It is a bit sad to see where we have landed after all that.
January 1985: Computers as Poison - "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention."
July 1985: Digital Retouching - "The end of photography as evidence of anything"
Winter 1985: "Islam: Beyond the Stereotypes"
Spring 1986: "Peering into the age of Transparency" - about space surveillance
Summer 1986: “This text tries to explain how minds work. How can intelligence emerge from non-intelligence? To answer that, I’ll show that you can build a mind from many little parts, each mindless by itself.”
Fall 1986: The Fringes of Reason - Strange myths and eccentric science
Winter 1986: AmerRuss - Joining America and Russia into one country
Summer 1987: What is real & A No-Cash Economy that Works
Fall 1987: Doing Drag & Male Identity
Summer 1988: The Far Left & Far Right Converge Summer 1988: The Rights of Robots
Summer 1989: Is the body obsolete
Summer 1991: Electronic Democracy
Winter 1991: Questioning Technology
Fall 1992: Artificial Life
For a comically small amount of money I can listen to any song I want to, read any book I want to, watch any movie/TV show I want to. Then there’s the ad-supported videos and images and text. Then there’s the AIs that I use every day!
I’m in awe at how amazing where we have landed at is. Sure some stuff isn’t perfect but what fun is it to be sad about what is pretty cool?
Sure, toys and cheap fun are more accessible than ever, but we are losing something much deeper that makes humans... more human for the lack of better words. Election results in many places are just a result of that. Maybe you don't care about that or are oblivious about it, to your own loss, but its everywhere and everybody who cares sees/feels it. There is gigatons of cool technological progress for sure, but it doesn't counterbalance what was expressed.
I am lucky that I moved to society which offers much more real freedom and democracy than current US can to 99.9% of its citizens (none other than Switzerland), even if for other reasons initially (mountains and obviously money), its what eventually made me stay and much more (polite respectful society which is low crime, high quality public healthcare and education, decent social system and so on). Most of the world has much less and it doesnt seem to be improving.
Felt like everything was going to be better, like we humans were going to be better. More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us.
In fact, I invite you to re read your entire post. You post achievements in conveniences as major milestones for human progress, but...people have never read as little as they do today, never went to so few concerts as today, or the movies and the average adult in US spends less than 4 hours socializing (including both family and friends) per week, that's less than half the quote of the 90s which was already less but not as significantly.
> You post achievements in conveniences as major milestones for human progress
A careful reader will note that I did not do this.
As other commenters have stated the techno-futurist vision that comes out of the Whole Earth Catalog was radically utopian and far grander then "I get to watch low value consumer media whenever I want."
> More peace, no apartheid, no Soviet union, removing borders between countries in Europe, tech felt like a way to connect us.
If I read your comment charitably, one could maybe argue that we're actually making decent progress in the electrification of things, and that we're also improving health globally, but I'm not sure if that's the case. It doesn't quite feel like it at least.
I think that's a function of social media and living in a society where things are objectively already really good for the vast majority of people compared to 50 years ago.
As soon as you start looking at: mental health, drug addiction, loneliness rate, sexual activity, going out, etc, by all metrics we're way worse than our parents, let alone our grandparents.
And globally, things are not so rosy.
Specifically the point of electrification, might be that we electrify more, but globally the CO2 emissions are on the rise still, and have continuously risen in the past 50 years.
We switched from techno optimism to techno pessimism - for some good reasons - nevertheless internet brought to the table revolutionary capabilities not only for evil but also for good.