single atom. We’ve got
robot legs controlled by brainwaves. Explorers have just
stood in the deepest unsubmerged place in the world, a
cave more than two kilometres under Abkhazia. NASA are
getting ready to launch three satellites the size of
coffee mugs, that will be controllable by mobile phone
apps.
Here’s another angle on vintage space: Voyager 1 is more
than 11 billion miles away, and it’s run off 64K of
computing power and an eight-track tape deck.
In the last ten years, we’ve discovered two previously
unknown species of human. We can film eruptions on the
surface of the sun, landings on Mars and even landings on
Titan. Is all of this very boring to you? Because all this
is happening right now, in this moment. Check the time on
your phone, because this is the present time and these
things are happening. The most basic mobile phone is in
fact a communications devices that shames all of science
fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators.
Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it
couldn’t text or take a photo that he could stick a nice
Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn’t see the mobile
phone coming. It certainly didn’t see the glowing glass
windows many of us carry now, where we make amazing things
happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn
wizards.
That, by the way, is what Steve Jobs meant when he said
that iPads were magical. The central metaphor is magic.
And perhaps magic seems an odd thing to bring up here, but
magic and fiction are deeply entangled, and you are all
now present at a séance for the future. We are summoning
it into the present. It’s here right now. It’s in the room
with us. We live in the future. We live in the Science
Fiction Condition, where we can see under atoms and across
the world and across the methane lakes of Titan.