It feels a little on the nose. I clicked "random article", and there's an article on the United States. Shockingly, the things in the headlines in the news over

It feels a little on the nose. I clicked "random article", and there's an article on the United States. Shockingly, the things in the headlines in the news over the past 2-5 years caused a massive decline. Maybe I've just read too much history, but the random topics of the day and trends that people care about one decade are almost universally irrelevant or forgotten in five decades. Some things were, in fact, important, but become background issues as people accept and adapt. Others are overblown, wrong, or artifacts on the political or cultural environment, i.e. proxies for anxieties that are generational or for the interests of a major institutional power with a short- or medium-term agenda. That is to say, if I were to create a wiki for the mid twenty-first century, I'd make it alienating, not comfortably extrapolative. The concerns of the populace should be head-scratchers for us. People should be arguing about shades in social strata that don't exist now, waxing moral on norms we haven't invented, and making jokes we don't have the context to get. Sociopolitically, we should expect a layering of cultural and political movements. In fifty years, that might include some kind of Reaganesque conservative reassertion, some kind of orthogonal or approximately novel social movement, and some kind of progressive or liberal progressive advance, and each reacting to one another and sticking around to greater or lesser extents. I think we will also be suprised to see what looks like zero or minimal progress in some areas that are currently hyped. I'll leave considering those as an exercise for the reader. Basically, the future is messy and alienating. We'll be old then, if we're alive, and the concerns of that day will not be the concerns of ours, or even extrapolations on those concerns.