I'm just a little bit older than you, somewhere between 5 or 10 years, so I have a slightly different perspective. So I don't really expect you to understand what I am about to say, you will probably just interpret it as a direct attack on how you want the world to be organized. But don't be afraid, i'm not blaming any of this on you. How could I? You can't see it at all.

When I was a kid, the future was being sold as a Jetson's world, not only with new gadgets and toys, but everything was going to be better. Because of increased productivity, not only would we all work less, but the work would be more fulfilling and more rewarding, both in turns of standard of living AND quality of life. We would all be more affluent and more educated, and life would be more meaningful because all the dirty, routine and boring tasks would be done by machine. The excess profits would be poured back into less hours on the job and more benefits, the continuation of a century of industrial progress was our heritage and our birthright.

The computer would turn us all into knowledge engineers, but no one warned us about data entry. No one told us that the satisfaction and pride of the skilled workman would be diminished by robotic mass production and dull, repetitive service work. Instant communications would create a global village where everyone was on the phone, talking to voice mail. Productivity would lead to such increases in wealth that poverty would disappear, and everyone's standard of living would go up. and with everyone working less, there would be ample work for everyone. Medicine and science would not only improve, it would be universally available for next to nothing, power would be too cheap to meter, television would have hundreds of channels, all of them different and exciting, and our cars would not only be faster and more comfortable, we would also use them to go to more interesting places with all our leisure time. There were no traffic jams and road rage in the Jetson universe, gas was always cheap, and the nation would not all look exactly the same.

Well, as always, the artists saw through the sham first. First, the Beat poets sounded the alarm, and by the early fifties, Vonnegut's "Player Piano", or if you prefer traditional science fiction, Pohl and Kornbluth's "The Space Merchants", showed us exactly where the future was actually going, with uncanny accuracy. They are the perfect antidote to Ayn Rand's entrepreneurial romances. By the time I was getting out of high school (the year Kennedy died and the Beatles became popular) it was pretty clear that we had been lied to. We were working just as hard as we always had, and all we had to show for it was consumer goods.

You see, the technology has increased enormously, and prosperity has become more widespread, but the fact remains that we're not as happy as we used to be, that our social problems have been neglected, and that much-vaunted prosperity has been concentrated more and more on fewer and fewer people. By the time I got to college it was pretty clear to my contemporaries, not just the privileged youth of the managerial and professional elite, but working class kids like me, that precious little of this technological progress was trickling down to where it really mattered: quality of life. The only mistake they made was educating us, but that problem is now being corrected. Oh yeah, we're more prosperous, but we're not any happier. By any quantifiable measure, we are better off, I'll grant you that, but what about the rest, what really matters? Why is life in the Jetson universe so damned dull?

"If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?"
"If you're so rich, why aren't you happy?"