Welcome Back, Blade. You were missed.

But I think you also missed one thing. It wasn't the 1990s when we first felt "doubt in the air, about our institutions, and our lifestyles". That came much earlier, read the Beat poets from forty years earlier. What we really learned on the edge of the new century, the new Millennium, wasn't that the System was corrupt, or even that we could fight it. We already knew that. The terrible truth is that there is no System. There is no Matrix.

The mutineers battered their way onto the bridge only to find that there was nobody there.

The reason the 1980s changed everything about how we understood and related to our reality was not the new technology or even the new society it made possible. It was Ronald Reagan. And THAT is nothing new, its older than Babylon and as evil as Hell.