Hey dude, where's our future?

Hey dude, here's my past:<p>First grade, 1961-1962:<p>We had to learn "duck and cover", in case of surprise nuclear attack by the Soviets.<p>For field trips, we toured our neighbors' underground bomb shelters, which were about as common as home theaters are now.<p>We had to say the Lord's Prayer, whether we wanted to or not.<p>Some of my classmates wore braces, because the polio vaccine didn't quite make it in time for them.<p>We played with the African American kids in our neighborhood, but they wen't to a different school. Even though Brown vs. Board of Education had been decided by the Supreme Court in 1954, integration was still years away.<p>We didn't realize it at the time (no one did), but the Cuban Missile Crisis brought us perilously close to WWIII.<p>We only saw my dad on weekends because he got home from work after our bedtime.<p>No one I knew had ever flown on an airplane; it would be 20 years before I would.<p>I had never been to a restaurant or a movie.<p>We had no computers, internet, cell phones, cable TV, or air conditioning.<p>Our hopes and dreams were simple: to be happy (we were), go to college (we did), get jobs as good as our father's (we didn't), and to have wonderful families of our own (some of us did, some of us didn't).<p>We made a lot of progress since then but not nearly enough. We never imagined the opportunites we now have, not the threats. OP is sure right about one thing; our work is never done.

As far as I can tell, the 'problem' is the huge gap between reality and what is generally accepted as 'true.'<p>I feel very much like the author of the post, as I imagine a lot of others do. I sometimes try and hold it all in my head; the government censorship, the people hating the censorship, the ever rising power of the hacker, the large sums of money spent on designer clothing, etc.<p>The only way I have been able to resolve this apparent paradox (how can everyone I know be <i>so good</i> when the world is <i>so bad</i>), is to recognize explicit, intentional, and calculated 'misinformation campaigns' are fully integrated into US society.<p>A strong, self-reinforcing (if everyone believes, it must be true) network of truth and lies is pushed as a zeitgeist; and some probably-genetic tribal mechanism gets the dissidents ostracized from the community when they are like, "no seriously.. just look at WTC7"<p>Having been "off" the boob-tube and most forms of "popular entertainment" for almost a third of my life now; I have noticed my world view splitting farther and farther from that of the average uninformed, top-model watching citizen.<p>I would expect a very strong correlation between consumption of popular media and totally-naive world views, including any world view that gives our regime the benefit-of-the-doubt.

Any call to 'educate yourself' accompanied by inspirational Che Guevara quotes can't be taken seriously. Look behind the hagiography and there's nothing but a butcher with soundbites and a pretty face.

Counting wars and conflicts seems like a pretty naive way to go about this. You only thought that world peace was inches away when the cold war ended because you weren't actually paying attention to what the cold war was suppressing/controlling. With hindsight, it was fairly obvious that we encounter the apparent 'uptick' in wars. Which really wasn't an uptick in total conflicts, but rather ones which the United States were directly involved in.<p>If you go to the wiki article on anything related to the cold war and look at the cold war section at the bottom where events are broken down by decade, just count the number of 'invasions' and 'civil wars' are listed.<p>It's possible things are getting worse. But this line -really- bugs me: "I’d rather have the cold war back, because in retrospect people who fight over ideology seem a lot less likely to blow the whole place to smithereens than the ones who fight over religion. "<p>That -might- be true if you happen to live in the developed world. But just look at all the shit both sides instigated in the developing world during the cold war. A necessary part of the cold war was constantly keeping a hand in the runnings of nearly every developing country to attempt to maintain a status quo.<p>All those toppling of government by the united states since the 50s? Nearly every single of them were motivated at least partly by the containment policy.<p>I'm not trying to argue that those actions were wrong. That's besides the point. The point is that many people (including the author) has the wrong view of the cold war period. Honestly, since I wasn't around then, I can't claim to have 'the correct' view. But I believe the facts speak for themselves. The Cold War period wasn't exactly a happy time for -world-.

Born in 1985, my reference point for the world got calibrated at around 1992 and only started moving along sometime in late high school/early college - the 2000s.<p>Increasingly I'm noticing the differences just in that period from the mid-80s. I do feel like "the future is now" applies to our time.<p>I look at all the occupations of our society and think to myself... "Within in my lifetime, technology is probably going to change this." Retail districts seem unbelievably shiny and glossy these days, with a tendency to put flatscreens and bright LEDs and reflective surfaces everywhere. I haven't gotten a driver's license yet and wonder whether it will ever be necessary; the Internet is already a huge enabler for setting up carpools, and automated driving is quickly coming up on the horizon.<p>I'd like to think I'm on the ball and know where things are going, but unexpected things seem to keep happening all the time. Some months ago I decided that I might as well just give up on the futurism game and just focus on what's relevant to what I'm doing(games), cause everything else is moving so fast I'd never keep up anyway. Yet even within THAT, it's still hard.

The future as fallen prey of the hand-wavy notion that things will be taken care of somehow by someone. Problem is, taking action can involve hard work, spending time in jail or other unpleasant activities so when there's abuses people just let it slide.<p>Maybe it's cynicism, maybe cowardice or just plain laziness. Anyway, gotta get back to watch Seinfeld reruns and stuff my face.

I think as history progresses, the world becomes a more richly complex place; and more opportunities are made available to its inhabitants as a result.<p>I don't think that people are less worthy, or less 'good', than they were in the past. I do think that our attention has to fight more distractions than ever before.<p>Maybe it's not surprising that we sometimes lose track of what's truly important.

World peace is a pretty unrealistic goal at this point. The population of the world has grown too large, concentrated and different (ie, between cultures) for fair apportionment of the resources available to it. Therefor, there will always be competition and strife. The Internet isn't going to change that...

I wonder what Francis Fukuyama is up to these days:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last...</a>

I think part of this is following a time line as he grew up. Just look at the abuses 1970s, and the 1980s was a recession time for many.

It's an emotional plea that I can related to, but flag it I must, not HN material.