Perhaps related, on this page musing about Wikipedia (https://shii.bibanon.org/shii.org/knows/Wikipedia.html): "It is founded on the unfortunate belief that people will always do good things and be nice to each other, and after a few spectacular years that everyone involved will remember, it falls apart in a miserable, unhappy mess, which everyone will later insist they had no hand in."
That belief isn't unfortunate - technological optimism or what Wired once called "extropianism" is just the same as every other kind of utopian fantasy. And when you're young, and kind, and full of love, and think the world can be fixed if only everyone had the tools and the motivation to express their best selves, it's seductive. And it should be. Because if teenagers and twentysomethings were as cynical and resigned as the rest of us, we'd be doomed. Every generation architects some new utopian paradigm, and has to go through its own process of disillusionment as they watch the mob tear it limb from limb. Ultimately, the best you can hope for is that people learn from history and don't repeat the same mistakes.
But that is exactly what happens: Human civilization is a generational loop of genocide and treachery. All of these wonderful things we enjoy exist in spite of everything we are.
Yeah, but I see some incremental progress. Legal systems, institutions, human rights, technology that alleviates misery (as opposed to gadgetry, or worse, tech that enalaves people). It's definitely been two steps forward and one step back. Unfortunately, we seem to have entered the back step. Friend said to me the other day "we peaked so hard in the early 90s". Hard to argue with that.
