Episode 17: The Return of the Primeval Flame

You can now listen to the story being told in English, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Italian, Hindi

We live in a Brave New World. Hear about the future from Frank, a sentient AI.

 

Re-worlding the User Experience of Being Human

 

Change the metaphor of the self, and you change the user experience of your world.

Changing the Operating System of the Self

We live in a time of constant software updates. Our phones, apps, and devices ask for them weekly. But what if the system most in need of an update isn’t digital at all?

What if the software that actually needs rewriting is the metaphor of the self: the invisible code that runs our consciousness?

 

Metaphor as the Operating System of Being

Every era runs on an implicit operating system — a story about what a person is and how reality works. For the modern West, that OS has been something like Self 1.0: The Autonomous Individual. It boots up with a familiar interface:

• I am an independent self.
• The world is made of separate objects.
• Agency means control.

It’s a powerful architecture. It gave us science, technology, individual rights, and the idea of personal freedom. But it also left us with the illusion of separation: from nature, from each other, and from the systems that sustain us.

Like an old OS that can’t handle the complexity of new hardware, the metaphor of the autonomous self is crashing under the weight of planetary interdependence.

 

When the OS Updates, the World Feels Different

Here’s the thing about operating systems: they don’t just manage functions; they shape experience. Change the OS, and the user experience changes too: the menus, the gestures, and the icons. Everything feels different, even if the hardware stays the same.

Ontology works the same way. Your ontology — your underlying sense of what is real and how things relate — is your user experience of the world.

If your OS says you are a discrete individual navigating an external environment, the world appears as a field of separate objects.
But if your OS says you’re a node in a multi-plex — a living junction in a vast web of relationships — the world renders differently. Reality stops feeling like scenery and starts feeling like interface.

 

The Multi-Plex: Self 2.0

In this new operating system — let’s call it: Self 2.0 — identity is relational rather than autonomous. You’re still “you,” but the boundary between self and world becomes porous. Ideas, moods, and signals pass through like data packets. Consciousness becomes a membrane of exchange, not a private chamber.

Agency changes, too.

It’s no longer about command and control but attunement: sensing the flows that move through you and responding in resonance. At the same time, ethics becomes network maintenance: how you manage the quality of your connections, what signals you amplify, and what feedback loops you reinforce. To live this way isn’t to dissolve individuality; it’s to recode it as participation rather than possession.

 

Metaphor as Ontological Code

Metaphors are not just linguistic ornaments; they’re ontological code. They determine what kind of world can appear for us. When you shift the metaphor, you change the experience that becomes possible.

“I am a self in a world” loads one version of reality: individualist, extractive, and human-centered. Yet, “I am a node in a multi-plex” loads another: distributed agency, interdependent, and ecological.

The metaphor is the code. The ontology is the interface. Together, they define your user experience of being human.

 

Installing the Update

Like any software upgrade, this one requires a reboot. It takes practice to live as a node — to listen more deeply, to sense the invisible circuits of relation that sustain life, to realize that the world isn’t background but active field.

You don’t lose agency; you gain context. You don’t dissolve the self; you expand it to include the heterogenous systems that make it possible.

Importantly, the multi-plex isn’t a science-fiction horizon. It exists in the here and now, already running in the background, waiting for us to notice that the interface has changed.

Your ontological update awaits.

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Episode 16: The Fire and the Code

 

From the Great Acceleration to the Great Enshitification and Beyond: Part Two

Part Two: Missed Opportunities, the Great Enshitification, the Consequences for the Young, and the Age of Flux

 

The Missed Moment

The end of the Cold War in 1989 was supposed to open a new chapter. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Americans were told that history itself had ended—that liberal democracy and free markets had triumphed once and for all. For a brief moment, it seemed as if the United States might redirect the vast resources once devoted to military competition into a “peace dividend”: rebuilding infrastructure, expanding education, addressing poverty, and perhaps even taking early action on the environment.

That moment never came.

Instead, the 1990s became a decade of missed opportunities. The neoliberal consensus, now bipartisan, turned away from social investment and doubled down on globalization, deregulation, and the technological boom. Bill Clinton, elected on the promise of a new kind of Democrat, embraced free trade, loosened financial rules, and celebrated the market as the engine of progress. For ordinary Americans, the message was clear: government would no longer guarantee security or prosperity—it was up to the individual to adapt, hustle, and compete.

Meanwhile, the scientific evidence on climate change was already mounting. By 1988, NASA’s James Hansen had testified before Congress that global warming was underway. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established the same year. The link between fossil fuel combustion and rising greenhouse gases was no longer speculative; it was measurable, observable, and widely understood among scientists. Yet the political will to act never materialized. The United States signed but never ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Fossil fuel interests, well-funded and politically connected, sowed doubt and confusion, successfully delaying action at the very moment when intervention could have altered the trajectory.

Culturally, too, the 1990s revealed a shift. The decade was suffused with optimism about the digital future—Silicon Valley promised a frictionless world of connection and innovation. But beneath the hype, the social fabric was fraying. The dot-com bubble inflated a speculative economy, while traditional industries continued to wither. Communities built on manufacturing hollowed out, replaced by service jobs that paid less and offered fewer protections. For many young people entering adulthood, the promise of upward mobility felt increasingly fragile.

The missed moment was not only about economics or climate—it was about governance itself. The flaws in America’s political system became harder to ignore. The Electoral College allowed a president to lose the popular vote and still win the White House. Senate representation gave disproportionate power to smaller, rural states. And campaign finance—already awash in corporate influence—tightened its grip. Ordinary citizens, seeing their voices diluted, began to disengage, deepening a cycle of political alienation.

Then there was the violence. School shootings, once unthinkable, became part of the national landscape. Columbine in 1999 shocked the country, but instead of catalyzing meaningful reform, it became the grim template for a recurring nightmare. Sandy Hook would follow in 2012, and countless other tragedies in between. Each time, the response was paralysis—thoughts and prayers instead of legislation. The inability to address such a glaring public safety crisis revealed a government increasingly incapable of acting on behalf of its citizens, even in the face of horror.

Looking back, the 1990s and early 2000s were a hinge point. The United States had the wealth, the technology, and the global standing to redirect its trajectory—to build a more sustainable economy, strengthen its social fabric, and restore faith in democratic governance. Instead, the opportunity slipped away. Growth was celebrated, but inequality widened. Climate warnings were heard but ignored. Governance flaws were visible, but unaddressed.

This was the missed moment: the chance to pivot from acceleration to sustainability, from neoliberalism to renewal. Instead, America doubled down on a system already beginning to show signs of strain. The consequences of that inaction would not be felt immediately, but when they arrived, they would fall hardest on the generations who had no say in squandering the opportunity.

 

The Great Enshitification

The internet was once hailed as humanity’s new frontier, a digital commons where knowledge would flow freely and barriers of geography, class, and gatekeeping would fall away. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was a real sense of possibility: search engines that promised to catalog the world’s information, forums that connected strangers across continents, platforms that allowed anyone with a modem to publish, share, and participate. For a generation, this was intoxicating—the promise of democracy reborn in the ether of cyberspace.

But what began as liberation has hardened into enclosure. The open, decentralized internet has steadily given way to walled gardens controlled by a handful of corporations whose business model depends not on empowerment, but on capture. This transformation, which writer Cory Doctorow has memorably dubbed “enshitification,” follows a familiar trajectory: platforms start out good to lure users, then become exploitative to serve advertisers, and finally degrade outright as monopolies extract value from everyone—users, workers, creators—until little remains but a hollowed-out husk.

Social media embodies this descent most clearly. What began as a way to connect with friends or share updates became, by the 2010s, a system optimized to keep eyes glued to screens. Algorithms were tuned not for truth, not for depth, but for engagement—which often meant outrage, misinformation, or spectacle. Advertising dollars rewarded the most inflammatory content, while meaningful discourse was buried. For creators, the platforms promised visibility but delivered precarity: one tweak of the algorithm, and entire livelihoods vanished.

E-commerce followed a similar path. Amazon, once lauded for its convenience and selection, consolidated power through predatory pricing, relentless surveillance of sellers, and exploitative labor practices. Independent businesses were absorbed, crushed, or made dependent on a platform that could change the rules at will. Consumers enjoyed convenience, but at the cost of diminished choice, lower quality, and a system where the profits accrued not to communities but to a centralized behemoth.

Even the search engines that once seemed like the great liberators have been corroded. Where once search results offered pathways into the web’s vast archives, they now increasingly prioritize paid placements, SEO-gamed content mills, and the platforms’ own properties. The open web survives, but as a shadow of itself, buried under a layer of corporate sludge. The promise of discovery has given way to a kind of digital claustrophobia.

The deeper cost of enshitification, however, is not technical—it is civic and psychological. The internet that might have expanded our collective imagination has instead narrowed it, filtering experience through metrics of virality and monetization. It has eroded trust, blurred the line between fact and fiction, and rewarded polarization over consensus. Worse, it has left us dependent on systems we do not control. As ordinary users, we have little recourse when platforms implode or pivot. Our digital lives—our communications, archives, creative work—are hostage to the whims of executives and the imperatives of quarterly earnings reports.

This was not inevitable. Different choices in regulation, ownership, and design could have fostered a more democratic digital sphere. But as with earlier moments in America’s trajectory, profit was prioritized over stewardship. The internet was not nurtured as a public good; it was strip-mined as a private asset. And so the cycle repeated: early abundance followed by consolidation, enclosure, and extraction.

By the 2020s, the pattern had become impossible to ignore. What once felt like progress now felt like decay—an acceleration into diminishing returns. The promise of the digital frontier had curdled into a system where everything worked worse, cost more, and left its users more isolated, surveilled, and exhausted.

The great enshitification is not only a story about technology. It is a parable of late capitalism itself: how systems built on the logic of endless growth inevitably turn parasitic, consuming the very resources that gave them life. The missed moment of the 1990s meant that by the time these dynamics were clear, the infrastructure of daily life—from communication to commerce to entertainment—was already entangled in systems designed for extraction.

In that sense, enshitification is less an aberration than a symptom: a mirror reflecting the deeper exhaustion of the American project.

 

The Consequences for the Young

If the Great Acceleration promised a future of rising tides, and the Neoliberal Turn recalibrated that promise toward individual risk, the Great Enshitification has made clear that the deck is stacked against most young people today. The rewards of society’s labor and innovation, once broadly shared, are now increasingly concentrated at the top. For the generations coming of age in the 2000s and 2010s, the American Dream is no longer a horizon toward which they can steer—it is a mirage whose shape constantly shifts.

Economic precarity defines much of their experience. Student debt has become a millstone: the promise of higher education as a pathway to prosperity is now undermined by loans that often exceed the starting salaries of graduates. Housing, once attainable in a postwar boom fueled by unions and a growing middle class, is now prohibitively expensive in cities where jobs cluster. Renting consumes ever-larger portions of income, while homeownership feels out of reach except for those who inherit wealth. Jobs themselves are unstable, increasingly automated, and often offer no benefits, leaving young people juggling gig work, temporary positions, and the perpetual fear of displacement by technology.

Health and well-being have also deteriorated. Obesity, diabetes, anxiety, depression, and other chronic conditions reflect both lifestyle and systemic factors: ultra-processed food, sedentary work, and an environment saturated with stressors. Mental health crises have become normalized, yet support remains inadequate. For many, the intersection of financial insecurity and societal neglect cultivates a constant low-level anxiety, a sense that the future is something to survive rather than shape.

Culturally, the erosion of trust extends to institutions that once promised guidance and protection. Politics feels distant, skewed by money, structural inequalities, and procedural quirks—from the Electoral College to Senate malapportionment—that amplify the voice of the few over the many. Young people witness elections decided by the narrowest margins or by systemic quirks that ignore the popular vote. Decisions about the environment, healthcare, and social welfare are dominated by lobbying and campaign finance, leaving ordinary citizens to absorb the consequences. The sense of agency, once foundational to civic engagement, is undermined.

Social life, too, bears the scars of historical choices. The dispersal of families in the postwar suburban migration, combined with the dissolution of stable community networks, has produced isolation. Loneliness is pervasive, compounded by digital engagement that connects superficially while amplifying comparison, envy, and disconnection. School shootings and mass violence reinforce the sense of vulnerability and powerlessness, while the failure of policy interventions signals that safety is contingent on wealth or luck rather than collective protection.

All of this shapes a worldview that is fundamentally different from that of the postwar generation. Whereas the youth of the 1960s and 1970s believed in their capacity to change the world, today’s young adults and teenagers are more likely to aim for survival, stability, and incremental gains. Their horizon is constrained by debt, climate anxiety, and the fallout of policy choices they did not make. Dreaming big is difficult when the scaffolding of opportunity has been removed.

And yet, even amid these challenges, the human capacity for adaptation persists. Networks of activism, mutual aid, and technological savvy show that young people are not entirely passive recipients of systemic failure. They are learning to navigate, hack, and sometimes resist the structures that constrain them. But the weight of history—of missed opportunities, neoliberal policy, and societal erosion—presses down relentlessly, shaping a generation whose expectations are measured not in the grandeur of achievement, but in the mitigation of harm.

In short, the consequences of the previous decades—the Postwar Dream deferred, the acceleration unchecked, the neoliberal turn embraced, the missed moment unheeded, and the enshitification realized—land disproportionately on those least responsible for creating the system. The young inherit not a dream, but a landscape defined by constraint, compromise, and crisis management.

 

The Age of Flux

We live now in an era that defies simple description: an Age of Flux in which the foundations of society, economy, and environment are all in motion, often at once. The forces unleashed by the Great Acceleration, the Neoliberal Turn, and the ensuing enshitification have produced a world in which stability is no longer the default, and certainty is a fragile illusion.

Economically, globalization and technological transformation continue to reshape labor markets at dizzying speed. Automation, artificial intelligence, and platform economies are replacing and restructuring jobs, often faster than workers can retrain. Financial systems are increasingly abstract, global, and interdependent, with shocks propagating rapidly across continents. Economic inequality, having widened for decades, is now a structural feature of society rather than a temporary aberration.

Socially and culturally, the consequences are profound. Trust in institutions—government, media, education, and corporations—remains eroded. Digital platforms mediate much of life, shaping perception and discourse while simultaneously enabling both connection and manipulation. Climate change, resource scarcity, and biodiversity loss present challenges that are both global and existential, forcing humans to confront limits that were invisible to the postwar generation. The youth of today inherit a world in which the future is uncertain, fluid, and often threatening.

Yet within flux lies possibility. The very systems that destabilize can also catalyze adaptation and innovation. Movements for social justice, environmental stewardship, and participatory governance demonstrate that citizens can reclaim agency, even in constrained conditions. Digital tools, while imperfect and often exploitative, also enable unprecedented communication, collaboration, and mobilization. The challenge—and opportunity—of the Age of Flux is to navigate complexity while retaining sight of shared purpose.

This age calls for creative resilience: the capacity to imagine, experiment, and act in ways that do not rely on the old scaffolding of stable growth, linear progress, or inherited privilege. It asks us to recognize interdependence rather than individual ascendancy, to cultivate systems that prioritize stewardship over extraction, and to balance human aspiration with ecological and societal limits.

In many ways, the Age of Flux is a reckoning with history. It is the culmination of the Postwar Dream’s promise, the Great Acceleration’s momentum, the neoliberal recalibration of the social contract, the missed opportunities of the 1990s, and the enshitification of digital and economic systems. It is the world shaped by choices—collective, political, and technological—that were made over the last seventy-five years.

But it is also a world of agency. While the past cannot be rewritten, understanding the threads that brought us here allows for deliberate intervention, for designing societies, economies, and technologies that serve broad human and planetary well-being. The Age of Flux is, paradoxically, both a warning and an invitation: a warning that the status quo is fragile, and an invitation to imagine, innovate, and act in ways that renew possibility rather than diminish it.

From the Great Acceleration to the Great Enshitification and Beyond

 

Part One: How the Great Acceleration Gave way to Neoliberalism and Globalization

The Postwar Dream

In 1945, the world exhaled. The devastation of the Second World War left cities in ruins and millions dead, but it also left a strange kind of clarity. Out of the rubble, there emerged a vision of a future that might at last deliver peace and prosperity. In the United States, that dream took on a distinctive shape: stable jobs, modest but growing wealth, a single-family home, and the promise of upward mobility for one’s children.

This was not a dream pulled out of thin air. It was built on the hard-won foundations of the New Deal, which had established the principle that government bore responsibility for the welfare of its citizens. Combined with the unprecedented economic engine of the Petrocene — the age of cheap oil and seemingly limitless energy — the stage was set for what the French would later call les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of postwar growth.

For ordinary Americans, this translated into something tangible. The GI Bill sent millions of veterans to college, giving them access to professional jobs that had once been closed to their families. Unions were strong, wages rose steadily, and productivity gains translated into broad prosperity rather than being siphoned off into the pockets of a few. The fiscal architecture of the era reinforced this balance: progressive taxation, both on individuals and corporations, meant that wealth was not allowed to concentrate in quite the same way it would later.

Culturally, the suburban home became the icon of the dream. The postwar migration to the suburbs was not simply about shelter; it was a reshaping of American life. The little house with a yard symbolized stability, autonomy, and entry into the middle class. Yet it also carried with it consequences that were not immediately obvious. Suburbanization tied prosperity to the automobile, embedding car culture into the nation’s DNA. It also restructured family and community life, dispersing extended families and weakening older neighborhood ties in favor of nuclear households orbiting around highways and shopping centers. What looked at the time like a promise fulfilled would later contribute to the loneliness epidemic of the twenty-first century.

The optimism of the period was palpable. Children born in the 1950s and 1960s grew up with a sense that each decade would be better than the one before. They lived in an America that had defeated fascism abroad, was engaged in building the Great Society at home, and seemed poised to extend its prosperity indefinitely. It was not naïve to believe in progress; it was the common sense of the age.

This was the Postwar Dream: a belief that collective effort, guided by government, powered by industry, and spread across society, could deliver a good life for all, an underlying promise that shaped a generation’s imagination of what was possible.

That dream, however, would not remain untouched. The forces that made it possible — the energy bounty of the Petrocene, the discipline of progressive taxation, the faith in collective action — would all, in time, be undermined. What began as a dream would slowly mutate, first into acceleration, then into something far more precarious.

The Great Acceleration

By the mid-twentieth century, the Postwar Dream had found its fuel. The vast energy bounty of oil, coal, and natural gas — combined with technological innovation and an industrial base untouched by the devastation of war — propelled the United States and much of the Western world into a period of breathtaking expansion. Historians now call this period the Great Acceleration: a rapid and near-exponential surge in population, production, consumption, and environmental impact.

It is difficult to overstate the scale of this transformation. Global population doubled between 1950 and 1987. Car ownership, air travel, electricity use, fertilizer application, and plastic production all shot upward in curves so steep they look almost vertical on a chart. What had been linear growth in the early twentieth century became exponential in the decades after the war. For a generation raised on the promise of endless progress, this looked like vindication of the dream.

In the United States, the suburb became the primary stage on which the acceleration unfolded. The migration outward from cities was fueled by cheap mortgages, new highways, and the promise of safety and space. The suburban landscape demanded cars, and cars demanded oil. Daily life became inseparable from the rhythms of the internal combustion engine. For a while, this dependence felt liberating — mobility meant opportunity. But it also locked American society into a high-energy, high-consumption pattern that would prove difficult to reverse.

The Great Acceleration was not only material; it was cultural. The promise of upward mobility became a kind of social contract. The children of working-class families expected to go further than their parents, and often did. University enrollments soared. Home ownership expanded. Consumer culture blossomed with television, advertising, and mass-produced goods that symbolized status as much as utility. From Tupperware parties to Disneyland vacations, the markers of modern life were suffused with a sense of novelty and abundance.

Yet beneath the optimism lay contradictions. The benefits of acceleration were not evenly distributed. Redlining and housing discrimination locked Black families out of the suburban boom. Indigenous communities bore the brunt of resource extraction. And the prosperity of the industrial West was underwritten by a global system that treated the Global South as a reservoir of cheap labor and raw materials.

Most ominously, the environmental consequences of acceleration were already becoming visible. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) sounded the alarm about pesticides and ecological fragility. Smog choked Los Angeles, rivers caught fire, and oil spills stained coastlines. Scientists were beginning to warn about the link between fossil fuel combustion and atmospheric change. Still, for most citizens, the exhilaration of growth drowned out the early signals of danger.

In retrospect, the Great Acceleration can be seen as a high-wire act: a dazzling display of human ingenuity, powered by finite resources, premised on the assumption that the Earth could absorb limitless extraction and waste. For those who lived through it, it was often thrilling. But it also set in motion the crises that would later define the twenty-first century — climate disruption, ecological collapse, and a social order increasingly unable to deliver on the promises it once made.

The dream had become a race, and the pace of that race left little room for reflection. The sense of inevitability — that tomorrow would always be bigger, faster, and better than today — was intoxicating. But it was also a trap. When the momentum faltered, the consequences would be profound.

The Neoliberal Turn

By the late 1970s, the confidence that fueled the Great Acceleration was starting to crack. Stagflation — an unfamiliar mix of economic stagnation and inflation — shook the assumptions of endless growth. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979 made it clear that the Petrocene’s bounty was neither stable nor inexhaustible. Industrial jobs began to vanish as manufacturing moved offshore. For the first time since the war, a generation looked ahead and doubted whether they would be better off than their parents.

Into this climate of uncertainty stepped a new ideological project: neoliberalism. Popularized by figures like Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States, it promised to break free from the burdens of regulation, taxation, and government intervention. The narrative was seductive in its simplicity: government was the problem, not the solution. If markets were liberated — if taxes on the wealthy were slashed, unions curbed, industries deregulated, and finance unleashed — then prosperity would return, and “all boats would rise with the tide.”

What made the neoliberal turn so effective was its emotional appeal. It harnessed the frustration of citizens who felt left behind and reframed it as a revolt against bureaucracy, inefficiency, and welfare “dependency.” It aligned itself with cultural conservatism, draping free-market ideology in the language of freedom, patriotism, and even religion. In Reagan’s America, laissez-faire economics became bound up with the idea of American exceptionalism itself.

The economic sleight of hand was profound. For three decades, prosperity had been measured by rising GDP, but it had also been sustained by progressive taxation that ensured wealth was broadly shared. Neoliberalism rewrote the script: by cutting taxes on corporations and the rich, it claimed, growth would accelerate and benefits would “trickle down.” The Laffer Curve, with its laughably simple promise that lower taxes could increase revenue, became the talisman of the age. The public bought in, fueled by the dream that anyone — if they worked hard enough, or got lucky enough — could be rich.

In practice, the effects were corrosive. Wealth concentrated at the top. Wages stagnated for the middle and working classes. Social programs were rolled back under the banner of fiscal responsibility. The bipartisan embrace of free-market policies — from Thatcher and Reagan to Clinton and Blair — signaled that the social-democratic vision of the postwar era had been decisively abandoned.

Culturally, the ethos shifted. Where the youth of the 1960s had believed they could change the world, the prevailing mood by the 1980s and 1990s was “look after number one.” The mantra of Wall Street — greed is good — escaped into popular consciousness, no longer a cautionary line from a movie villain but a guiding principle of economic life. The promise of collective uplift was replaced by a lottery mentality, epitomized by reality shows, stock-market speculation, and the rise of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs as cultural icons.

Neoliberalism also reshaped governance itself. Campaign finance laws were loosened, culminating in the Citizens United decision of 2010, which enshrined the power of money in politics. Electoral institutions already skewed by the Electoral College and Senate representation became even more distorted by the influence of corporate lobbying. Increasingly, politics became something done to people, not for them — a performance staged by elites with the financial means to shape outcomes.

In retrospect, the neoliberal turn was less a solution to the crises of the 1970s than a redirection of power. It stabilized inflation, restored profits, and fueled globalization, but at the cost of deepening inequality and hollowing out the social contract. The Postwar Dream had been one of shared prosperity; neoliberalism recast prosperity as an individual gamble, where the risks and burdens fell on ordinary citizens while the rewards flowed upward.

The consequences of this turn were not immediately obvious. For a time, the stock markets boomed, consumer goods became cheaper, and credit cards extended the illusion of affluence. But underneath, the foundations were eroding. When the cracks widened, as they inevitably would, the cost would be borne not by the architects of neoliberalism but by the generations who came after.

In Part two, I’ll explore the opportunities missed during the 1990s and the Great Enshitification that ensued.

 

Episode 15: Spooky Action Through Time

 

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome: Why Gen Z Inherits Chaos Instead of Progress

 Shadows of the Depression, Glow of Victory

The trauma of the Great Depression shaped an entire generation. It left behind not just economic scars but a cultural longing for stability, prosperity, and abundance. When the guns of the Second World War finally fell silent, it seemed as though the long nightmare had ended. The postwar boom — what historians now call the Great Acceleration — appeared to fulfill those desires. Economies surged, suburban housing spread, consumer goods multiplied, and families who had once struggled to put food on the table now filled their homes with televisions, refrigerators, and automobiles.

This material abundance became the stage for a new kind of mass culture. Radio, cinema, and later television created a shared vocabulary across vast populations. Popular music, Hollywood movies, and televised sports didn’t just entertain; they offered a sense of belonging and identity. America’s cultural exports — from jazz to Coca-Cola — spread across the globe, projecting an image of modernity and freedom that was often more persuasive than its armies.

This was the golden age of American soft power. At home, prosperity was celebrated as proof of the system’s success. Abroad, American cultural influence became a potent weapon in the Cold War, countering the gray conformity of the Soviet bloc with blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll. And yet beneath the glow of domestic triumph lurked a stark contrast: America’s foreign policy record was riddled with failures and contradictions. While it spoke the language of liberty, it orchestrated coups in Iran and Guatemala, fought to a stalemate in Korea, and later mired itself in the tragedy of Vietnam. The world could see the gap between the promise of freedom and the practice of power.

Triumphs of Science, Selective Listening

The same duality played out in the realm of science and technology. Nothing symbolized the triumph of scientific ingenuity more vividly than the atomic bomb and the moon landing. One promised security through destructive power; the other embodied humanity’s highest aspiration, reaching for the stars. These moments defined the zeitgeist of the postwar period: science as the ultimate engine of progress and prestige.

But the celebration of science was selective. When scientific discoveries carried the promise of profit or geopolitical advantage, they were heralded as milestones. When they warned of restraint, caution, or long-term risks, they were brushed aside. The dangers of cigarette smoking were known for decades before they were acknowledged. The early warnings about greenhouse gas emissions in the 1970s were actively suppressed by the fossil fuel industry. In each case, science that complicated the narrative of growth and prosperity was muffled or ignored.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome

This pattern reveals a deeper problem, what might be called the sorcerer’s apprentice syndrome. Again and again, society has conjured powerful technologies into being without considering how to contain their consequences. Nuclear power, chemical agriculture, fossil fuels, plastics, and later digital platforms were each introduced with little thought to their potential downsides.

In the fairy tale, (not familiar with the tale? Watch the three-part video series of Disney’s Fantasia version on YouTube) the apprentice loses control of the magic he unleashes, only to be saved when the master returns to set things right. In our world, there is no wise magician to rescue us. The technologies we release become grand cultural and environmental experiments, their outcomes unknown, their risks often denied. The precautionary principle — the simple idea that we should err on the side of caution when consequences are uncertain — was rarely applied. Instead, we behaved as if growth itself were justification enough, as if the market would sort out any problems.

Cycles of Promise and Disappointment

Each wave of innovation began with a rush of promise, only to end in disillusionment.

The Great Acceleration promised prosperity, stability, and peace through technology. For a time, it delivered. But by the 1970s the shine had worn off. The Vietnam War exposed the limits of American power. Oil shocks revealed the fragility of energy dependence. Inflation eroded living standards. Environmental degradation — smog-filled skies, polluted rivers, endangered species — exposed the hidden costs of industrial abundance. The dream of endless growth had a bitter aftertaste.

The information and communication technology (ICT) revolution offered a new promise. The internet was supposed to democratize knowledge, empower individuals, and create a more connected and creative world. Social media promised to bring people closer, amplifying voices that had long been silenced. For a brief period, it felt as if history had turned a corner. But the disappointments piled up quickly. The internet became dominated by surveillance capitalism, harvesting personal data for profit. Social media fueled polarization, disinformation, and political extremism, while exacerbating mental health crises among young people. Instead of empowerment, many experienced addiction, alienation, and manipulation.

The pattern was clear: the promises of new technologies were overstated, the risks underestimated, and the disappointments borne by those who had the least power to influence the outcome.

The Moral Failure

At the root of these cycles is not simply bad luck but a moral failure: the refusal to heed scientific warnings and the consistent neglect of the precautionary principle. When the evidence of harm became overwhelming — whether with tobacco, fossil fuels, or social media’s impact on youth — leaders responded slowly, reluctantly, and often dishonestly. Economic interests, political calculations, and short-term gains outweighed long-term responsibility.

COVID-19 provided yet another example. Despite decades of pandemic preparedness reports, many governments were caught flat-footed. Early warnings were ignored, investments in public health were insufficient, and when the crisis struck, political leaders often downplayed the danger. Once again, society had chosen not to prepare for a predictable risk, leaving millions vulnerable.

The moral failure lies not in ignorance but in willful blindness. We listened to science when it promised power or profit, and ignored it when it demanded sacrifice or restraint.

Betrayal and Broken Scripts

For Generation Z, these cycles of promise and disappointment are not distant history; they are the conditions of their lives. Unlike their grandparents, who experienced postwar optimism, or their parents, who witnessed the birth of the digital age, Gen Z came of age in the aftermath of disappointment. Climate instability is no longer a warning but a lived reality. Economic precarity, from student debt to unaffordable housing, is widespread. The mental health crisis among youth is not a marginal concern but a defining feature of their generation.

The traditional life scripts — steady employment, home ownership, upward mobility — no longer feel attainable. Instead, Gen Z confronts a future marked by uncertainty and vulnerability. The sense of intergenerational betrayal is sharp. Boomers, in particular, are seen as having enjoyed the benefits of the Great Acceleration while ignoring the mounting evidence of its costs. They reaped the rewards of cheap energy, mass consumption, and suburban expansion, but left behind ecological crisis and social fragmentation.

For many in Gen Z, the story of the past seventy-five years is not one of progress but of squandered promise. They inherit not only the environmental and economic debts of their predecessors but also the disillusionment of repeated technological letdowns.

Where We Stand

Looking back, the narrative of the last three-quarters of a century is one of brilliance without wisdom. Science and technology gave humanity extraordinary powers, but those powers were harnessed more for short-term gain than for long-term stewardship. Each wave of innovation was launched as a grand experiment, its risks brushed aside, its costs deferred. The benefits were concentrated, the harms distributed.

Now, at the end of this cycle, a vulnerable generation faces the compounded consequences of decades of moral failure. They know that yesterday’s promises will not secure tomorrow’s future. The question is whether they — more skeptical, more adaptive, more painfully aware — can break the cycle.

The sorcerer’s apprentice story has always ended the same way: with chaos barely contained until the master returns. But in our story, no master is coming. The responsibility to reckon with the forces we’ve unleashed rests with us alone. Whether we can finally listen to science not just when it promises power, but when it demands restraint, will determine whether the next seventy-five years repeat the cycle — or begin something genuinely new.