> Your framing bothers me because it implies there was no alternative No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this: > I won't go as far as

> Your framing bothers me because it implies there was no alternative No, I went out of my way to emphasize that I wasn't saying this: > I won't go as far as claiming there was no way to avoid them as a society, but as a baseline everyone expected to be grappling with these issues. The _challenges_ were inevitable. Failing to surmount them (to whatever extent you think we did) was not. But those two don't add up to where-did-that-come-from bewilderment at what happened, as failure was always a possibility. If we've utterly failed at handling climate change in twenty years, a reasonable reaction wouldn't be "20 years ago we thought we'd be living in a perfect solarpunk future, who could have predicted climate dystopia?". The presence of a difficult problem implies the possibility of failure, which is incongruous with the GP comment's Pollyanna-ish view of the future when he was a kid. > for the most part, us technical people were very concerned with dystopias, both the cynical and the wide eyed dreamers. Yes, these are the people I was referring to when contrasting the GP's framing that when he was a kid, he didn't worry about the privacy etc concerns of technology.