Yeah, this stuff always comes with "your mileage may vary." What I remember is a lot of very optimistic ideas being discussed openly without a lot of cynicism

Yeah, this stuff always comes with "your mileage may vary." What I remember is a lot of very optimistic ideas being discussed openly without a lot of cynicism or irony. Go find some old Mondo 2000 or other early-mid 90s futurist material. I also remember a wave of new technology people could touch and interact with: the PC and Internet revolutions. Shiny starships are awesome but I will probably never ride in one. The 80s-90s was also the last era of musical innovation. If you include the 80s too there was: hip hop / rap, drum and bass, techno/rave and all its variant genres, grunge, shoegaze, dreampop, math rock, new wave, synth rock, I could keep going... Since 2001: very little except slight variations on the above and reboots of older forms. For some reason music totally collapsed after 2001. I've toyed around with economic interpretations but ultimately it feels like there's some psychological wall there. We can't think of anything new.