[ryandrake]

My own conspiracy theory is that AI, and the increasingly authoritarian government swings, are the Boomer generation's last shot at freezing the world in time and ensuring our world is shaped to their vision long after they're all gone. The thing that generation fears the most is that we're all going to just move on from them when they're dead, and finally progress past this "1970-2020" economic/cultural stasis that we've been stuck in for basically my entire life.

[amoss]

kind of wild that you think there has been no shift in culture between 1970 and 2020

[Larrikin]

A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.

[runarberg]

I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).

Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.

Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).

[mxuribe]

I think you stated better what i was trying to babble in another comment here. :-)

And you might think it is a conspiracy theory...but the sentiment i'm seeing (obviously a limited data set to only folks i engage with) seems to align so much to it...that if not fully true, *feels* quite close to it - even if not an intentional thing.

[barebearcountry]

+1