[As in: Modern museum, aptly]
Just some note. Suddenly realised why the upcoming, near, Singularity is such a big deal:
It will change the way the world turns. It will no longer allow the New to be adopted…! It will require all old to be abandoned as fast as possible, not retaining anything of the Old that was good.
Of course, we still have classic stuff, and have not yet fulfilled all dreams, but up till now, we have always have progressives to embrace the New while the ‘conservatives’ wait for proof the New is actually better than the Old. (And reactionaries just don’t want to try or test anything new.)
With the Singularity, there may not be such a thing anymore as nostalgia and valuing the Things of Yesterday. We’ll have the newest of the newest only; all things less than perfectly new are a waste. So that is where all the grand (hard pastel) sketches of the bright future all fail, quite consistently: In them, there is nothing left of the past, nothing cared for as remembrance of where we came from, nothing from our youths to remind us of the finitude of our lives. Which means we’ll make all the errors ever more clearly and wholesale’ly [better word?], over and over again, in the end certainly erring to the side of killing humanity and/or the planet; if we’re at it, why not go all the way, right?
And if we don’t, the Singularity, or Matrix, will do it for us.