I realise this is a review, not the actual text. But still. This is utter bollocks.
It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them.
e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes "Art" seriously plays them or understands them.
The whole "we went to the moon and never went back" completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars.
The Internet is taken for granted as a method of "chatting", and smartphones as a method of "taking selfies". Again, because the author doesn't understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it's as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it.
The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We've hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn't so easy any more.
Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
Agreed. I was especially unconvinced at the arguments for "repetition", for example that today's music is separated from the 90s only by "nuance". What? Sure, from up close it may seem that way, but given 30 years I'm sure we can look back and very clearly see the style developments just as we can for the 70s and the 80s.
It sounded to me like a case of "back in my day" but with incoherent arguments.
That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died.
My personal explanation is the collapse of the record industry. I don't think it was due to piracy, though piracy didn't help. It was mostly due to the abandonment of the old practice of scouting for interesting new music in favor of producer-led manufactured pop. The suits wanted a more reliable way to produce marketable acts, and they got it... at the expense of virtually all innovation. The same thing happened to mainstream Hollywood studios who can now only make one movie. Of course it only works for a while. Now everyone is bored and nobody cares and listenership and movie attendance numbers are crashing.
(This is always what happens when the bean counters run things. You get a short term bump in profit, but what they are really doing is cannibalizing the value of the enterprise in hidden ways. The body is basically digesting its own organs. Eventually you are left with a shell with no value.)
Piracy did worsen this trend in the record industry. When the economic model starts to be threatened, a natural response is to become more conservative and cancel anything innovative. It's usually the wrong response, but it's a very normal human response to a feeling of threat or starvation.
The only part of this I really agree with is that the music industry is harming artists more than usual. It is a meme at least as old as jazz or even older (Baroque music was so-named because it was said to be lopsided, like a misshapen pearl) that music ain't what it used to be.
There is still great music being made, and the really deep stuff has always gotten ignored by most people most of the time. Heck, I majored in music and I don't listen to Bach or Coltrane every day. That stuff is too rich for every occasion.
I'd say that innovation within genres - just people making good songs - is every bit as important as creating new genres. New genres aren't automatically created at a certain rate. They're an event, triggered by major social changes or new cultural influences most of the time. For America to invent a new genre we might need to conquer or be conquered by someone else, or have a new wave of immigration.
Some good artists currently making popular music with depth and interest off the top of my head:
St. Vincent, Dessa, Chris Thile, SquarePusher, BJ Cole, Run the Jewels, Billy Joel (I list him here because rather than just repeating his same hits forever, he went and recently released a classical-style piano album that's quite good, so he's still growing and changing as an artist), Tori Amos (she's been making music a long time but has a new style every decade or so).
I dislike the stuff called music so much these days that I have started to listen to classical music. As a hardcore grunge and heavy metal addict I ever thought that hell would freeze before. But the nth remix of a 90 hit doesn't move me - nothing original in it.
I think time will tell us that a bar, alcohol and blue smoke will do more for creativity than a gym and health food all day long.
Classical can get pretty metal, for sure. :) Wagner and Mahler come to mind.
On a totally different note - have you listened to Them Crooked Vultures? John Paul Jones, formerly Led Zeppelin, playing distorted console steel is pretty wild.
> That's the part I completely agree with. Music is absolutely stuck. There have only been micro-genres, such as the many micro-genres of techno/EDM or hip hop. There has been nothing approaching the birth of hip hop, techno/rave, grunge, "alternative" rock, and so on. Those all came of age in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. For some reason after 2000 music died.
I don't really see this at all. I might agree that mainstream music hasn't changed much since the late 2000s, when synthesizers seemed to mostly replace guitars in popular music. to me, taylor swift sounds really different than she did in 2009, but pretty much the same as in 2011 or so. then again, I don't really pay enough attention to this kind of music to give it a fair analysis.
grunge was certainly a major departure from what was popular in the 80s, but it's not radically different from a lot of less popular music that came before it. I would argue there's much more variation in the last twenty years of hardcore subgenres than there was between hüsker dü, pixies, and nirvana.
Music became largely teen-oriented by the late 90s and onwards. Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears... fast forward to the 2010s and nothing has dramatically changed - Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande etc. Maybe it's a very profitable spot exploited by producers and songwriters.
When I was a teen in the early 90s I listened to Tool, Nirvana, emerging Techno/Rave, Rap, as well as older rock like Pink Floyd, The Beatles, Jimmy Hendrix, and King Crimson. I could keep going but that's a sampling. In college I got more into electronic and obscure hip hop, both of which were quite new and innovative at the time. I lost all interest in pop because that was the late 90s when all pop went to crap.
All of that has held up pretty well because it was all good music. Nobody is going to remember the absolute dog shit pop that teens listen to today. It's boring, repetitive, devoid of deep emotion, and is basically the same song over and over.
What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music. That's because their generation's music is objectively awful. I have seen studies that have quantified this via means such as Shannon information content. The content of popular music has been declining since the late 90s, and the similarity of songs and acts has been increasing.
> What I see is that many teens today (those who really like music) are listening to old music from the 60s-90s and very little new music.
Teens after 1990 who fancied themselves liking music and being intellectual listened to older music too. I know, because I had friends like that. They considered Nirvana and grunge repetitive crap. Emerging techno and rap too. They would listen Pink Floyd or Beatles, but those were old at that point.
Anecdotal, but my parents (whoil like, Hendix/ Zep / Floyd) thought that Tool / Nirvana / et al sucked. Hard.
Both my parents have pretty good formal music education; my dad was a high school band director for a while. They never said as much, but I am pretty sure that from their perspective most of what I listend to in high school in the early 90s was "absolute dog shit pop" and " objectively awful".
To be fair, Coal Chamber and Sublime are "objectively awful" :D
They are not totally wrong, though I would debate Tool with them. Even if you don't like the style or content Tool is really well done musically. Grunge was innovative and creative but wasn't that musically "serious." I can see classically trained musicians hating it. Same goes for punk.
There can be musically well crafted music and there can be creative music. Occasionally you get music that is both. My point was that post-late-90s pop is neither. It's churned out repetitive trash that relies heavily on cheap hooks and bass lines to be catchy and inspire superficial emotion.
The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious.
"The slide of music toward mindless manufactured repetitive pop started in the 80s, but it was in the late 90s that it became really obvious. "
Just an opinion (and I am aware it's not a popular opinion), but the Beatles going on Ed Sullivan is what really screwed up our system... prior to that the contemporary popular music was jazz, and that was a moment when every boomer musician I know gave up accordion or clarinet or whatever and got into a shitty garage band.
Like, I think there are worthwhile developments even in the shittiest, most repetitive music. Lately I've been having a grand time making electornic music in a single groove box...
my main point is that there's no transcendent "goodness" to US pop music, as various generations each think the newer generations stuff sucks for one reason or another.
Personally, I love the stuff my teenager sends me, even if a lot of it heavily rips of Devo or the Talking Heads or the Dandy Warhols or whoever.
IMO (and heavily-- just my opinion) it's incredibly repetitive stuff that's often making fun of its audience.
I love Alex Grey's art and I liked the music when was in high school, but I get why folks who are into stuff like hard bop or Chopin think that it's not super refined.
Manufacturer produced pop’s beginnings are exactly contemporaneous with the invention of recording. Just as soon as people learned that they could sell a recording, they started collecting and selling them. And they took care that what they recorded they could sell. And people did buy it. See the Columbia music hillbilly series for example. The recorders totally looked for the most marketable acts.
They got better at predicting what could sell, but commercialized recording didn’t appear later.
Further, prior to recording, musicians couldn’t make a living without that same broad appeal. People don’t buy tickets to shows they don’t want to see, and patrons don’t commission works from artists they don’t like.
The only artists free from commercial concerns are ones who have money from other things.
Another issue is that today discovering new music becomes hard. An algorith will tell you what you like based on your past hearing habits. New music will come to you as a surprise by the one who is paying most to feature it to you. Passive consumption like listening to radio which virtually no one seems to do these days means to be confronted with new things you may dislike but there might be something new which becomes a trend and later a new genre.
The past decade has been acknowledged as the Golden Age of Television. Art evolves - and Breaking Bad is as much art as Anna Karenina.
There is a very irritating snootiness in the review that only thinks classical music as art, and just passingly acknowledges jazz - which by the way was denigrated often in vehemently racist terms when it first appeared.
Have you ever heard of "classical" music? It's a single music genre covering about 500 years of music.
Then, very briefly, the technology of recording music developed to the point where it was commercially viable to mass-market music. As happens with any technological revolution, that triggered a massive spike in innovation. That spike lasted ~50 years, we're just getting to the end of it.
My point is that what happened between ~1950 and ~2000 isn't normal. That's not how fast music normally changes. That was a specific response to a specific stimulus. It will take another stimulus of equal magnitude to provoke a similar level of change.
(also: musicians were almost permanently broke prior to the recording industry. Interesting, and sad, to see that returning too)
Everything moves faster now because there are more people to move it. The rate/person is not that different.
What we have seen since the late 90s is the collapse of musical creativity (at least in popular music... you can still find some creative music if you dig really hard) in spite of population and economic activity continuing to grow. That is not normal. That's a dark age.
Interesting. But it's circular reasoning isn't it? "there were less people, so less innovation. Then there were more people, so more innovation. But now there's more people, but less innovation, so it must be a dark age" doesn't really work as a self-evident statement.
You could make an argument that innovation follows the money. The innovation boom of the late 20th century correlates with the music industry profit boom of the same priod. Now there's less money being made, there's less innovation.
Also, you could probably chart the risk-taking of the music industry. They started off not knowing what the hell anyone wanted, so produced weird shit. Then they got hit by waves of disruption. Then they got a grip on it all and stopped taking risks. Which is where we are: stuff that sounds different doesn't get published.
Except, of course, that we have people self-publishing now. There probably is completely freaky weird awesome shit being made, but we don't hear it because discovery is hard in such a huge sea of music.
I think inovation is stagnant because of team work. No tongue in cheek. But when you take a look at the sea changinf inventions it has been the work of a nerd who was passionate for a prlonged period of time. Not a team which has to publish every brain-fart as a paper.
Universities favouring publish-or-perish are another dead end development.
This may be true, but a lot of the early 60's music was very much collaborative. I think it's more about a risk-taking culture. Universities are not risk-taking cultures.
you seem to be circling around the idea that winner-take-all dynamics have taken over music (and other industries) because of the internet. rather than democratizing exposure and innovation and distributing esteem and reward, the internet has collapsed major strains of interest into one conglomerated popularity contest where even fewer can make it big. the curation of the music industry was useful when access was limited and marketing had cost and power, but not so much now, so it's demise is more coincident than prerequisite.
I think the music argument is somewhat valid, there's nothing like "rock" and "hip-hop" anymore. We have a ton of different styles but nothing groundbreaking. It's to be expected though with how the music industry evolved. Conservative investments and volume instead of quality.
Yes absolutely. What qualifies Anish Kapoor's Bean for example as art above the Shadow of the Colossus?
And there was an absolute explosion of written works only starting two centuries ago - due to mass scale printing. And even in books, fantasy is somehow not high literature - which is just gatekeeping at this point.
In physics for example, computational modelling has been exploding. The availability of GPUs and ML based modelling has been rising rapidly too.
Yet another point - when I was a MS student quantum computing was a pie in the sky fantasy - today it's an exploding field. Same for energy storage - the progress we have made there in the last decade is mind boggling.
There is an effect that we humans cannot really accept - it takes time to really judge the quality of a work. And that time is often decades. Human beings are exceptionally poor at long term thinking (we have literally mountains of evidence for this) and yet stubbornly refuse to accept this limitation.
I agree in that I have major problems with the article, but disagree that somehow we are in this period of great innovation. I think this kind of argument always goes down two paths. First, someone says "things are terrible right now and it's the end." Then someone else says "no it isn't here's why things are actually great!"
Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such? Just the opposite - anti-science sentiment is as high as ever. How many people actually truly learn a language online? Downloading duolingo and using it for 2 weeks before giving up is not learning a new language. We overrate minutiae such as this.
> if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.
HN is for openly discussing ideas. Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
> Sure we have access to more knowledge than ever - but have we seen the effects of such?
yeah this the disruption I mentioned. Our society is going to change because mass communication. Not all of that change is going to be good. All of that change is going to be resisted. The same was true for all changes in society, from feudalism to parliamentarianism to democracy, including electricity and steam power.
> Technologists face the same biases as anyone else.
I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
I don't think FaceTime has the societal impact you think it does. it's just the evolution of the phone - very nice, but doesn't solve our real challenges. When you think about it - the computer itself wasn't an insane concept since the 1950s. The technology evolved with major improvements much like anything else, like cars, planes, boats, etc, but the theory behind it pretty much remained the same. Once the right materials and manufacturing of chips were figured out, is it really much of a jump to guess we'd have amazing computers today?
And without the Soviet Union around, it's much harder to solve the challenges we have because there isn't a big bad. The current conservative talking points of China do not carry the same weight because the entire nation's stock portfolios are reliant on cheap chinese factories. There is a general schizophrenia with our world today. Connected by so many things - email, instagram, video chat, cell phones, facebook. And yet depression is very high. People seem far more distant. We need more manufacturing here - but wal-mart and amazon dominate the retail market with cheap chinese goods and Americans can't get enough. Google gives us vast knowledge - and yet looking at tests from the 70s, most are far, far harder. Schools have gotten easier. Anti-vax has a powerful voice. I think technology contributes to this, but all in all I think it's not the sole cause.
> I get that. But technologists tend to get clued-up about everything else before airing their opinions. For some reason, Art Critics especially, intellectuals seem to think it's OK for them to know everything about 19th century impressionism and nothing about Internet Protocol and still have a valid opinion about 21st century Art.
I don't think knowing about IP has anything to do with one's ability to judge art. It's a slippery slope, or rather absurd, because art debates always go down the rabbit hole of "what is art"
My go-to example for this is the Cambodian tuk-tuk driver taking a YouTube English lesson while waiting for a fare. This is radical change. The democratisation of knowledge is huge. And it has unwanted side-effects: everyone does their own "research" now, and then we have to un-democratise some knowledge so that lies don't get passed off as truth. It's going to take us a couple of generations to work out how allowing everyone to publish anything they like, and read anything they want, is actually going to work in a sane society.
Video games are indeed a form of media, but I think it is misleading to say they are art in the same sense as this author intends. Art and mass entertainment are only superficially similar, and most video games are made to entertain. Video games are (generally) consumable goods created to provide an amount of temporary pleasure.
Good art is recognized not just by beauty or the skill required to create it, but by its ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking.
There are no video game equivalents (yet, one would hope) of, say, Bach, Rembrandt, or Bernini.
Maybe someday there will be, but not today.
edit: To the downvoters, I'm saying all this as a pretty avid gamer. video games are a very young medium and a hopefully in a few centuries I will be wrong.
I love video games. I spend a great deal of time playing them and I think they have a lot of oppurtunities other mediums can't match. But they don't move me the way even a mediocre novel or movie can.
Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
Maybe it's that AAA titles mostly focus on the adolescent male demographic. But we've yet to find our Tolstoy.
> Video games are terrible at interpersonal relationships, for example. I find the more "interactive" relationships with NPCs the more shallow the relationshop, while "railroad" games tend to be better at it.
I think this is more of a money issue. in a highly linear game, every dollar is spent on content that every player will experience. if you have even three choices in the game that depend on each other meaningfully, you suddenly have eight possible endings and several additional plot paths on the way there. so you have to do several times as much development work to achieve the same level of polish, but each player will probably only experience one or two of the paths. they'll still only pay ~$60 for it.
I have given up on getting a good story out of emergent gameplay and sandbox-y games. Bioshock 1 & 2 is about as good as it's going to get with regards to producing a good story that can go multiple ways. Those games moved me like very few songs or books ever did.
Dwarf fortress is a pretty good stochastic story generator, it's head and shoulders above anything else in that vein. But yeah, those kinds of stories will never really be quite as focused or meaningful as human-crafted narrative
Video games developers employ a huge number of artists, musicians, sculptors, cinematographers and architects. All of whom produce what would on a daily basis be called "art". It is a strange kind of alchemy to put all that art in a box at which point it becomes Not Art.
(also ignoring the whole 20th century modernist questioning of "what is art, anyway" involving all kinds of installations, found art, outsider art, signed soup cans, prints, International Klein Blue, and so on)
Some video games that explore the human condition and could be said to be Art with the capital A:
The Stanley Parable (deconstruction of what it is to play a game. It starts with a third person narration of your character being at work, pushing buttons all day without being quite sure why, and proceeds into multiple endings that deconstruct reality in quite creative ways that sometimes break the fourth wall)
Braid (Mario clone, but you can rewind time and there's a story line that riffs on the old Mario memes but uses them as a metaphor for the atomic bomb)
Dragon Age: Origins (DnD based game with excessively fiddly combat but a fairly massive branching story line, asking the user to make many moral choices, with outcomes ranging from mostly happy to everybody dies)
Portal I and II (notable for their sci-fi dystopian narrator GlaDOS, who is voice acted by an opera singer who plays a computer that has gone insane)
A lot of what computer games do as an art form is fundamentally different than other genres - their chief advantage is interactivity, which is something we haven't known what to do with in art very much prior to this, other than a handful of plays that break the fourth wall.
This interactivity allows for experiments in the concept of community and alternative models of fairness and social status. The reason I still would qualify these as art is that they are exploring these spaces in a non-systematic and intuitive manner rather than an academic one.
This puts MMOs at the top of the medium as an example of what games can do to explore the human condition. They can be life-consuming and addictive, but they explore alternative identities, economies, and social systems in a way and on a scale that no purely intellectual endeavor detached from real economic and political consequences has ever done before. As to what we take from this, I'm not sure other than World of Warcraft has taught me how naive libertarian economics can be given how completely a player was able to take over the entire server economy on one server by just buying low and selling high until his economic advantage was sufficient to control the market.
Yeah like I said in another comment, I'm really not trying to deny the validity or value of individual games or anything like that. Portal is brilliant, and I really liked DA:O (though not quite as much as Baldur's Gate or Pillars of Eternity). I just think that the Shakespeare of the video game medium, whatever form that would even take, hasn't been born yet.
Portal may be ok puzzle, but I just really fail to see that as some kind high art equivalent. I mean, it is fun for enough people for me to be sure it is something valuable, but calling it "exploring human condition" would be a massive stretch.
It is enjoyable puzzle that was big deal when puzzles like that were rare. But it is not a game you will show next generation of children so that they learn something about human condition or some such.
Yeah, that's fair. But I'd put it in the category of like sci-fi movies (she's obviously based on Hal from 2001), and Portal 2 has movie-equivalent levels of storyline.
I think it's an art form in its infancy, and that different arts have different levels of both time spent and depth of understanding gained by taking them in. How much does a painting teach you about the human condition?
Most paintings don't, but that standard came from top thread and not from me. Imo it us ok for majority of them to not be that special.
Most paintings are ideally fun to look at and then get forgotten. Others have some practical purpose (showing war at the time with no photos, celebrating personality for propaganda purpose etc) or are simply moving craft to higher level.
The human conditions ones were the ones in what I called practical category. For example when I was reading about John Brown, that famous painting of him helped me to keep in mind the personality. I have some more examples like that but way more obscure.
I think the best of contemporary writing (whether fun or human condition level) is in movie series. That is format that is currently at the top, having the most complicated and touching and what not storylines. None of that was possible before streaming services.
Yeah, that could be. It's a young genre and I think that paintings from before perspective became systematically understood are super awkward. That's a cool thought. I'm totally okay with blowing some hours to experience the Hamlet of games.
You should take a look at Pathologic. If you're looking for high art in games, that's what I'd recommend. Watch Hbomberguy's video on YouTube if you're curious.
I would respectfully submit that you're talking from a standpoint of utter and complete ignorance about your subject.
There are a thousand games that have an "ability to engage with some aspect of what it means to be human, in a way that is coherent, mature, and thought-provoking". I've been moved to tears by several (killing the dragon in Minecraft after literally months of effort, This War of Mine). Stupid things like "Clicker Heroes" have reminded me that all life is inherently meaningless and all endeavour is ultimately futile, given meaning only by what we feel about it.
Compare that to some of the utter crap that passes for High Art, and video games are way ahead in mature, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be human.
No we agree much more than you think. I really like minecraft, some of my greatest teen memories are of running a server with a bunch of my friends that had 40+ mods. I think the world is made better by minecraft's existence, and people have made all kinds of beautiful and artful things in minecraft.
My point was not to say that there are no games that provide powerful, meaningful, beautiful experiences to the humans that play them. Such a claim would be absurd. What I am saying is that the game as a medium probably hasn't matured to the point where it can be compared to the Arts with a capital A, as they are historically understood. Precisely, I mean things like painting, sculpture, music, and literature.
I am not the stupid kind of cultural elitist who would say that there is something inherent about the video game medium that would prevent it from rising to that level, I just think that empirically it hasn't happened yet, though in the long term I am quite hopeful.
And yeah, contemporary "high art" has been in largely poor condition for quite some time. At least if the stuff that makes it into museums is any indication.
Awesome, I apologise for judging your ignorance then.
I have studied Art. I have an "O"-level in Art History. I have been to famous museums, and looked at world-class paintings, sculptures, etc.
I mean, I've stood in front of the Night Watch in the Reiksmuseum, and it was great. I get that. I sketch (badly), and I appreciate the craftsmanship that went into that. It's a great piece of art, and it moved me.
But to say that that, awesome as it is, is more "Art" than any video game... is bollocks. It's just not true.
It's typical of non-technical "intellectuals" to completely ignore the main areas of modern human progress, simply because they don't understand them.
e.g. the whole discussion on Art completely ignores Video Games, which are undoubtedly Art, and also an area of rapid innovation and development. Yet they're usually dismissed out of hand because no-one who takes "Art" seriously plays them or understands them.
The whole "we went to the moon and never went back" completely ignores the argument that the moon landing was, right from the start, an uneconomical publicity stunt. The exciting time is now, when space is starting to become economically viable and we have organisations making viable plans to colonise Mars.
The Internet is taken for granted as a method of "chatting", and smartphones as a method of "taking selfies". Again, because the author doesn't understand what vast and wide-reaching achievements these are. Watching a Cambodian tuk-tuk driver watch a YouTube English lesson while parked up waiting for a fare is a modern marvel. Bringing communication and the spread of knowledge to anyone who wants it, wherever they are, is the most important thing to happen to humanity since the invention of agriculture. And yes, it's as disruptive to human societies as agriculture: we should expect our societies to be disturbed by it.
The economic malaise is mostly a result of WW2. Europe was economically destroyed, and the US changed its entire economy to meet the demand (and the USSR moved its entire manufacturing base a thousand miles east in a year, an astounding thing to do). Recovering from that meant that growth was easy because it was coming from such a low base. We've hit the final point of that recovery, and growth isn't so easy any more.
Not everything is perfect. There are some changes we need to make. But please let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And to anyone writing about modern society: if you don't understand technology, please stop fucking writing about it.